To secure supply, Australia needs to engage with Africa’s mineral sovereignty
Africa’s push for greater control over its minerals is a national security question for Australia, not just a commercial one for its miners. Canberra should coordinate more directly with African governments, both nationally and regionally through the African Union, rather than leaving its interests in Africa to companies alone.
An international forum in Ghana’s capital, Accra, from 19 to 21 October has worked on new approaches to what’s being called mineral sovereignty, policies that will directly affect companies such as Australia’s Perseus Mining, which runs the Edikan gold mine in Ghana. Mineral sovereignty means African governments, rather than foreign companies, deciding how their minerals are mined, processed and sold.
Australia’s goal of building critical mineral supply chains outside China depends partly on African supply, and if Canberra stays out of these discussions, Beijing is likely to set the terms. Canberra should expect to coordinate Australian companies for the return of more value from African mines to local societies.
The Accra meeting, the African Minerals Policy Forum, brought together Ghanaian President John Mahama, mining ministers from across the continent, the African Union and the African Development Bank. Its agenda centred on mineral sovereignty, with closed-door ministerial sessions on critical minerals, local refining and state control of gold.
In February, Mahama pledged that by 2030 no raw mineral ore would leave Ghana. In his opening remarks last week, he said ‘We must resist arrangements that pit our countries against one another and weaken our collective bargaining position.’ He urged neighbours to coordinate more closely on mineral taxes, royalties, local participation and processing. Ghana will chair the African Union in 2027, which makes its stance continental rather than just national.
Ghana is also building its own capacity to assay and refine gold. Since 1 July, large-scale gold miners – including US company Newmont, South Africa’s Gold Fields and China’s Zijin – must sell 30 percent of their output to the Ghana Gold Board as unrefined gold bars for local refining. Newmont and Gold Fields both run major mines in Western Australia.
In April 2025, Zijin completed its US$1 billion (A$1.6 billion) purchase of Newmont’s Akyem mine in Ghana. This was part of China’s strategy to become a key player in African mining. Similarly, US miner Freeport-McMoRan sold the massive Tenke Fungurume mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo to China Molybdenum in 2016. China now controls most of the cobalt supply chain in Congo’s southern provinces. Despite reports of unsafe labour conditions, child exploitation and environmental degradation, China has coupled its mining dominance with infrastructure investment and security cooperation – and it’s working. Between 2000 and 2021, Chinese lenders committed about US$37 billion to urban infrastructure in just six African cities, including Nairobi, Lagos and Kinshasa. China has also expanded its security footprint, becoming the second-largest financial contributor to UN peacekeeping. It has deployed peacekeepers to South Sudan, Sudan’s Darfur region, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali, and has also opened its first overseas military logistics base in Djibouti.
Given its push for mineral sovereignty, Ghana is likely to use its African Union chairmanship next year to encourage other African governments to take greater control over their mineral resources. This week, Ghana’s minister for lands and natural resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, announced that their cabinet had approved a revised Minerals and Mining Policy and amendments to the Minerals and Mining Act, covering local participation, land leasing and community development. If Australia wants to win favour in the countries where it mines, it needs clear strategies in which its companies involve locals, create jobs and livelihoods for communities around mines, take an approach of doing no harm, and direct part of its funding to development or humanitarian aid. The exploitation of natural resources has severely worsened instability and conflict in Mozambique, Nigeria’s Niger Delta and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Coordination needs to happen at national and regional level. Mahama wants the African Union’s frameworks turned into ‘coordinated investments, regional infrastructure and larger markets’, and urged governments to ratify and fund the African Minerals Development Centre.
African countries are coordinating with their neighbours, too. Tanzania’s minister, Anthony Mavunde, named Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique as partners on graphite and processing, and credited Tanzania’s 2017 raw-export restrictions with building more than eight gold refineries. That puts the Australian Balama mine in Mozambique inside a regional graphite bloc. And it puts the Nyanzaga gold project in Tanzania – owned by another Australian company, Perseus – in a country that already restricts raw exports. By aligning with national and regional policies, Australia could sidestep or soften future restrictions on exports and processing.
An Australian parliamentary report published this month by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade finds that, as a middle-ranking economy, Australia must ‘compete on quality, not scale’. With Africa at the centre of US–China competition for critical minerals, Australia should learn from the major powers’ successes and missteps if it wants to be a responsible mining and trade partner. The committee notes that Australian miners already have a reputation for ‘ethical dealing and sensitivity to environmental, social and governance matters’, making Australia ‘a desirable partner of choice’. Even still, communities expect Australian mining companies to build roads and schools.
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