Africa needs to build an economic architecture that renders it immune to US extortion

There is a leaked memo stemming from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s desk. It was prepared by the US State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, and it outlines, in the unsentimental language of US “diplomacy”, how the United States plans to bring Zambia to heel.

The strategy is straightforward, it’s pure extortion. The US is threatening to withdraw HIV medication from 1.3 million people unless the Zambian government opens its copper, lithium and cobalt mines to US companies. The memo does not dress this up. It states plainly, “We will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale.”

Read that again. The world’s wealthiest nation is using sick and vulnerable people as a negotiating chip. Not sanctions. Not tariffs. People. The memo reportedly states that this approach demonstrates “our insistence on tangible benefits under our America First foreign policy”. So the richest country in the world insists on benefits off the backs of the vulnerable. Nice.

This shakedown is unprecedented. And while other African partners, like the EU, may be clumsy and sometimes stumble, they adopt a radically different stance in their engagement with Africa.

The fundamental difference is the centring of common values and partnership. This means there are levers to pull, arguments to make, processes to engage in to find common ground. This comparison makes the US threat even more stark. What Rubio’s memo describes is something categorically different – the deliberate and shameless weaponisation of human life.

The memo is worth reading closely, because it is unusually candid about the mechanics of coercion. It records that at every point in negotiations, the US communicated what Zambia stood to lose if it failed to act. The US repeatedly used bullying tactics, threatening to withdraw assistance where necessary, to extract progress. So much for the “Art of the Deal”.

There is no finesse here. When Zambia didn’t engage quickly enough on the minerals question, Washington suspended health funding talks entirely. Within days, the memo notes with evident satisfaction, Zambia’s mines minister reversed course and granted US technical experts access to the country's mining database.

It worked. That is, unfortunately, the point.

Zambia has enormous mineral wealth. Copper deposits that the global green energy transition depends on. Lithium and cobalt reserves that make it, on paper, a country of significant strategic value. And yet here it is, being marched to the table at gunpoint because decades of aid dependency have made the government structurally unable to say no.

This is the paradox that should animate every conversation about African economic sovereignty. Resource wealth without institutional and financial independence is not leverage. In the current geopolitical moment, it looks more like vulnerability. It signals to the world exactly what you have and just how exposed you are. The US didn’t come to Zambia despite its mineral wealth. It came because of it, and it came knowing the Zambian government has few options.

Moral floor

Other large players have also behaved exploitatively, of course. China’s long-standing presence in Zambia's mining sector has its own troubling record of opaque contracts, limited skills transfer and debt structures that constrain sovereign decision-making. The problem is not uniquely American. But there was, until recently, a broadly held understanding that certain things were not done. There was a moral floor below which negotiators and politicians would not sink.

The memo also reveals something important about who the strategy is actually aimed at. It notes that public cuts to assistance would “demonstrate to aid-receiving countries” the seriousness of US demands. The Zambian government is not the only audience here; Trump and Rubio are speaking to all so-called “shithole countries”. This is a performance for the entire continent, a signal to every African government currently holding minerals that Washington considers desirable. Agree to our terms or watch your people suffer.

To the Zambian people watching this unfold: Rubio’s memo is explicit that public pressure is part of the strategy. The plan that cuts aid visibly is designed to turn citizens against their own government and force its hand. That tactic only works if people don’t see it for what it is.

The rest of the world is watching. And history is full of moments where populations facing exactly this kind of coercion refused to be instrumentalised, and won. The leverage Washington thinks it holds is only as strong as Zambia’s isolation. That isolation is not inevitable.

This moment does demand a response from African leadership, civil society, and from the continent’s institutions. Not because the US should be appeased, but because what happens in Lusaka today sets a precedent for what happens in Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam and Windhoek tomorrow. If mineral wealth can be extracted through this kind of pressure, it will be.

The question Africa must answer is not how to resist Washington specifically, it is how to build the kind of continental economic architecture that makes this level of coercion structurally impossible. DM

Dr Kelly Alexander is faculty at Gibs Business School and president of Meridian17.