Africa at centre of global supply chain realignment but at risk of economic capture

Let me be direct about something that rarely gets said plainly enough in polite policy forums. Africa may be sitting at the centre of the most consequential supply chain realignment in a generation, but it is at risk, not just of missing this geopolitical opportunity, but of having that opportunity captured.

The threat comes not just from foreign powers, but from networks of political elites, corrupt intermediaries, and extractive, embedded criminal organisations that have historically moved fastest into many governance vacuums the continent has produced. These dynamics are not unique to Africa, but they are particularly costly here given the scale of unmet development needs and the intensity of geopolitical interest.

What happens next will be critical. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) describes a world fracturing into blocs: US-aligned, China-aligned, and a contested middle ground of non-aligned connector economies. Much of Africa occupies that third space. Here, the optimists see opportunity. The realists see both opportunity and a trap – because potential unanchored to institutional capability does not stay neutral. It gets captured.

In this shifting world order, can African leaders act to move themselves up the value chain, or at a minimum, negotiate substantially better terms at the lower rungs using genuine leverage rather than hope? Much of it hinges on whether they can develop sufficient capacity and coordination to set and enforce the terms of extraction before someone else sets them for them.

Minerals don’t make you powerful — control does

Nowhere is this choice more stark than in Africa’s mineral wealth. Africa holds a remarkable share of the minerals required for the global energy transition: copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earths. The demand is significant and growing. But demand alone does not create leverage.

Leverage exists when you can credibly say we control something you need, we can deliver it reliably, and the terms of that delivery will build our long-term industrial capability. Without that combination, Africa risks remaining what one recent policy discussion described as “a price-taker in a geopolitical auction”, central to everyone’s industrial strategy but author of none.

The current wave of resource nationalism, including export bans in DRC and Zimbabwe, illustrates the danger. A poorly designed export ban often does less to discipline the extraction machine than to reroute it through channels that are even less transparent. Ghana is taking a more sophisticated approach, building a regulated Gold Board with traceability and financial controls rather than simply prohibiting exports. Botswana offers the longer lesson: patient, repeated renegotiation of its diamond partnership with De Beers, each round expanding local beneficiation, skills transfer and processing commitments.The lesson is not that export restrictions are wrong, it is that they function only when a state can process, police and predict, which requires institutions, energy infrastructure, logistics and regional coordination.

Corridors are leverage, but also vectors for capture

Infrastructure is another area of contestation. The Lobito Corridor, connecting Angola, the DRC and Zambia, is simultaneously described by the EU as a sustainable development initiative, by Washington as a strategic connectivity project tied to critical mineral supply chains, and by the US Development Finance Corporation as a $553-million investment in Angola’s Benguela railway. Same project, three framings. That tells you that this is contested infrastructure whose contractual terms determine who benefits, over what period, and on whose conditions.

Capital can build roads and railways – or, if poorly structured, mortgage your policy space for a generation. Corridors have historically produced real assets, but not necessarily industrial transformation. Without contracts locking in local supplier development, skills transfer and transparent governance they just become faster extraction pipes.

When deals are structured primarily in confidential arbitration venues, with security arrangements that bypass normal oversight and off-take agreements that run for decades, the question of who actually negotiates on Africa’s behalf becomes urgently relevant. The point is not to reject foreign capital, but to have the capability and the negotiating strength to ensure it is deployed through transparent, rules-based contracts that build domestic capability as they deliver returns to investors.

The alternative to integration is not independence

Regional integration offers perhaps the only real antidote to this dilemma. But the argument for integration is often reduced to the false binary of perfect pan-African unity or every country going it alone. This is costing the continent dearly, because the vacuum left by a lack of coordination is not neutral; it is too often filled by sophisticated criminal extraction networks that are better at cross-border operations than the fragile legal regional institutions meant to constrain them. Where regional institutions have been adequately mandated and resourced, they have shown they can close some of these gaps; the problem is that these successes remain the exception rather than the norm.

Partial integration and peer accountability, even messy and imperfect, is structurally protective in ways that matter enormously.

When Angola, the DRC and Zambia coordinate their positions on Lobito Corridor contracts, they are harder to play off against each other, harder to approach individually with opaque side arrangements, and harder to bind into terms that work best for the financier.

When SA, Kenya and Nigeria align on digital infrastructure standards, they make it more difficult for a single foreign platform to set the rules unilaterally for the entire continent. By sharing technical capacity, legal expertise, financial analysis and environmental assessment, smaller and weaker states are less dependent on the very parties seeking access to their resources for the technical advice needed to evaluate the deal.

Middle powers must lead, beginning with themselves

SA, Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt have the institutional depth, the financial markets and the regional influence to anchor genuine coordination, provided they can address unresolved governance deficits that limit their credibility and increase their strategic vulnerability to external coercion.

One of Africa’s central geopolitical weaknesses is administrative. If countries can strengthen governance to function reliably, including revenue services that collect, regulators that enforce, and ports and railways that run, then they stand a better chance of building effective coalitions. The good news is that there are already pockets of excellence, from more capable revenue authorities to increasingly sophisticated regulators, that show what is possible when political focus and administrative investment align.

Investing in capability will also be key. Navigating competing US and Chinese standards, technology ecosystems, compliance regimes and payment infrastructure simultaneously requires technical capacity, legal sophistication and political consistency that most African states do not currently possess.

The argument for building that capacity together is about survival in a world where the alternative to organised capability is organised extraction. A workable non-alignment means issue-by-issue coalitions where interests converge, diversified infrastructure and financing partners so no single relationship becomes a chokehold, continental-scale bargaining, where achievable, and above everything else, relentless investment in the administrative and execution capacity that makes reliability possible and capture more difficult.

The window is open. The minerals are there. The strategic demand is genuine. But none of that is sufficient on its own. History is indifferent to potential. It rewards demonstrated capability, and it is brutally efficient at finding the weakest points in any system and routing extraction through them.

The stark challenge facing Africa’s middle powers, therefore, is whether they can build the coordination that serves their citizens before it is built for them, on terms they did not negotiate and from which they cannot easily escape. DM