---
title: "Implementation stands between Africa and its critical minerals opportunity"
description: "Africa holds mineral deposits the modern world depends on, and critical minerals policies are being drafted across the continent, but the test is whether they can produce investment environments predictable enough for long-term capital yet flexible enough to deliver community benefit."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Opinionistas"
author: "Christina Pretorius"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/christina-pretorius/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-09-06-implementation-stands-between-africa-and-its-critical-minerals-opportunity/"
published: "2026-09-06T15:24:20"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 819
---

# Implementation stands between Africa and its critical minerals opportunity

> Africa holds mineral deposits the modern world depends on, and critical minerals policies are being drafted across the continent, but the test is whether they can produce investment environments predictable enough for long-term capital yet flexible enough to deliver community benefit.

By Christina Pretorius · Published 6 September 2026, 17:24 SAST

## Content

Last week’s African Critical Minerals Summit 2026 in Johannesburg highlighted growth opportunities in critical minerals like copper, cobalt, graphite, and nickel. Alongside industry leaders, a legal panel explored how regulatory frameworks can help – or hinder – investment in these strategic assets.

A government can produce a well-drafted mining code and still fail to attract capital, because instead of evaluating the document, investors are looking at whether that strategy has been translated into functioning institutions, enforceable regulations, accessible infrastructure and predictable processes. A mining code that takes three years to yield a licence does not deliver regulatory certainty, however well-drafted. Projects stall on process far more often than on geology.

### Only the state can provide regulatory certainty

Drawing on patterns observed across multiple African jurisdictions, certain elements consistently determine whether a critical minerals opportunity converts into a bankable project: regulatory certainty, quality geological data, and infrastructure.

The relationship between these three is not symmetrical. Where regulatory certainty and quality data exist, investors will either fund the infrastructure themselves, or separate infrastructure investment will come to the fore. This is because confidence in the resource and confidence in the legal framework protecting their investment is usually enough to unlock private capital for roads, rail, port capacity and power. Where regulatory certainty and infrastructure exist, exploration capital tends to follow, because companies will invest in geological surveys and resource delineation when they trust that the environment will allow them to convert that data into a bankable project.

But nothing will convert without regulatory certainty, even where quality data and infrastructure exist. Unlike data and infrastructure, regulatory certainty requires sustained political will; a government must consistently – and visibly – create rules that are enforceable and transparent. No amount of private capital, and no donor or international organisation, can make that decision on a government’s behalf. It is the one pillar only the state can provide.

### Every other sector relies on critical minerals

Summits and policy documents routinely refer to “the critical minerals sector” as though it were a standalone industry comparable to telecoms or financial services, but they must be understood as the foundation on which most other sectors are built.

The energy transition cannot proceed without lithium, cobalt and manganese; electric vehicles cannot be manufactured without nickel, graphite and rare earths, and digital infrastructure depends on copper. Defence and aerospace depend on platinum group metals and titanium, while agriculture increasingly depends on phosphates and potash.

The policy conversation changes once critical minerals are understood as foundational. It becomes less a question of mining policy, and more a question of industrial strategy, energy planning, and trade and infrastructure investment. This paradigm shift will determine whether Africa can appropriately benefit from its mineral wealth. It also changes what investors are buying, because they start investing in a node within a global industrial system, rather than a single mining project.

Mining companies are just one part of the value chain, a distinction that has consequences for how investment agreements and community frameworks are structured.

Governments negotiating with mining companies sometimes treat the company as though it is, or should be, responsible for the full chain of value creation, from extraction and processing through to job creation, infrastructure development, skills transfer, community development and industrialisation. That expectation is unreasonable for any single actor to carry, and when it goes unmet, the result is disputes, delays and eroded trust on both sides.

A mining company’s core competence is finding, extracting and selling minerals. Some go further, investing in processing and building infrastructure, but expecting one company, or even one category of company, to deliver an entire national development agenda is neither realistic nor good policy.

Legal frameworks need to make room for multiple actors across the value chain, including processors, logistics providers, technology firms, financiers, traders and downstream manufacturers, as well as junior and emerging miners, who play a distinct role in exploration and discovery and should not be regulated as though they carry the same capacity as major multinationals.

Communities sit within this value chain too, and engagement that stops at compliance will not hold over the life of a project. The thread holding this together is trust between governments and investors, mining companies and communities, which is built through consistent conduct over time. Few regulatory systems can manufacture it on demand.

### The opportunity is bigger than mining

The opportunity presented by Africa’s critical minerals extends beyond the mining industry itself, and the question is whether the continent can use its mineral resources as a foundation for industrialisation, economic transformation and continental prosperity. Lawyers have a particular role to play in that outcome, because law and regulation can either create the uncertainty that slows investment, or provide the certainty and structure that long-term partnerships require to succeed.

Africa’s resources have never been in doubt, and now is the time for our continent to do what is required to convert them into lasting value.**DM**