South Africa’s Critical Minerals Advantage: Building Inclusive Value Chains for Sustainable Industrialisation

In this context, South Africa must navigate carefully between opportunity and dependency. Strategic partnerships can support industrialisation, technology transfer, and infrastructure development, but only if negotiated from a position centred on African developmental priorities rather than external resource security interests. This requires a stronger developmental state capable of aligning mineral policy with industrial, energy, labour, and climate objectives.

The report correctly highlights the importance of regional value chains under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). No single African country possesses all the minerals, infrastructure, or industrial capacity necessary to dominate the green economy independently. Yet collectively, Southern Africa possesses extraordinary mineral wealth: cobalt from the DRC, lithium from Zimbabwe, graphite from Mozambique, copper from Zambia, and platinum group metals from South Africa. Regional integration therefore becomes not only an economic strategy, but a geopolitical necessity.

Equally important is the question of justice. A just energy transition cannot simply replace coal extraction with critical mineral extraction while preserving inequality, labour exploitation, and environmental degradation. Mining-affected communities, artisanal miners, workers, women, and youth must become central beneficiaries of the transition rather than peripheral casualties of another extractive cycle. The inclusion of artisanal and small-scale miners within formal governance systems, as proposed in the report, reflects an important shift toward inclusive mineral governance.

South Africa’s challenge therefore extends beyond economics. It is fundamentally about sovereignty, development, and the future positioning of Africa within a changing world order. The critical minerals debate forces us to ask difficult questions: Who benefits from the green transition? Who controls technology, infrastructure, and manufacturing? Can Africa move beyond the “pit-to-port” model that has historically defined its role in global markets?

If South Africa succeeds in leveraging its mineral wealth to build domestic and regional industrial capacity, strengthen democratic governance, and promote social justice, it could emerge as a leading force in shaping an alternative developmental pathway for the continent. If it fails, the green transition may simply become another chapter in the long history of resource extraction without transformation.

The critical minerals moment is therefore not only about energy transition, it is about Africa’s place in the future global order.