African governments are restricting mineral exports, and the measures are being read as a continental assertion of resource sovereignty. The design of those measures tells a more modest story about who they were built to protect.

The Argument at AfCoDD VI

AfCoDD VI met in Nairobi under the theme “From Fragmentation to Influence: Advancing the Common African Position on Debt”. Much of the discussion turned on leverage. Africa holds the minerals the energy transition runs on, and the argument was that the continent should convert that endowment into bargaining power instead of negotiating as a supplicant.

I agree with the premise. In a side conversation, someone listed the export bans in Zimbabwe, the DRC, Namibia and Mali as evidence that this is already happening. That reading has become common and it is wrong.

Very little in how these measures were designed suggests a shared African doctrine about resource ownership. The instruments are administrative tools for fixing leakage, propping up prices and protecting revenue. Governments are entitled to use them. They do not amount to the transformation they are being credited with.

What the Measures Are

Zimbabwe. Statutory Instrument 213 of 2022, the Base Minerals Export Control (Lithium Bearing Ores and Unbeneficiated Lithium) Order, was gazetted on 16 December 2022. It barred the export of lithium ore without written ministerial permission, while concentrate remained exportable. In June 2025 Cabinet announced that concentrate exports would stop from January 2027. On 25 February 2026 the Ministry of Mines suspended exports of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates with immediate effect. The ministry letter, dated 17 February, cited continued malpractices in mineral exports. The trigger was the discovery in January of stockpiles of Zimbabwean ore at the Port of Beira in Mozambique.

The DRC. Kinshasa suspended cobalt exports in February 2025 after a price collapse driven by oversupply. The suspension ran eight months and lifted prices by more than 90 per cent from multi-year lows. On 16 October 2025 it was replaced by a quota system administered by ARECOMS. Each approved exporter receives an annual allocation based on its average production and exports over the previous three years, with a discretionary strategic quota retained by the state. The ceiling for 2026 and 2027 is 96,600 tonnes a year, roughly 48 per cent of the country’s 2024 production of about 204,000 tonnes. A government order effective 29 June 2026, made public on 6 August, banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates outright, with ministerial waivers available for a year in cases deemed strategically important.

Zambia. The National Critical Minerals Strategy 2024 to 2028 lists eleven priority minerals and is built around value addition, downstream diversification and industrial procurement. UNCTAD’s assessment for Zambia identified 412 potential products across the value chain, with a subset requiring around US$1.21 billion in capital and capable of generating roughly 115,000 jobs.

The Stated Reasons

Zimbabwe’s 2022 ban answered smuggling and revenue leakage through illegal mining networks. The February 2026 acceleration answered ore stockpiled at a Mozambican port. Mines Minister Polite Kambamura said the purpose was to weed out briefcase companies and middlemen being used to smuggle minerals out, and to stop under-declaration. A governance failure was met with an administrative instrument.

The DRC’s suspension answered a price collapse, and the quota regime that replaced it manages market supply. Zambia’s strategy is the most deliberate of the three, and even it is framed in the language of competitiveness and diversification rather than a break with the model that produced the dependency.

These are reactive instruments addressing leakage, oversupply and fiscal pressure. Calling them an African assertion of a different development model lets governments bank credit for a transformation they have not committed to, and it lets the rest of us stop asking the harder question.

Zimbabwe’s Export Quotas

On 7 April 2026 the ministry issued eleven conditions to the Chamber of Mines, under which the February ban was, in the minister’s own word, “softly lifted”. Six large-scale producers received export quotas: Sinomine’s Bikita Minerals, Chengxin Lithium’s Sabi Star, Yahua Group’s Kamativi, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt’s Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe at Arcadia, Tsingshan’s Gwanda Lithium, and Sandawana Mines, owned by the Mutapa Investment Fund. Five of the six are Chinese-owned and the sixth belongs to the state. A 10 per cent export tax runs on concentrate until the January 2027 deadline.

Kambamura said the conditions were set “so that we protect the investments that they have already put into the country”.

The state suspended exports to stop leakage, then calibrated the suspension to protect the position of the foreign investors already in the ground. Chinese firms have put more than US$1 billion into Zimbabwe’s lithium mining and processing since 2021. Huayou has completed a US$400 million lithium sulphate plant at Arcadia, the first in Africa. Sinomine’s US$500 million facility at Bikita and Yahua’s plant at Kamativi are still under construction, and Sandawana remains at feasibility. As of August 2026 Zimbabwe has one finished sulphate plant, and a Chinese company owns it.

Zimbabwe has added a processing step to the value chain. The question of who controls that chain has the same answer it had in 2021.

Who Absorbs the Cost

In the DRC the quota system applies to industrial producers only. Artisanal and small-scale mining accounts for roughly a third of Congolese cobalt, and under current law all of it must be sold through the state-owned Entreprise Générale du Cobalt, which holds exclusive rights to buy, process and export artisanal output. EGC has no active processing plant. The result is a formal regime built around industrial compliance, with a large artisanal workforce outside it and still trading through intermediaries. Analysts expect more of that output to be blended into industrial shipments and exported under false declarations, which is the problem these instruments were meant to solve.

Large operators can absorb a shutdown, a licensing delay or a quota cut, because they have balance sheets, legal departments and direct access to the ministry. A cooperative digging cobalt outside Kolwezi has none of that. A compliance system built around industrial scale determines who survives the transition.

Ownership and the Value Chain

Moving from ore to concentrate to sulphate to hydroxide is still extraction when the ownership, the financing and the offtake agreements reproduce the same centre-periphery structure that raw export did. A beneficiation mandate relocates the extraction one processing step downstream, where it can be just as extractive as it was at the mine gate.

Huayou and Sinomine control production, processing and downstream sales. Even when the chemical plant sits at Arcadia or Bikita, the decisions about pricing, offtake and technology are taken elsewhere. Zimbabwe hosts the facility while somebody else sets the terms on which it operates.

A supply-side lever says nothing, by itself, about who owns the processing capacity, who captures the margin, or whether the communities living on top of the ore body see any of it.

What a Values-Grounded Approach Requires

Keep the export restrictions, and add the things that decide who benefits, legislated rather than left to market response.

Domestic and community ownership stakes in processing facilities, alongside tax and royalty capture, so that value addition builds local balance sheets and not only local jobs.

Protection and formalisation pathways for artisanal and small-scale miners, who are squeezed first by export bans and quota systems built around industrial compliance. The DRC’s EGC arrangement shows what happens when the pathway exists on paper and nowhere else.

Regional coordination, using the African Green Minerals Strategy adopted by the AU Assembly in February 2025, so that beneficiation mandates stop African producers competing against one another for the same processing investment. Namibia has already prohibited exports of unprocessed lithium, cobalt, manganese, graphite and rare earths, and Zimbabwe and Zambia meet at Livingstone in November. Six national strategies chasing one Chinese refinery investment reproduces the race to the bottom of the raw-export era.

Debt and fiscal safeguards, so that the infrastructure and processing build-out these bans presuppose is financed on terms that do not recreate the vulnerabilities the continent is working to escape. Zimbabwe cannot access concessional finance while US$7.7 billion in external arrears remains unresolved. That constraint shapes every deal Harare signs on lithium, and it is why the terms are set by whoever brings the capital.

Transparent benefit-sharing frameworks that are legislated and monitored, so that a community holds an enforceable claim on the value beneath its land instead of relying on what a mine chooses to fund through its social responsibility budget.

Where This Leaves Us

Africa is right to stop exporting raw ore for minimal return. Zimbabwe was right to act on the stockpiles at Beira, and Kinshasa was right to refuse a price collapse manufactured by its own oversupply. These are competent state actions and the continent should defend them.

We should also be precise about what they are. Export restrictions are a supply-side lever, reached for under fiscal pressure, and calibrated so far to protect the investors already in the ground. The institutional scaffolding that would turn them into a development strategy has yet to be built. Until it is, the continent has moved its dependency one rung up the value chain and congratulated itself for the move.

From fragmentation to influence is the right ambition. The work that follows is deciding what the influence is for and who it is meant to serve.