The message from Mamadou Sangafowa Coulibaly, the Ivorian Minister of Mines, Petroleum, and Energy, could not have take on a more bolder tone after the West African nation staged the Ministerial Forum on Critical Minerals, Value Chains, and Beneficiation in Abidjan on 10 July.
“Africa is ready to make critical minerals a lever for industrial transformation,” Coulibaly said.
Minister Coulibaly had no shortage of supporters at the ministerial conference, which the African Development Bank Group (AfDB) hosted in collaboration with African Governments and the African Union Commission.
“The world is entering an era that is built on critical minerals,” Dr. Hanan Morsy, Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) said at the high-level event, adding, “For Africa, this presents an opportunity that is as significant as independence 60 years ago. But opportunities don’t transform economies. Strategy does.”
Dr. Sidi Ould Tah, President of the AfDB, heralded the opening of “a new chapter in relations between Africa and the rest of the world regarding the exploitation and management of critical minerals.” It is a chapter that could further strengthen the growing ties between Kampala and Beijing in, critics further note, ways that rarely make democracy safer.
The rapid rise of China within the global order of multilateralism has squarely left Beijing joined at the hip with African nations like Uganda. Despite institutions that underpin the multilateral system, not least the International Monetary Fund (IMF), switching from balance-of-payments support to macroeconomic surveillance, crisis lending, and structural reform, or in fact because of it, nations like Uganda nowadays find China’s pull irresistible.
With China’s foreign policy predicated upon extracting advantage, Beijing and Kampala have organised their strategies around shared interests in the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After being involved in skirmishes on Congolese soil in the 1990s, and being asked to pay war reparations that are set to reach US$325 million this year, Uganda has mended fences with her western neighbour. The Uganda-DRC interdependence is seen as an indispensable stabilising force in their bilateral ties.
Insatiable REEs appetite
At the heart of the cordiality is Beijing’s insatiable appetite for rare earth elements (REEs)—replete in the DRC—that has seen relations between Kampala and Kinshasa thaw out sufficiently to allow trade to thrive. With total bilateral trade nearing US$1 billion annually, the DRC has cemented her position as Uganda’s largest African trading partner. Underpinning the fledgling trading partnership is the growing demand for Ugandan manufactured goods.
The numbers tell their own story. In 2024, Uganda exported US$478 million worth of goods to the DRC. No small beer, by any measure. Most, if not all, of the manufactured goods in question come from industrial parks dotting Uganda under the stewardship of so-called Chinese investors.
What is not immediately clear, but no less important, is the fact that this is part of a meticulous plan by Beijing to end up in the good graces of Kinshasa. Uganda, whose gold receipts have increased steeply in recent years, is hardly a passive recipient in the grand scheme of things. Kampala has found itself appropriately, if not strategically, placed to make the most of the crumbs that drop off the table that is Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Along with the expansion of new war-fighting capabilities of Congo’s traditionally feeble army, Kampala has found herself central to infrastructure projects tailored to pave the way for access REEs in the eastern DRC either by road or rail.
As a result, a lot of money has poured into the Ugandan economy courtesy China. While some observers contend that this conviction by Beijing appears misplaced, pointing to the cold feet over the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project, seen through the lens of worst-case assumptions, there have not been many red flags to derail things.
Consequently, China remains Uganda’s largest bilateral creditor, and the East African nation is saddled with debt amounting to $32 billion. The spectre of defaulting poses a threat to Uganda’s sovereignty, which has hedged its bet on the petro-dollar economy.
Winds of change
Much of this lending is odious debt, which sustains the imperial presidency Yoweri Museveni has carefully calibrated amid different winds of change since 1986. Uganda, once the darling of the West, has gradually gravitated towards the far east, embracing China and Russia, whose non-interference policy turns a blind eye to egregious abuses, the rule of law and democratic governance.
As a matter of fact, oftentimes, interests have tended to converge under the authoritarian playbook. While the state-owned New Vision newspaper this week alluded to an intersection of interests, with Uganda reportedly set to deploy troops as part of a proposed International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza, the chasm between Washington and Kampala seems to widen with each passing day. Just this week, Uganda suffered the ignominy of being placed on a list by Washington of countries whose travel advisory is graded level 4. The list is a who-is-who of failed nations. This came hot on the heels of news that Kampala has hired Skyline Capitol, a prominent lobbying and government affairs firm, on a $20,000-a-month gig to cleanse its image.
Critics say that all of this shows that there is a thaw in relations between Uganda and the Donald Trump-led US government. This is despite the fact that Washington during Trump 2.0 somewhat mimics the Chinese non-interference policy and favours trade and the extractive industry in favour of democracy and human rights. As a matter of fact, Kampala has ingratiated itself to Washington by inking a deal to take in nationals from third countries who are denied asylum in the United States. Uganda has also offered to play a proxy role in the exploitation of REEs in the neighbouring DRC.
An arms wrestle
Uganda has not shied away from showing that it has every intention of making the most of the arms wrestle between Washington and Beijing. Both countries are mindful of the fact that the DRC is the archetypal jewel in the crown if anything because its REEs will power the next industrial revolution. The clearest pathway to DRC is for all intentions and purposes through Uganda, whose steadying hand in the restive Great Lakes region is not to be downplayed.
This has not been lost on both China and Russia. Uganda, as such, relies on Beijing and Moscow for military supplies. China has particularly recalibrated its trade ties with African nations like Uganda, lifting tariffs on several products and lending through Exim Bank to fund infrastructure projects. This has not been without consequences per many observers. Uganda, for one, has found itself perilously close to being afflicted by debt-trap diplomacy.
Chinese loans have high interest rates and onerous lending terms, which could lead to the seizing of national assets. Uganda’s only international airport in the sleepy town of Entebbe was once feared to have come menacingly close to ending up in the unforgiving grasp of Chinese lenders. While it didn’t, Kampala has put herself in a fragile position where she risks becoming dependent on foreign infrastructure providers whose telecommunications networks, cloud storage systems, undersea cables and data centres are externally controlled by China.
China’s fibre-optic cables, facial recognition cameras, biometric databases, and artificial intelligence systems have turned Uganda into a police state under the pretext of enhancing national security and neutering terror threats. Opposition politicians like Bobi Wine have severally been targeted. Ditto rights activists and journalists, to mention but two.
Uganda is also active in the market and has purchased malware from Israel, Italy and elsewhere but the distinction is such purchases are sporadic than deliberate.
Conspicuous absence
With China’s technological expansion into Africa tied to the ambitions of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the damage that looks set to be wrought was conveniently by the recent Ministerial Forum on Critical Minerals, Value Chains, and Beneficiation. Critics insist that the consequences of the BRI’s digital component—known as the Digital Silk Road and administered through firms such as Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision—cannot be wished away.
Surface-level observations return a simplistic verdict that the Digital Silk Road offers cheaper telecommunications infrastructure and surveillance equipment. A deeper probe, however, unearths what some see as sinister motives. Already, the national CCTV grid that was installed in Uganda by Huawei has created an all-seeing eye whose perpetuation of self-censorship is there for all to see.
What is immediately obvious is that the BRI and its attendant components like the Digital Silk Road are part of the export to Uganda of the broader China-centric values of an effective police state. It is well documented that this requires citizens to acquiesce, stripping citizens of their civil liberties. Less known, but no less remarkable, is the fact that surveillance extends towards China’s role in the extractives industry in African countries like Uganda and the DRC.
“Africa holds approximately 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of the most critical minerals—including cobalt, lithium, graphite, rare earth elements, platinum group metals, copper, manganese and nickel. The continent’s mineral endowment is estimated at about US$29.5 trillion (819 per cent of Africa’s GDP, or roughly 8.2 times Africa’s annual GDP) in mine site value, representing approximately 20 per cent of the global total, of which about US$8.6 trillion (239 per cent of Africa’s GDP) remain undeveloped,” the AfDB said in a statement ahead of staging of the Forum.
“Global demand projections for critical minerals are unequivocal: by 2040, demand for platinum group metals is expected to increase by more than 1,000 per cent, lithium by 842 per cent and copper by 88 per cent, compared with 2023 levels. The scale and pace of this growth point to an unprecedented industrial transformation. The electric vehicle and battery value chain alone is projected to grow from USD 7 trillion in 2030 to USD 59 trillion by 2050 […] The Forum will mark a defining milestone for the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD), adopted through the Abidjan Consensus in April 2026, mobilising blended finance, guarantees, and institutional capital to address Africa’s critical minerals investment gap,” it added.
The conspicuous absence of the mention of the authoritarian governance model that Beijing is propping up has not gone unremarked. With Uganda’s chairmanship of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) not expected to end until January of 2027, Kampala and Beijing could further be joined at the hip as the latter looks to assuage its appetite for REEs. Washington has picked this out, and is moving to position itself as a voice of reason.
“Africa has the human capital, the resources, and the opportunity to become the greatest industrial growth story of the twenty-first century,” Mr Jeremy Wiggins, Deputy Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said at the Forum in Abidjan, adding, “Good governance is not an obstacle to investment. It is what makes it endurable.”