By Fatai Abiodun Esq
According to the report posted by Thisday[1], Nigeria and the African Development Bank (AfDB) have renewed calls for African countries to take greater control of the continent’s vast mineral resources through local value addition, regional cooperation, strategic financing and ownership of mineral data to ensure that Africa derives greater economic benefits from its natural wealth.
The call was made at the Ministerial Forum on Critical Minerals, Value Chain and Beneficiation: Pathways for African Transformation, held under the auspices of the AfDB in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dr Dele Alake, urged African mineral-producing nations to abandon isolated national approaches and embrace regional collaboration to unlock the full economic potential of the continent’s mineral resources.
Alake stressed that while the campaign for local beneficiation had opened new opportunities for economic independence, African nations must now develop practical strategies that would enable them to take full control of their mineral assets.
The above demand exposes the dichotomy between the Global South and Global North classification. Under International Development Law, the Global South-Global North binary serves an indispensable critical function by exposing enduring structures of colonial and economic domination. Yet as feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial scholars demonstrate, the binary also risks essentializing identities, obscuring internal inequalities, and reproducing the hierarchies it seeks to challenge.[2]
Nigeria and the African Development Bank (AfDB )’s renewed call for African countries to take greater control of the continent’s vast mineral resources is in line with the demand for a new binding protocol to the African Charter that would declare “extractive dependency” a violation of the right to development and require African states to adopt a unified bargaining framework.
This is not the first time a call of this nature would come to existence; Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana)[3] was perhaps the strongest advocate of African political and economic unity. Kwame, under his famous work, Africa Must Unite, argued that Africa would never achieve genuine development if individual states remained economically dependent on former colonial powers.
Kwame advocated for the creation of a United States of Africa, a common industrial policy, African ownership of natural resources, Continental economic planning and Rejection of neo-colonial economic structures.[4]
Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) believed African countries were too small individually to compete globally. He promoted regional integration, self-reliance, African socialism (Ujamaa), and industrial cooperation. He argued that exporting raw materials while importing finished products kept Africa permanently poor.[5]
Adebayo Adedeji[6] was a Nigerian economist, academic, and statesman whose work helped shape African development policy in the late twentieth century. Adedeji is best known for serving as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) from 1975 to 1991, where he became a leading advocate for African economic integration and self-directed development strategies, arguing for development approaches tailored to African conditions rather than relying exclusively on externally designed structural adjustment programs. His ideas significantly influenced debates on economic policy across the continent.
One of the foremost Professors of law, Prof. Ahmed Garba, during one of his classes in International Developmental Law, advocated for home-grown solutions and opined that Africa should develop its own standards for the governance, extraction, processing, and commercialisation of its natural resources because externally imposed standards have often failed to reflect the continent’s unique developmental priorities and socioeconomic realities.
No doubt that Africa’s underdevelopment resulted largely from centuries of exploitation and unequal integration into the global economy. It is important to emphasise that exporting raw materials while importing manufactured goods entrenched dependency and was in violation of the right to development.
Drawing on critical legal scholarship on neocolonialism, dependency theory advocate Samir Amin, and post-colonial international law expert, Chimni’s work on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), there is a need to interrogate whether the new scramble represents a rupture from or a continuity of the 19th-century colonial scramble.[7]
While Alake and AfDB call for a unified framework for African countries to take greater control of the continent’s vast mineral resources is in order, the question is whether a unified African legal framework for resource governance could emerge under the Africa Mineral Strategy Group (AMSG), and the Africa Minerals Development Centre (AMDC), or do the structural asymmetries of global capital and geopolitics could render such efforts futile?
Also, how should a decolonial theory of international development law reconceptualise “sovereignty over natural resources” (UNGA Resolution 1803) in an era of extractive dependency and Great Power rivalry?
From the perspective of dependency theorists such as Samir Amin, the Lobito Corridor and TAZARA rehabilitation largely reproduce the structural features of the nineteenth-century colonial economy. Its apposite to stress that the original colonial scramble for Africa had three defining characteristics: extraction of raw materials for external markets, Construction of infrastructure designed primarily for export, and the Integration of African economies into unequal global value chains.[8]
TWAIL scholars such as B. S. Chimni had argued that formal colonialism has been replaced by structures of informal empire mediated through international economic law. The mechanisms have changed: investment treaties, Sovereign debt arrangements, Trade rules, Development finance institutions and Global supply-chain governance.
From this perspective, the new scramble is not territorial conquest but regulatory and economic control through legal instruments that constrain policy space and preserve asymmetrical bargaining power. The question becomes not who owns the territory but who controls mineral licensing, pricing, technology, financing, and dispute settlement.
The existence of the African Development Bank (AfDB), the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area creates institutional possibilities unavailable during colonial rule. The problem is not the absence of agency but whether African states can collectively exercise it.
The big question is, can a Unified African Framework Emerge?
The answer depends on whether Africa can overcome collective-action problems. This means that Africa’s ability to develop a common and effective strategy for managing its mineral wealth depends on whether African countries can work together instead of pursuing narrow national interests. Collective-action problems arise when countries have shared objectives but fail to cooperate because each prioritises its own immediate interests over the long-term collective benefit.
However, the proposed framework recognises that achieving unity is challenging because African countries differ in political priorities, economic development levels, governance capacity, legal frameworks, infrastructure, and short-term national interests. Some governments may prioritise attracting immediate foreign investment over long-term regional goals, while others may resist sharing strategic information or coordinating industrial policies.[9]
In conclusion, a unified African framework would enable countries to coordinate policies on local value addition, regional cooperation, strategic financing, and ownership of mineral data, thereby strengthening Africa’s bargaining power, promoting industrialisation, retaining more value within the continent, creating employment, and ensuring that Africa derives sustainable and equitable economic benefits from its natural resources.
While achieving continent-wide consensus may be challenging, the absence of unanimous agreement should not prevent progress. African states that are willing and prepared to pursue deeper economic integration, harmonised mineral policies, and common development standards should take the lead in forming a coalition of committed partners. Such a coalition can serve as a practical demonstration of the benefits of regional cooperation by promoting local value addition, coordinated industrialisation, and stronger bargaining power in global markets.
As these pioneering states begin to realise tangible economic gains such as increased investment, job creation, technology transfer, and higher revenues from processed mineral exports, other African countries are likely to recognise the advantages of participation and voluntarily align with the initiative. This gradual, example-driven approach reflects the principle of “variable geometry” in regional integration, whereby progress is led by willing members without being delayed by those not yet prepared to participate.
Ultimately, successful cooperation among a core group of states can create the momentum necessary for broader continental unity and advance Africa’s collective right to development.
Fatai Abiodun is a Lawyer, Developmental Law Researcher and Public Affairs Analyst
fatai.abiodun200709@gmail.com
08072464004
References
[1] https://www.thisdaylive.com/2026/07/27/nigeria-afdb-push-african-control-of-mineral-wealth-local-value-addition/
[2] The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Framework Document paras 39–56.
[3] Nkrumah K, Africa Must Unite (Heinemann 1963).
[4] ibid
[5] Nyerere JK, Freedom and Unity/Uhuru na Umoja (Oxford University Press 1966).
[6] Adedeji A, African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP) (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa 1989).
[7] Carlos Lopes, Africa in Transformation: Economic Development in the Age of Doubt (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).
[8] Ake C, Democracy and Development in Africa (Brookings Institution Press 1996).
[9] ibid
