Africa should seize the worldwide vital minerals alternative to speed up industrialisation, create jobs and deepen regional financial integration quite than proceed exporting uncooked supplies, Worldwide Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola argues.
Talking on the Ambassadorial Breakfast on Africa’s Progress By Important Minerals occasion, hosted by Absa in partnership with the Division of Worldwide Relations and Cooperation, in Johannesburg, on August 7, he mentioned Africa’s huge vital mineral endowment positioned the continent on the centre of the worldwide power transition.
He famous that Africa possesses most of the minerals required for clear power applied sciences, together with platinum group metals (PGMs), copper, manganese, bauxite and graphite, making the continent indispensable to the worldwide transition to a low-carbon economic system.
“Our continent has most of the minerals which might be vital to the worldwide power transition. These minerals are important to applied sciences, starting from photo voltaic panels and wind generators to electrical automobiles and power storage techniques. Africa is, due to this fact, central to the transition to a low-carbon future,” Lamola mentioned.
Nevertheless, Lamola cautioned that useful resource abundance alone wouldn’t assure prosperity and mentioned Africa should break longstanding patterns wherein minerals are exported for processing elsewhere earlier than being re-imported as higher-value merchandise.
He burdened the necessity for higher beneficiation and industrial capability throughout the continent.
He additionally warned that rising demand for vital minerals may both usher in a brand new period of shared prosperity or intensify extraction, battle and instability on the continent if governments did not implement prudent, long-term and localised growth-enabling insurance policies.
In the meantime, Lamola has additionally welcomed coverage interventions by nations together with South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Malawi to advertise native worth addition, highlighting that these efforts help the implementation of the African Inexperienced Minerals Technique and the G20 Important Minerals Framework.
“Inside [the G20 last year,] intra-Africa fee techniques [were highlighted] as a vital space of cooperation.
“How we handle the promise and peril of this second will decide whether or not we realise Agenda 2063’s imaginative and prescient of a peaceable, built-in and affluent Africa anchored within the beliefs of Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance,” Lamola mentioned.
He additionally burdened that industrialisation was important to addressing Africa’s demographic problem, noting that whereas between ten-million and twenty-million younger individuals enter the labour market annually, Africa creates solely about three-million formal jobs a yr.
Lamola’s remarks echoed these of Absa Group CEO Kenny Fihla, who highlighted that Africa had reached a defining second as rising international demand for vital minerals repositioned the continent as a strategic participant within the international economic system.
“Africa is at an inflection level. International demand for vital minerals has repositioned our continent as a strategic provider to the world however the query we should now confront extra essentially is whether or not Africa can harness this second to energy its personal industrialisation,” Fihla mentioned.
He additionally argued that unlocking the continent’s mineral wealth would require nearer collaboration between governments, finance and business, stronger implementation of the African Continental Free Commerce Space (AfCFTA) and higher funding in regional industrial capability, including that Africa’s “future competitiveness can be decided not by what it extracts, however by what it builds”.
Lamola known as on enterprise to work alongside governments to speed up progress via mining, manufacturing and agriculture, arguing that stronger public-private partnerships can be important to unlocking Africa’s financial potential.
He concluded by stating that addressing the foundation causes of migration, together with unemployment, weak financial progress, local weather change and battle, would in the end rely on creating extra inclusive and built-in African economies able to delivering jobs and long-term prosperity.
