Modern Mining March 2024

continue to do what they will – as Thucydides put it, “the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must”. Elites whose power is unconstrained by institutions and citizen strength will continue to take money from, and do business, with, other unscrupu lous powers. A recent journal article that my colleague Pranish Desai and I wrote suggests that Dutch Disease – one manifestation of the resource curse – is at play in southern Africa. Ironically, the way to heal the disease is to ensure that mining acts as a flywheel for industri alisation. In the absence of democratisation gaining renewed strength, however, that kind of structural transformation will remain a pipedream. 

be forthcoming; certainly not responsible invest ment, which is a subject for another column. While the ACTFA is a positive development, one “serious obstacle” to progress on the continent is democratic backsliding. The econometric evidence is clear that sustained transitions to democracy pro duce significant economic growth gains over their autocratic counterparts. This is simply because democracies – for all their flaws – are better at hold ing elites to account for unsatisfactory performance and can thus ensure that broad-based develop ment occurs. The latest data is not yet out, but the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for 2022 indicated that sub-Saharan Africa had scored only 4.14 on the Index vs a global average of 5.29. The only area that scored lower was the Middle East & North Africa, which came in at 3.34. Deeply concerning, though, is that 23 of the world’s 59 ‘authoritarian’ regimes are in sub-Saharan Africa, while the Middle East & North Africa only boasted 17. With the swathe of recent coups – coup contagion – across West Africa, and some countries even leaving ECOWAS (The Economic Community of West African States), the 2023 results are not going to paint a prettier picture. So, what does democratic backsliding have to do with mineral wealth and structural transforma tion? The bottom line is that authoritarian regimes have every incentive to ensure that mineral rents flow only to elites at the expense of citizens. The transaction costs of reform are much higher than the costs of repression in elite calculus. Mineral rents fund patronage, co-optation and repression ability, the three cornerstones of any authoritarian regime. I could argue, and I do, for better mineral policies, stronger industrial policies that connect mining to global value chain opportunities, and a more func tional ACFTA, but these arguments are meaningless in contexts where the broad swathe of citizens do not have a voice. In those contexts, elites will

Africa is abundantly blessed with mineral resources.

Global demand for copper, cobalt, lithium, and titanium is going to multiply in the decades ahead.

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