Zambia’s Mining Industry Can Catalyse an African Renaissance
It’s a vision rooted in history, with a contemporary zeitgeist. Can Africa seize the opportunity?
The longue durée of history is a construct that assesses the impacts of events and trends over centuries or even longer. Way into the future, scholars may come to view the confluence of sociopolitical winds of change and big mining industry moves in Zambia’s Copperbelt as having seeded a 21st-century African Renaissance.
Mining underpinned great African civilisations and economies in centuries past. The Mali Empire was one of the most powerful and wealthiest in the world during the 13th to 16th centuries. Mali flourished by leveraging its gold deposits to forge trade networks across the Sahara and into Europe and the Middle East, and to create a centre of culture and learning in Timbuktu. More or less simultaneously, in southern Africa the Mutapa dynasty was also rooted in gold riches, controlling mining output across a vast territory encompassing today’s Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique. The Mutapa Empire dominated trade inland and along the south-east coast from the mid-1400s, and endured for 450 years.
Copper played a pivotal role in the history of the 14th to 19th century Luba Kingdom in the southern part of today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. Luba rulers used the metal as a form of currency and to consolidate political power in the region, then to finance expansion and establish trade routes to Africa’s east coast.
The copper catalyst
Fast forward 250 years, today the copper mining industry in Zambia – among other metals extractives sectors – is being positioned as the catalyst for broader industrialisation and socioeconomic development.
It hasn’t been plain sailing to reach this promising point. When President Hakainde Hichilema was elected five years ago this month he inherited a mountainous USD 14.71 billion national debt and a mountain of problems, including crippling annualised inflation rates of 24.4% overall and 31.6% for food. The bureaucracy was riddled with incompetence, and there was a trust deficit between government and the private sector which, for mining companies, amounted to “bad governance, nationalisation, expropriation, and corruption,” summarises a leading African mining journal.
It took him just two weeks to appoint a new minister of mines, lawyer Paul Chanda Kabuswe. A bit more time was needed to fix the ownership impasse of two giant Copperbelt mines, Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) and Mopani Copper Mines (MCM). But the government’s actions to stabilise relations and then proactively introduce investment-friendly policies encouraged the mining industry’s sense of confidence, culminating in First Quantum Minerals’ USD 1.25 billion S3 build at its Kansanshi, a landmark project officially opened this month by President Hichilema. The flagship expansion will boost the output of the country’s largest copper mine by 240,000 tonnes per annum and extend its life by 25 years, creating 15,000 direct jobs in the process. It symbolises Zambia’s strategy of securing a role in the global decarbonisation and renewable technologies supply chain, in which copper is a critical input.
Beyond copper, and mining in general, Zambia also envisages a broader industrial base for the nation. Plans are at an advanced stage for the establishment of an electric vehicle component manufacturing hub at Ndola, a step toward beneficiation and value-chain extension in Zambia itself. In the energy sector, Indeni Energy Company has shifted from being a petroleum refinery to becoming a fuels marketing enterprise, aligning with government policy to liberalise the energy market and improve supply resilience.
These are markers of the government’s reoriented economic strategy, its implementation spearheaded by the recently appointed CEO of ZCCM-IH, Phesto Musonda. The leadership’s vision is to pave the way for new and hybrid investments, transitioning Zambia from reliance on extraction and raw mining exports to leveraging mining as a springboard for economic diversification and growth into manufacturing, technology, and services.
Africa Rising: a continent’s renewal?
Zambia’s example should be noted in the context of a shift towards the continent’s economic integration. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is a framework for scaling industrialisation across borders to rekindle Africa’s history of interregional trade and as a global trade route hub.
Promising signs have emerged, and sentiments expressed, before. South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki popularised the notion of an African Renaissance in the late 1990s, firstly in his 1996 “I am an African” speech, then, from 1998, in formal policy statements. He envisioned a new era of Africa’s social cohesion, democracy, economic growth, and the continent taking its place in global affairs.
Indeed, the first decade of the 21st century saw Africa’s growth outpacing the rest of the world. The continent’s real GDP expanded 5.1% annually on average between 2000 and 2010, putting the lie to the negativity of The Economist, whose May 2000 issue blared ‘Africa, The Hopeless Continent’ on its cover. The consulting firm McKinsey corrected that narrative in a series of 2007 to 2010 feature articles titled Lions on the Move, highlighting the dynamism of African economies.
But the success story faded. Since 2010 Africa’s economic performance – with Rwanda and Ethiopia the exceptions – has lagged the world, stagnating at just 3.1% of global GDP. Worse, from the early 2020s, the aptly named Coup Belt across the Sahel saw a string of military coups in Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Niger and Sudan. Power grabs and resources greed will retard these countries’ development by a decade or more.
However, for most of the continent the outlook is brightening: the African Development Bank forecasts the Africa’s GDP growth at 3.9% for 2025, accelerating to 4-5% by 2026. But the dream of renewal and progress will require political cohesion within the Africa Union – and the willingness to use its African Standby Force to enforce the moral principles it enshrines – as well as cooperation between the 54 AfCFTA signatories, massive infrastructure investment, and public-private project development.
The latter is a key pillar of lasting upliftment. If mining is to be the catalyst for Africa’s rejuvenation, the industry should understand ESG as non-negotiable. Beyond the balance sheet, environmental stewardship is vital; equally pressing is the industry’s social responsibility. Although local communities should remain the focus of how and where mining operations implement the ‘S’ of ESG, broader thinking should come into play. For instance, Zambia’s Education for All (EFA) schooling initiative, started in 2021, comes with a significant cost, notes the World Bank. Could the industry contribute to funding the bill? This would be a win-win, especially if science, technology and maths (STEM) were emphasised and mining engineering qualifications incorporated into curricula.
Balancing today and tomorrow
Mining is a business, and operations must deliver investment returns. So the mining sector must manage not-so-short-term profitability and long-term sustainability. Decisions about capital investments, beneficiation, and reinvestment in communities will define whether resource wealth is fleeting (in the context of the industry) or enduring (with regards to a nation, and beyond). Big calls will need to be made to marry the trade-offs between realistic, foreseeable near term gains and shepherding the enterprise in a manner than embeds generational betterment.
These dilemmas are already present in the structure and dynamics of the copper market. Global copper demand is projected to surge 25% in the next fifteen years, then reach 50 million tonnes per annum by 2050 – nearly double the latest estimates of worldwide current tonnes volumes. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that the supply pipeline is not keeping up – a situation it says represents a major risk to copper markets, pointing to a 30% supply deficit by 2035. The Zambian government’s goal of rapidly expanding the country’s copper production to three million tonnes per annum by 2031 is intended to capitalise on this market situation.
But Zambia also has an opportunity to model how mining can support not just local communities but national development priorities. If Zambia realises its ambitious mining strategy, the current moment at Kansanshi S3 may be remembered long into the future as the spark, and the economic epicentre, of a continent-wide, 21st-century renaissance.
So, are we witnessing the start of a Make Africa Great Again wave, a sea-change in the fortunes of a continent? History reminds us that Africa once housed great empires and vibrant trade networks. The question now is whether modern Africa, powered by the potential of the mining industry and guided by new governance frameworks, can translate resource wealth into broad-based prosperity.