In Africa’s Mining Towns, I’ve Seen Wealth Leave and Dust Remain

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I have walked through towns where the ground is rich, but the people are not. Places where the earth underneath your feet could power the world’s clean-energy future, yet the homes beside the road have no electricity. Towns where the horizon is shaped by mine trucks carrying rocks worth millions, and the air is thick with a kind of dust that feels permanent dust on roofs, dust on crops, dust on futures.

These are the places where Africa’s mineral wealth lives.
And these are the places where Africa’s mineral wealth leaves.

As the world rushes to secure cobalt, lithium, copper, manganese, graphite and nickel for electric vehicles and batteries, Africa’s mining towns stand again at the epicentre of a global scramble. The slogans have changed: “clean energy”, “critical minerals”, “green transition”, but the lived experience feels hauntingly familiar.

I have seen wealth leave.
I have seen dust remain.

And in this moment when Africa has become indispensable to the world’s climate ambitions, the question rises with renewed urgency:

Will this critical minerals boom finally change the lives of the people who live closest to the mines?
Or will it become another chapter of extraction without transformation?

A morning in a mining town

One morning in the DRC, I watched a convoy of cobalt trucks roll past a cluster of makeshift homes. The sun was barely up, and women were already sweeping away the thin film of grey powder that had settled overnight on their doorsteps. A small boy carried a yellow plastic jerrycan to fetch water from a borehole that often ran dry. A group of young men stood near the roadside, waiting for the possibility of a day job.

Nothing in the scene suggested that this was one of the world’s richest cobalt regions, supplying a mineral so valuable that global automakers now fight over supply contracts years in advance.

The trucks thundered forward.
The dust lifted behind them.
And as it settled, the town returned to its slow, grinding rhythm of uncertainty.

What struck me most was the silence of people who have learned, over decades, that the wealth under their soil flows past them, not to them.

The weight of a familiar pattern

Across Africa’s mineral belts, from the copper mountains of Zambia to the lithium fields of Zimbabwe, the manganese corridors of Ghana, the graphite deposits of Mozambique, and the platinum stretches of South Africa, you hear a version of the same story.

Every boom begins with hope, and every bust ends with disappointment.

I have sat with miners who earn a daily wage that barely covers food.
I have met families displaced by mining concessions whose compensation came too late and too small.
I have heard community leaders ask the same weary question:
“Where is the development?”

Africa has lived this cycle before, with oil, gold, diamond, coal and coltan. The names of the minerals change; the outcomes often do not.

Now, as the world demands “critical minerals” to power renewable energy and electric mobility, Africa risks entering a new era with old rules: export raw materials, import finished products, and remain locked in the bottom of global value chains.

And yet, this moment is different. Not because the world has changed, but because Africa finally can.

The truth beneath the ground

Africa holds vast critical minerals wealth:

• Nearly half of the world’s cobalt
• A third of global manganese
• Over 80% of platinum group metals
• Some of the world’s most promising lithium deposits
• Significant nickel, graphite, and rare earth potential

Yet in too many mining towns, poverty remains the local currency.

Why? Because minerals do not make nations wealthy, industries do.
Mines provide jobs. Factories create futures.

For generations, Africa has exported rocks so others can export products.
The mineral leaves, the value is added elsewhere, while the community remains unchanged.

When I walk these towns, I am reminded of a simple truth: Extraction is not development.

The human cost behind the transition minerals

There is a painful irony in the global conversation about Africa’s minerals.

The world frames these resources as the key to a “clean” future: cleaner cars, cleaner grids, cleaner air. But for many African mining communities, the present is anything but clean.

I’ve seen polluted rivers where children used to swim; farmland stripped bare by tailings dust; young men risking their lives in unsafe artisanal pits. I’ve seen women walking miles to fetch water because mining operations contaminated their local wells.

The minerals that promise a greener world sometimes leave behind a greyer one.

And communities notice this contradiction.
They ask: “If our minerals are helping save the planet, who is helping save us?”

It is a question no policy document can ignore.

When the world leaves without saying goodbye

In Zambia, I once met a miner who told me something I have never forgotten:
“When the price is high, they come. When the price falls, they disappear.”

He was not talking about geologists or traders. He was talking about the artisanal miners who employ them and make promises of a better life.

Mining towns know volatility better than economists. They feel it in their stomachs, not spreadsheets.

During commodity booms, towns swell with activity, money, and speculation.
During busts, shops close, schools struggle, clinics lose funding, and whole communities collapse back into survival mode.Critical minerals may be new, but the cycle is not.
Unless Africa breaks the pattern, this boom will end the same way, with towns full of abandoned pits and abandoned hopes.

This time must be different

For the first time, Africa sits at the centre of a new industrial revolution, not because the world wants our labour, but because the world needs our minerals.

But leverage is not power until it is used with intention.

Africa must refuse to be a pit stop in someone else’s green transition. We must negotiate differently, demand differently and even build differently. 

Critical minerals must not only be mined in Africa, but they must be processed, refined, manufactured and transformed in Africa.

Not just cobalt ore — cobalt sulphate.
Not just lithium rock — lithium chemicals.
Not just copper concentrate — copper wire, plates and components.
Not just manganese — battery precursor materials.

A mining town should not be a place where trucks take value away; instead, it should be where value is created. 

Factories must rise where pits now lie.
Schools must be rebuilt with mining revenues.
Training centres must prepare young people for engineering jobs, not only manual labour.
Communities must be shareholders, not spectators.

Africa cannot make the mistake of the oil era, extracting wealth without transforming it into development.

A new vision for mining towns

Imagine a mining town where:

• The local school teaches battery chemistry
• Young people are trained as technicians, not just load carriers
• A processing plant employs thousands and powers small businesses
• Community funds build clinics, solar farms and water systems
• Women lead cooperatives and supply chains
• Royalties are transparent
• Environmental standards are enforced, not negotiated away
• Children grow up with visions bigger than the mine gate

This is not romanticism.
It is a model already emerging in parts of Morocco, South Africa and Namibia.

And with political courage, it can become the norm across the continent.

A final reflection: dust and the future

Every time I leave a mining town, I leave with a question that sits heavily in my chest:

Why does so much wealth leave without leaving anything behind?

But I also carry something else, a conviction that Africa stands at a crossroads unlike any in a century.

We can build an economy where minerals shape industries, not inequalities.
Where mining towns become manufacturing towns.
Where dust is replaced with dignity.

The world wants Africa’s minerals. But we must want more as a continent. We must want value, transformation and justice.

Because no matter how many trucks roll out of these towns…
The real measure of success is what stays behind.

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