Carlos Martinez

What breaking out of underdevelopment actually looks like

Earlier this year, Zimbabwe did something that developing countries are usually punished for: it banned the export of raw minerals and lithium concentrates outright, and told the mining companies operating there that if they wanted Zimbabwean lithium they would have to process it in Zimbabwe.

The economics driving that decision aren’t difficult to understand. Raw lithium concentrate fetches somewhere around $570 a ton. Battery-grade lithium carbonate sells for roughly $7,000, meaning that the refined product is worth 12 times the value of the unrefined rock.

Africa holds an enormous share of the minerals on which the global energy transition depends, but in the prevailing imperialist system it has been assigned the role of digging them up and shipping them out, while the value is captured elsewhere. This is a colonial division of labour, still running, with lithium substituted for copper and rubber. Zimbabwe refuses to play along.

Historically, “resource nationalism” in the Global South has been punished with coups, sanctions and structural adjustment. Iran nationalised its oil and Mossadegh was overthrown. Chile nationalised copper and Allende was overthrown. Indeed Zimbabwe, let’s not forget, has been under Western sanctions for decades on account of its unwillingness to play along with the global extractive order.

How are China’s companies responding to the new policy? By investing in Zimbabwe, building refineries and processing plants, and complying with the government’s requirement that they add value locally.

Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, through its subsidiary Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, has constructed the country’s first lithium sulphate plant at Goromonzi in Mashonaland East. In April it shipped Zimbabwe’s first-ever export of domestically produced lithium sulphate. Sinomine’s Bikita Minerals is building a second plant in Masvingo. Once both are running, as President Mnangagwa noted this week, Zimbabwe will be the only country in Africa hosting multiple lithium-processing operations.

Instead of Zimbabwean rock being shipped to a refinery in China, the refinery is being built in Zimbabwe – with the jobs, the skills, the tax base and the higher-value export revenue staying in the country. Huayou paid $422 million for the Arcadia project in 2021; it is now investing further to comply with a policy that reduces its own margins in favour of its host.

By contrast, the US Minerals Security Partnership exists to secure supply chains for US industry, not to build African ones. Washington’s recent minerals dealmaking in the DRC is about access, not beneficiation. Nobody in Brussels or Washington is financing lithium refineries in Masvingo.

The West is trying to keep Africa at the bottom of the value chain. China is helping it move up.