2023-10-05 11:24:04
In Brussels, the capital of Europe, the race for critical materials essential to the energy transition, microprocessors and mobility is mobilizing the entire Union administration at the highest level.
Trivially, the European Union, the United States and China, which control 60% of the world’s industry and a little less than 55% of world GDP, must urgently have sufficient critical raw materials such as nickel, lithium, cobalt, titanium or rare earths such as zircon to no longer depend on China for their supply. The United States is forced to ally with Japan and Australia. Australia is an Eldorado of critical minerals with rare knowledge for their transformation.
Paradoxically, it is Africa, the poorest continent with its 30 million km2, that all critical and strategic mining resources are concentrated. An incredible potential of the African subsoil which is full of more soil and subsoil riches than any other continent. Africa alone has more than 60 different types of ores, totaling a third of the world’s mineral reserves, all ores combined, including the list of 30 materials that are both critical and strategic codified in the Critical Raw Materials Act of the European Union.
With this frantic race to guarantee the supply chains of global industry, a new mining geopolitics is taking shape against a backdrop of political and economic tensions and shocks in a multipolar and multilateral world. If we believe that France, a declining power, will leave Africa with all this mining potential, we are wrong. Hydrocarbons, the new monograph of critical and strategic minerals and the demographic dividend sharpen all desires. It is an immense market that no power can do without.
In this context, our country Senegal is unable to adapt its mining policy in view of the new challenges brought about by the demand for critical and strategic minerals for the value chains of the continent first and then the globalized economy.
Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger have immense potential for strategic and critical materials but our countries continue to depend on gold and other mines whose exploitation destroys our environment and the ecosystem, impoverishes our populations and accentuates invasion and tax avoidance. After China, Russia and Canada, Africa produces the most yellow metal. It is also the continent that is home to 60% of global poverty with more than 40% of the billion Africans living on less than 2 US dollars per day. We can even talk about the curse of the yellow metal.
The Prime Minister of Senegal, in a caustic but determined tone, is right to hold mining companies accountable; however, he must dare to completely and completely overhaul our mining policy by putting it in better hands. This is the visible failure of CSR and EITI in our gold regions; and be careful, the jihadists in the Sahel are targeting gold mines.
A new mining policy is first and foremost a security and then an economic and industrial issue in our sub-region. Let us therefore dare to adopt new critical and strategic materials.
Moustapha DIAKHATE
Former CS Prime Minister
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#geology #critical #strategic