Coercion and Copper: Africa’s Wider Choice in Security Realignment, Critical Minerals and the Limits of Autonomy

On 4 July 2026, armed groups attacked five locations across Mali. The strikes came after Bamako had expelled French forces, ended a United Nations mission and deepened its military relationship with Russia. Three months earlier, financiers working on the Lobito Corridor were seeking $3 billion to $5 billion for new railway sections linking Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola’s Atlantic coast.

One scene concerned war; the other concerned copper, transport and capital. Together they reveal the same shift. African governments face a wider field of external actors. China, the United States, the European Union, Russia, Turkey and Gulf states offer different mixes of arms, training, infrastructure, finance, technology and market access.

This is not a continental turn from one bloc to another. It is a sector-by-sector pluralisation of external relations. Mali may rely on Russia for combat support, while Angola hosts a Western-backed corridor and seeks Chinese credit for an oil refinery. The DRC can sign a minerals agreement with the United States, then deepen mining cooperation with China. Such choices display agency; they do not prove autonomy.

The test is conversion. External attention may create options; options may create leverage; leverage may improve a contract or diplomatic position. Autonomy appears only if those gains become safer communities, reliable infrastructure, fiscal receipts, local processing, skilled employment and policy freedom. Geopolitical significance is rising faster than the capacity needed to complete that conversion.

The Sahel’s security exchange

The Central Sahel offers the clearest test of partner substitution. Mali experienced coups in August 2020 and May 2021, Burkina Faso in January and September 2022, and Niger in July 2023. Each military leadership drew legitimacy from a real grievance: elected governments and a large Western-backed counter-insurgency system had failed to stop jihadist expansion. The armed forces promised that sovereign control over partnerships would produce better security.

The old structure has since been dismantled. France completed its withdrawal from Mali in August 2022, ended its military deployment in Burkina Faso in February 2023 and removed its final 1,500 troops from Niger in December that year. Burkina Faso went further in June 2026 by severing diplomatic relations with France. The United States withdrew nearly 1,000 personnel from Niger by September 2024, leaving Air Base 201 at Agadez, which had cost more than $100 million. The UN closed its Mali mission at Bamako’s request in December 2023, withdrawing nearly 13,000 peacekeepers and police.

Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger also built a regional vehicle. The September 2023 Liptako-Gourma Charter created the Alliance of Sahel States, or AES, around mutual defence. They established a confederation in July 2024 and formally left the Economic Community of West African States in January 2025. A unified force, announced as 5,000 troops and later described as 6,000, was launched in December 2025 with headquarters in Niamey. Its finance, readiness and command practice remain thinly documented.

Russia filled part of the space. Wagner personnel deployed to Mali in late 2021 for training and combat support. When Wagner announced its departure in June 2025, Russia’s Africa Corps stayed. This was an organisational transfer, not a Russian exit: a force controlled more directly by the defence ministry replaced a private military network that had offered Moscow greater deniability. Personnel and practices continued, while Russian state responsibility became clearer. Deployments in Burkina Faso and Niger have centred more on training and protection than the large combat role seen in Mali.

Partner control has changed; the results are much less persuasive. ACLED recorded more than 10,000 deaths from political violence across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in the first eleven months of 2025. At year’s end, UNHCR counted 4.1 million forcibly displaced people from the three countries, including 2.9 million displaced internally. In 2026, JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province continued to attack posts, roads, towns and economic routes, with violence spreading into Benin and Togo.

Civilian protection has become an acute test of the new order. ACLED data reported by Reuters attributed 918 civilian deaths in Mali during 2025 to the armed forces and their Wagner or Africa Corps partners, compared with 232 attributed to JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province. In Burkina Faso, the corresponding figures were 523 and 339. Event data are estimates, attribution can be disputed and these counts do not capture every death. They still puncture the claim that national ownership of a counter-insurgency automatically makes it more protective.

The AES is an African institutional initiative. Joint planning and cross-border authority answer a threat that no member can contain alone. Yet departure from ECOWAS has divided the regional system as armed groups move into coastal states. ECOWAS kept trade, travel and passport arrangements in place, preserving a basis for practical cooperation. Intelligence and border coordination now matter more than the contest over political legitimacy.

Security autonomy has also become entangled with military rule. Mali dissolved political parties in May 2025 and granted Assimi Goïta a renewable five-year presidential term without an election. Burkina Faso extended its transition by five years from July 2024 and dissolved political parties in January 2026. Niger began a flexible five-year transition in March 2025 and dissolved political parties as well. Russian support did not cause these choices. It gives military governments another source of assistance and diplomatic cover as they resist domestic and regional pressure for elected rule. That makes the distinction between national security and regime security impossible to ignore.

The July 2024 battle around Tinzaouaten showed another risk: external partnerships can connect local wars to conflicts far beyond Africa. Tuareg-led fighters inflicted heavy losses on Malian and Wagner forces. A Ukrainian military-intelligence spokesman suggested that the rebels had received useful information; Mali accused Kyiv of involvement and severed relations, followed by Niger. Ukraine denied supporting terrorism, and a rebel spokesman denied foreign help. Proof of an operational Ukrainian role remains limited. The diplomatic rupture still pulled a Sahelian battle into the wider Russia-Ukraine confrontation.

Security deals beyond the Sahel

Other regions show that diversification can take several forms. Turkey’s relationship with Somalia combines military training and maritime-security cooperation with energy exploration. A Turkish naval deployment followed a 2024 oil-and-gas agreement, and Ankara launched its first overseas deep-sea exploration mission in Somali waters in April 2026. The agreements sit beside one another, but public evidence does not establish a direct exchange of security for drilling rights.

In northern Mozambique, Rwandan forces helped create enough security for TotalEnergies to resume a gas project valued at about $20 billion. Maputo said it had secured funding to continue the mission in 2026, though the terms were not disclosed. In the Central African Republic, talks over replacing Wagner with Africa Corps exposed a clearer link: Russian officials sought cash payment, while Bangui preferred an arrangement connected to mineral access. A government may gain immediate protection while accepting fiscal or commercial obligations that citizens cannot inspect.

Cobalt, copper and the contest for value

The economic side of the new competition is driven by supply-chain risk. Batteries, electricity grids, defence industries and digital systems require minerals that are concentrated in a small number of countries and processed in an even smaller number. The African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy, launched in 2025, captures the continental ambition: use mineral demand to build processing and manufacturing at source, rather than repeat a history of exporting ore and importing finished goods.

The DRC is the sharpest case. The US Geological Survey estimated that it mined about 230,000 tonnes of cobalt in 2025, roughly 73 per cent of world output. China, by contrast, accounted for about 78 per cent of refined cobalt production in 2024. Geology gives Kinshasa a strong opening position; refining capacity, finance and access to buyers decide how much of that position it can retain.

President Félix Tshisekedi’s government has tried several routes. It banned cobalt exports in February 2025 and replaced the ban with an annual quota of 96,600 tonnes for 2026 and 2027, an attempt to manage supply and raise prices. It also renegotiated the Sicomines copper-and-cobalt arrangement, increasing the infrastructure commitment from $3 billion to as much as $7 billion. The renegotiation followed an audit that found only $822 million of the original infrastructure promise had been spent. Better written terms were a gain; the gap between promise and delivery was the warning.

Kinshasa is also keeping competitors in play. It signed a strategic-minerals framework with the United States in December 2025, tied to investment and security cooperation, then agreed deeper mining ties with China in March 2026, including local processing and geological data. Congolese officials have said they do not want their mineral policy reduced to a contest between Washington and Beijing. That position is credible agency, but it operates under severe constraints. War in the east affects mineral sites and transport routes; opaque joint ventures and failures to repatriate export earnings led the presidency to order a sector audit in April 2026.

The security-economic link is explicit in US-backed diplomacy between the DRC and Rwanda. A June 2025 peace agreement was presented partly as a way to reduce risk in mineral supply chains. Fighting did not disappear. The Rubaya coltan area remained beyond Kinshasa’s control in 2026, limiting any promise that a minerals compact could turn disputed territory into a secure supply source. A diplomatic document can connect peace and investment; it cannot substitute for control and political settlement.

The Lobito Corridor offers a different form of choice. The United States, European partners and development-finance institutions are backing a westward rail and logistics route from the Copperbelt to Angola. By April 2026, the Africa Finance Corporation was seeking $3 billion to $5 billion for 830 kilometres of new rail in Zambia and the DRC, with financial close targeted for late 2027 and completion for 2030. Separate loans of $553 million from the US International Development Finance Corporation and $200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa were finalised in December 2025 for the existing Angolan railway.

For Zambia, the corridor can diversify export routes and investors as the government seeks to raise copper production from 890,346 tonnes in 2025 to three million tonnes by 2031. The size of that gap is the point. Rail finance alone cannot resolve shortages of electricity, mine investment, technical skills and processing capacity. Zambia has gained a bargaining opportunity, not a guaranteed industrial transformation.

Angola makes the multipolar pattern even clearer. While hosting the Western-backed corridor, its state oil company sought a $4.8 billion loan from Chinese lenders in 2026 for a planned $6.2 billion refinery at Lobito. This is neither geopolitical confusion nor proof of full independence. It is selective diversification by a government using separate partners for separate projects. The quality of the result will be judged by debt terms, procurement, completion and the share of value retained locally.

Ghana supplies a smaller but revealing comparison. Parliament ratified the Ewoyaa lithium lease in March 2026 after revising the fiscal design around a price-linked royalty of 5 to 12 per cent. The project contains a reported resource of 36.8 million tonnes grading 1.24 per cent lithium oxide, yet it had not entered production. A steep lithium-price fall had already forced the developer to seek concessions. Ghana had improved its claim on a future revenue stream; market exposure still determined whether that stream would exist.

The Sinohydro arrangement carries the same lesson from infrastructure. Ghana’s 2018 framework offered up to $2 billion in infrastructure linked to future receipts from refined bauxite, with a first phase valued at $646.6 million. The Tamale Interchange became a visible asset, but the planned integrated bauxite-and-aluminium chain did not follow at the expected pace. Possessing bauxite opened a negotiation. It did not remove financing risk, implementation delay or the need for domestic industrial coordination.

More choice, not yet autonomy

Security and geoeconomics intersect most clearly where territory, infrastructure and resource access depend on one another. The DRC’s mineral diplomacy is tied to an eastern war. Mozambique’s gas project depends on a foreign security deployment. Somalia has parallel Turkish defence and energy arrangements. In the Central African Republic, the method of paying for Russian security assistance has itself become a resource question. In other cases, the connection is weaker. Russia’s Sahel strategy seeks military access, diplomatic influence and commercial openings, but public evidence does not support treating every deployment as a minerals-for-security exchange.

This is why the language of a new Cold War can mislead. There are familiar features: arms transfers, competing infrastructure routes, information campaigns and security clients. The present system is more plural and less ideological. Turkey, Gulf states and development-finance institutions matter alongside China, Russia, Europe and the United States. Armed groups in the Sahel are not proxies directed from Moscow, Washington or Kyiv. African governments often maintain simultaneous partnerships across sectors, and their domestic political interests shape every deal.

The language of a new scramble is no better if it makes African states look inert. Governments have expelled forces, created the AES, imposed export controls, renegotiated contracts and courted rival financiers. Those are choices. Yet agency differs in quality. It can serve an industrial strategy or an incumbent’s survival; raise a royalty or collect and invest it; finance a railway or leave a new route carrying unprocessed ore abroad.

The less comfortable finding is that partner diversification may reduce dependence on one external actor while preserving dependence on foreign arms, capital, technology and markets as a whole. In the Sahel, the military governments have secured greater freedom to choose who assists them, but the evidence does not show a corresponding improvement in civilian security. In the mineral economies, better quotas, royalties and corridor options have strengthened some negotiating positions, but production, processing and public revenue still depend on delivery.

Strategic autonomy, then, is not a diplomatic posture or a crowded list of partners. It is the capacity to refuse a poor offer, enforce a better one and sustain national policy after commodity prices, creditors or security sponsors change course. It requires competent public agencies, open contracts, regional cooperation, reliable taxation and investment in domestic skills and processing. Without those capabilities, multipolarity can become dependency rotation, with new flags attached to familiar vulnerabilities.

Africa’s geopolitical importance is growing, but states are not gaining at the same rate. The measure is what remains after the bargain: lower violence, stronger institutions, functioning infrastructure, retained value and wider policy freedom. For now, external competition has produced wider choice more consistently than autonomy. The opportunity is real. The conversion remains unfinished.

By Joshua Kudzo-Norsah
Email:goodynorsah@gmail.com

Selected references

• African Union. (2025, March 18). Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy (AGMS). https://au.int/en/documents/20250318/africas-green-minerals-strategy-agms
• Hackenesch, C., Heidland, T., & Tull, D. M. (Eds.). (2025). Leverage and limits: What African actors make of the new multipolarity (Megatrends Afrika Working Paper No. 21). Megatrends Afrika. https://doi.org/10.18449/2025MTA-WP21
• Nsaibia, H. (2025, December 11). Economic warfare escalates as militants expand beyond the Sahel. Armed Conflict Location & Event Data. https://acleddata.com/report/economic-warfare-escalates-militants-expand-beyond-sahel
• Rakotoseheno, S. (2024, March 25). Sicomines: How the EITI in DRC helped secure 4 billion in additional revenue. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. https://eiti.org/blog-post/sicomines-how-eiti-drc-helped-secure-4-billion-additional-revenue
• Saïdou Daoura, L., & Salia, R. L. (2026, March 4). Will the AES Unified Force succeed where the G5 Sahel failed? Institute for Security Studies. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/will-the-aes-unified-force-succeed-where-the-g5-sahel-failed
• U.S. Geological Survey. (2026). Mineral commodity summaries 2026. https://doi.org/10.3133/mcs2026

   Comments0