Fragmented Leverage: Why African States Call for Collective Bargaining but Prefer Bilateralism in Critical Minerals Negotiations

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An emerging trend in critical minerals governance in Africa is that resource-rich states are increasingly speaking the language of collective bargaining in their engagement with the U.S. and China over critical minerals. However, in the individual agreements, these states prefer to fall back on bilateral negotiations. With a growing number of critical minerals mined in Africa, the natural expectation is that the collective bargaining power of African countries should theoretically increase. The DRC, for example, accounts for about 76% of global cobalt mine production, while Guinea, for example, has about 7.4 billion tonnes of bauxite reserves, circa 26% of global known reserves, more than any other country in the world.

The African Union’s Africa Mining Vision as well as the African Green Minerals Strategy, recently launched, seek to promote collective bargaining at the continental level. However, currently most mineral diplomacy is conducted on a country-by-country basis by countries seeking to extract as much value from the minerals found on their territory, whether in terms of maximum fiscal returns or other gains.

For collective bargaining to be effective, it is in the interest of critical mineral producers on the continent to form an OPEC-like “critical minerals cartel.” This could strengthen their negotiating position vis-à-vis major powers. It also requires states involved to be willing to subordinate their immediate national advantage to a common continental strategy, meaning it requires a high level of trust and discipline presently lacking on the continent. We must however understand that countries on the continent are at different stages of development, and under disparate infrastructure constraints, fiscal pressure, debt burdens and regime incentives — resulting in incoherence in strategy whereby African states are encouraged to demand continent-wide leverage, but they revert to bilateral negotiations because it is politically more rewarding. This explains the February 2026 desperate offer of DRC president Felix Tshisekedi to give the US access to his country’s critical minerals in exchange for security assistance.

Why bilateralism persists

The structural unevenness, political urgency and capital-intensive nature of critical minerals mean bilateralism will persist for a long time to come. Producers in Africa are looking for foreign exchange, project finance, and quick infrastructure, while the major powers sweeten critical minerals negotiations by packaging minerals with industrial promises, railroad and loan commitments. A clear case in point is the recently announced US-backed Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor framed as a new mineral logistics system as well as a regional trade partnership, but in reality it is also a mechanism to counter and decrease America and the EU’s dependence on China and restructure its mineral supply chain instead. The Lobito Corridor means different things to Washington and Brussels on one hand, and the DRC, Zambia and Angola on the other. For these three African states, the corridor brings hope and promise of infrastructure and export diversification; for the US and its western partners, it is also intended to ensure and guarantee future supplies.

Bilateral leverage, like the DRC’s cobalt policy approach for example, is more attractive than that of a continental coordination of producer countries. In 2025, a strategy to stabilize prices and to recapture and regain control of the cobalt market after oversupply and a major global price fall led to Kinshasa deciding to introduce an export ban on cobalt for four months. Such an approach is pure resource nationalism, but a national decision by one country and not a coordinated approach of other producer countries in Africa. As a consequence, the mining royalties of DRC from its cobalt hydroxide rose only slightly even though production of this mineral increased strongly. Instead of developing a durable African cobalt regime, the DRC in the short term unilaterally increased the control over exports of this mineral, which in the long run will only bring about fragmentation.

How China exploits it

As far as China is concerned, bilateralism or fragmentation in the continent’s critical minerals negotiation is good for business. Chinese firms are patient, highly networked, and have the capacity to sweeten mining finance with other businesses, such as infrastructure, trade, and processing, etc., which often appeals to African states. For example, in Zimbabwe, Chinese firms have moved aggressively into lithium through large acquisitions and downstream investment: Huayou’s purchase of the Arcadia lithium mine for US$422 million for example was followed by an additional US$300 million processing investment.

Also, in the DRC, the 2008 Sino Congolaise des Mines (Sicomines) agreement between China and the DRC reportedly tied about US$6 billion in financing to a package split between mining and infrastructure, helping Chinese firms secure major cobalt and copper assets in exchange for roads and other development works. This is significant because even if Beijing controls extraction, without control over processing, it still confers considerable leverage on Beijing. They can buy the ore, also choose the best route for refining it, and anchor the industrial capacity elsewhere.

The exigency of speed and bundled solutions needed by most African states offers China the laxity to exploit bilateralism by offering African states exactly what they urgently need. In the short term, such deals alleviate an immediate development need, but in the long term, such deals may sacrifice future flexibility for short-term cash. The advantage that Beijing has is not just its capital, but also that it can absorb political fragmentation on the African continent and re-pack and re-sell this to individual countries in the form of national deals that would stymie unified bargaining.

Another advantage China holds is that of processing. IEA-based evidence found China to be the dominant refiner for 19 out of the 20 minerals it analyzed, averaging 70% market share. Several reports estimate China produces more than around 90% of processed rare earths and magnets. This means that African exporters often have limited downstream alternatives. So, African states negotiating with Chinese companies on a bilateral basis are offered market, finance and processing chains by China in exchange for guaranteed supply and concessions to mine. Importantly, this makes producing states on the continent highly replaceable individually, even when the continent is indispensable collectively.

How the US exploits it

The US, on the other hand, exploits fragmentation in different ways. While it presents or frames its approach in a positive light as “diversification”, “resilience” or “responsible supply chains,” in reality, this strategy also enables the US to employ bilateralism or even a minilateralism framework to split African producers from China and from each other. For example, the 2026 U.S. Critical Minerals Ministerial signed 11 new bilateral frameworks and MOUs with countries including Guinea, Morocco, Sierra Leone and Zambia amongst others. At the same time, it launched a successor platform to the Minerals Security Partnership, through which the US can engage with critical minerals producing countries. This is not an African-wide bargaining forum but a selective partnership architecture which the US can engage with when and how it chooses with the producers it considers most valuable at any time.

Another strategy of the US is to leverage on infrastructure diplomacy by investing in the Lobito Corridor with Development Finance Corporation (DFC) financing, participation by allied countries, and the commitment of a loan of up to $553 million to upgrade the Lobito Atlantic Railway. The loan will support the rehabilitation and operation of the brownfield mineral port in Lobito and an approximately 1,300-kilometer brownfield rail line in Angola running between the Lobito port and Luau on the Angolan border. These US-led investments are not altruistic. While on paper it looks developmental and cooperative, the strategic intention behind it is different.

It seeks to create a competing logistics corridor that can reorient mineral flows away from Chinese-linked routes and deepen bilateral dependence on Western finance and standards. Although credit must be given to the US because the corridor will undoubtedly bring benefits, however, it demonstrates at the same time how the US turns African fragmentation into a series of separate deals rather than a continent-wide industrial strategy that benefits the continent.

However, the national security framing of the critical mineral issue by the US could be considered its strongest tool by far. This enables Washington to justify geopolitical alignment, preferential purchasing, and large financing. A number of other actors in the global political economy are lining up behind the national security arc that this framing has created. As a result, while individual African states may be able to compare the “offers” made by various actors and hence have increased bargaining power as individual states, collectively, Africa as a whole will not be able to negotiate as a single “bloc” and therefore will not be able to agree on a set of continent-wide standards with respect to local content, processing, taxation and environmental issues.

Implications for Africa

The sad truth is that the geological abundance of natural resources on the continent is not the same as or does not automatically translate into development gains for individual countries. External parties control refineries, the means of transport to markets as well as the markets where the minerals are sold. This means the gains remain limited when states bargain separately and allow outsiders to control market access, refining and transport. The caution given by the AU Green Mineral Strategy (AGMS) resonates here: the goal should not just be high export volumes, but regional industrialization, resource-based industrialization and value addition. Until the continent engages in collective bargaining, these goals will remain only aspirational.

Another important consequence for the continent is that it loses the pricing power on these commodities. A clear case is DRC’s cobalt. With the status as the world’s leading producer of cobalt with a huge share of the market, the DRC has over the years shown a consistent trajectory of not being able to control prices given the syndicated concentration of output in the hands of a few firms and buyers who have the power to shift sourcing to other parts of the world. African producers on the continent compete against each other while the buyers also arbitrate among themselves all because of the fragmented production structure on the continent. This has weakened continental ability to coordinate between producers, impose joint restrictions or set floor prices.

Should African states continue to prefer bilateral negotiations over collective bargaining, there is a high propensity that critical minerals may continue to generate short-term benefits, but not what matters the most in the transformation of the economic fortunes of the continent, such as the establishment of processing plants, creation of skilled jobs, development of supporting industrial ecosystems and services and related industries required for sustainable industrialization. What is likely to emerge instead are more exports, more dependence, and marginally higher fiscal returns.

Bottom line

The issue of whether bilateralism should disappear or remain is not the actual dilemma facing the continent; it remains unavoidable because states are sovereign and needs differ. What is of utmost concern to Africa is the two major powers’ use of bilateralism as a substitute for collective strategy rather than as a tactical component of it. The US and China will keep exploiting fragmentation—China through processing dominance and bundled infrastructure-mineral deals, and the US through selective frameworks and corridor diplomacy unless African states convert their continental frameworks into credible bargaining institutions that will serve continental interest. What is likely to persist in the foreseeable future is that the continent will continue to maintain its position as an extraction center of the minerals the world needs, while capturing only a fraction of the strategic and developmental value they can generate.