The global race for critical minerals is on. Where is South Africa?
The area around Hotazel in the Northern Cape contains much of the world's known deposits of manganese.
Geopolitical tensions over critical minerals have become the focus of the global energy transition. The worldwide shift toward decarbonisation has transformed industrial strategy while reshaping worldwide power dynamics through control of strategic resources.
The United States, together with the European Union and China, are racing to secure supply chains that power clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.
The US's Inflation Reduction Act supports domestic manufacturing through incentives that transform worldwide trade patterns. The EU implements the Critical Raw Materials Act because of similar emergency conditions while building alliances with African nations to diversify mineral supplies and reduce strategic dependencies. China moved first and strategically built up its mineral treatment and component assembly capabilities while leaving other nations to pursue substitute development and protection against excessive dependency.
Other nations have taken strategic positions to secure critical mineral supply chain security along with these major powers. Canada and Greenland maintain active development of their critical mineral resources and Ukraine holds strategic lithium deposits, which will serve to reduce dependency on Chinese supply networks.
The world witnesses a broader shift where countries establish mineral accessibility according to their geopolitical and security goals.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a leading global supplier of cobalt for high-density batteries and coltan for capacitors for high-tech systems, entered negotiations for a strategic agreement with the US in March 2025 that seeks to grant the US exclusive rights to extract the country's critical minerals. This proposed partnership reflects a broader trend of resource-rich African nations leveraging their mineral resources to create powerful international partnerships which secure long-term industrial and geopolitical benefits.
South Africa possesses platinum group metals together with manganese and vanadium, which makes it a prime candidate to lead the worldwide energy transition through renewable energy and electric vehicle batteries. The government allocated R1 billion in March 2025 to bring in R30 billion private investments which will establish electric vehicle manufacturing by 2035.
During its G20 presidency South Africa is concentrating on developing local processing facilities for critical minerals to enable resource-rich nations to gain monetary benefits from their natural resources. To achieve its potential, South Africa needs to resolve fragmented institutional mandates along with infrastructural impediments and inconsistent regulatory frameworks.
The EU dedicated R490 million to support South Africa's green hydrogen industry in 2024. The question remains whether foreign investments will establish industrial autonomy in South Africa or pander to external supply chain requirements. True strategic autonomy requires more than hosting production facilities; it demands control of technology at the local level combined with manufacturing value addition capabilities and stronger export negotiation power.
To reduce overdependence and increase strategic influence means South Africa needs to expand global alliances outside the conventional Western and Eastern blocs. South Africa can create value chains that are more robust and focused on Africa by interacting with rising countries, regional allies, and international forums. Geopolitical hedging will enable South Africa to protect against external shocks while ensuring mineral benefits produce enduring industrial and economic value by increasing its strategic options.
According to the 2025 US Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries report, the US has identified 50 minerals which serve both economic operations and clean energy transformation. South Africa ranks as a leading global producer of at least 15 of the critical minerals, which include rare earth elements along with platinum group metals, vanadium, manganese, and chromium.
These critical minerals needed for clean energy and advanced industrial use face major supply issues. The USGS does not mention South Africa in its report yet its mineral reserves make it an essential player in the shifting global mineral landscape. South Africa needs to ensure its mineral engagements support a geopolitical hedging strategy that protects national sovereignty while creating regional processing facilities, developing domestic manufacturing, and enhancing Africa's position in clean energy value chains.
A strategic and coordinated approach needs to be implemented by South Africa to achieve this potential. First, a sovereign beneficiation fund would serve as an effective risk management tool to protect investments made by private parties in mineral processing and component manufacturing operations. A public capital-based fund would help bring in private and development finance to effectively link resource extraction to industrial production. The fund would need to select projects which increase domestic value creation while allowing technology exchange and establishing local production facilities.
High-value component localisation would need to be incentivised as a necessary second step. The following incentives are potential options to localise high-value components: export refunds for value-added commodities, preferred procurement of local components, and tax incentives for regional processing facility investments. Long-term research together with talent development and local supplier integration should receive support from these incentives to drive industrial growth.
Third, improving interdepartmental interaction is essential. The government's economic cluster oversees economic matters but the critical minerals sector needs departments to work together to execute policy — mineral and petroleum resources to work together with trade, industry and competition; electricity and energy; science and technology; and the treasury. The establishment of an inter-ministerial council dedicated to critical minerals will enable South Africa to join global value chains through unified strategy development, process optimisation, and policy unification.
The African Continental Free Trade Area offers regional cooperation opportunities to build processing centres and merge infrastructure while strengthening Africa's united bargaining power. Using complimentary abilities may promote cooperation rather than competition in Southern Africa.
In April 2025, China enforced strict export controls on seven rare earth elements together with related magnets. These materials serve as fundamental components for creating advanced defence technologies along with wind turbines and electric vehicles. The trade measure has intensified worldwide market conflicts while revealing potential breakdowns in supply chains to industries around the world.
The recent developments demonstrate why South Africa needs to develop local value chains and increase processing capabilities and reduce its exposure to external threats.
The approval of South Africa's Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy and the gazetting of the Mineral Resources Development Bill of 2025 represent a major policy transformation that unlocks industrial capabilities. The minister of mineral and petroleum resources announced on 20 May that the strategy defined platinum along with manganese, iron ore, coal and chrome ore as high-critical minerals followed by vanadium, palladium, rhodium, gold and rare earth elements as moderate to high criticality.
The strategy includes six strategic pillars which aim to establish resilient value chains and industrial ecosystems that link to clean energy technologies through exploration, local beneficiation, research and development investment, infrastructure development, financial support mechanisms and regulatory harmonisation. The strategy supports South African objectives to move past mining operations through the development of local talent and regional alliances for creating industrial inputs of high value. It provides an essential framework that enables mineral resource utilisation to achieve enduring economic stability and national strategic autonomy.
The competition for critical minerals in the global market extends beyond resources to determine how economic relationships will be governed in the future. South Africa controls the necessary mineral resources while having defined appropriate policy directions. The main obstacle is to convert this potential into strategic influence and enduring economic resilience through purposeful coordinated actions.
LebohangMafokosi is a public servant while pursuing her Master of Management in Energy Leadership degree at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mail & Guardian
34 minutes ago
- Mail & Guardian
South African firms suspect UAE companies may have obtained military intellectual property
(Wikimedia Commons) Defence company The investigation focuses on employees of at least two defence firms who are suspected of passing military intellectual property (IP) to UAE state-owned companies. 'Paramount Group is cooperating fully with the The OCCRP obtained two briefings from the SIU, which focus mainly on allegations that employees of a second company, One of the documents obtained by the OCCRP was a 2023 presentation to parliament's standing committee on public accounts (Scopa), while the other was a PowerPoint briefing of the SIU's findings in 2025. The SIU declined to answer detailed questions about its investigation, saying that it 'reports only to the president and parliament'. 'Therefore, we cannot make public statements or give comments on ongoing investigations,' a spokesperson added in an email. 'However, it is important to note that evidence indicating criminal conduct has been referred to the National Prosecuting Authority.' Paramount has also launched its own internal investigation to determine whether employees provided intellectual property to a UAE company after a joint venture deal that eventually collapsed. 'Pattern of misconduct' Founded in South Africa in the early 1990s, Paramount is now headquartered in the UAE. The company filed for bankruptcy last year after losing an arbitration case in London against Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments Company (Adasi). Paramount's problems began in 2016 when one of its subsidiaries, Riverston Enterprises Limited, entered into a joint venture deal with Adasi. The joint venture fell apart after Adasi was taken over by another UAE state-owned firm called Edge Group, according to internal records and court documents obtained by the OCCRP. As part of the agreement to set up the joint venture, Adasi had provided Paramount with a loan of $150 million, an internal document from Edge shows. That money was meant to cover the costs of creating the joint venture company in the UAE, and transferring the intellectual property behind Paramount's reconnaissance plane, which the new company would transform into an armed strike aircraft called the MWARI. Both Adasi and Paramount agree that the intellectual property was never transferred to the UAE as planned. Now Paramount says it is no longer legally obligated to transfer the intellectual property, but Adasi says it has the rights to the information under the arbitration ruling. Neither the Edge Group, which owns Adasi, nor its public relations representatives responded to requests for comment. But a legal document filed by Adasi in Paramount's bankruptcy case provides insight into its position. In the legal filing, Adasi argued that Paramount's bankruptcy case was a stall tactic meant to give the company time to move its assets so they could not be transferred. Those included the 'potentially valuable intellectual property assets', which had been 'granted to Adasi'. The filing states that Paramount said it declared bankruptcy because it could not afford to pay the penalty ordered by the arbitration board. That penalty totalled $230 million, and included the $150 million that was to cover the transfer of intellectual property for its aircraft to the UAE. Paramount's South African lawyer, Lauth, told the OCCRP that the intellectual property of the MWARI aircraft 'remains wholly governed by South African law and has not been externalised to the UAE, Adasi, EDGE or any related entity'. Intellectual property used exclusively for military purposes is often not patented, because doing so would make the designs accessible to competitors and hostile actors. Instead, such property is considered a 'sovereign asset' overseen by the government, according to experts including Vanessa du Toit who previously ran the National Conventional Arms Control Committee, which oversees South Africa's military technology and arms exports. Lauth said the research and design behind the MWARI was 'not the only intellectual property that was allegedly targeted'. 'Our clients have identified a broader pattern of misconduct involving multiple Paramount-developed platforms,' she told the OCCRP. In a leaked document from the arbitration case, Paramount founder Ivor Ichikowitz said the deal was based on Adasi ordering 5 000 armoured vehicles, and 6 000 'loitering munitions', which are drones built to explode on impact. In the end, only four trucks and 500 drones were ordered by the company. 'In hindsight, it now appears that the presentations and solutions we presented may have been used by … staff to benchmark other defence projects underway at the time in other organisations in the UAE,' Ichikowitz said, according to a leaked affidavit from the arbitration case. Ichikowitz declined to provide comment to reporters. Martie Baumgardt, a senior executive, told the OCCRP the firm is also carrying out its own internal investigation. She said the company is looking into the 'possible theft of IP from Paramount by individuals who left the company, which may conceivably have ended up in the UAE'. According to Baumgardt, after the joint venture with the UAE partner broke down, 45 Paramount employees joined Edge Group companies. A leaked document from Paramount's internal investigation also alleges that 57 laptops and 10 hard drives were stolen from 2016 — the year Paramount's subsidiary entered the joint venture with Adasi — to 2024, when it lost the arbitration case. The Denel affair Meanwhile, the Denel case dates back to 2012, when South Africa's state-owned arms manufacturer entered into a joint venture with a UAE firm, then known as Tawazun Operation Company LLC. Under the agreement, the two firms established a new company based in the UAE called Tawazun Dynamics LLC. According to the 2023 briefing to Scopa, the joint venture was initially intended to manufacture and supply Denel missiles to the UAE Air Force, and 'future customers'. At first, the partnership appeared to be a success. Other deals were soon struck, in which Denel would also provide a UAE defence company called NIMR Automotive LLC with RG35 Military Vehicle IP and hardware. But the relationship began to sour. 'It is alleged that the IP belonging to the institution was misappropriated in cohesive criminal conduct to abet foreign state companies,' the SIU said in its 2023 briefing, referring to allegations brought by Denel. In its investigation, the SIU found evidence suggesting that Denel employees may have accessed intellectual property without permission. In one instance, SIU investigators found that 'data packs' relating to missile technology had been downloaded from Denel's system after a request from Halcon, another arms company owned by Edge Group, according to the 2023 briefing. That briefing also outlines a case reported by Denel to the SIU, which involved intellectual property for a military vehicle. The SIU noted that contracts had been signed with NIMR by a Denel employee who was not authorised to do so. 'This official later resigned and informed Denel that he was offered a senior position by NIMR,' the briefing says. Denel reported that it had later received a letter from the chief executive of NIMR, who had previously worked for Denel, demanding intellectual property for a military vehicle. The joint venture company Tawazun Dynamics is today called Al Tariq and — like NIMR — it is owned by Edge Group, which did not respond to questions about alleged attempts to transfer intellectual property from Denel. The NIMR chief executive was one of more than 300 Denel staff who left the company and went to work in the UAE's arms sector, according to a summary of a South African parliamentary discussion in February. Gloria Serobe, chair of the Denel board, told the parliamentary committee that so many Denel employees had left for UAE firms that 'board meetings were done in Afrikaans'. This story was first published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Mail & Guardian
34 minutes ago
- Mail & Guardian
Universities, revive Joburg's hippest 'hood
(Graphic: John McCann/M&G) Melville, once declared one of the world's hippest neighbourhoods, is in serious decline. The suburb is an important asset to our academic life and must be restored. I often host students and faculty from universities in Europe and the US. For a long time, Melville was the automatic place for academic visitors, professors and students to visit and stay while passing through Johannesburg. Located next to the University of the Witwatersrand, one of our two great universities, as well as the up-and-coming University of Johannesburg (UJ), Melville has long provided a convivial environment for academics and post-graduate visitors. In 2020, just five years ago, Time Out magazine ranked Melville as one of the 40 coolest neighbourhoods in the world. Academic travel matters, and academics want to enjoy their experience of travel. For decades Melville, buzzing with coffee shops, restaurants, live music venues, galleries and a very good second-hand bookshop provided exactly what academics and post-graduate students needed to enjoy their time in Johannesburg. The turn to Zoom during Covid has reduced academic travel quite a bit, but spending two days on Zoom rather than travelling for a conference is a painful and vastly less rewarding experience. Melville was hit hard by the Covid lockdown though, and has been hit just as hard by the general collapse in the functioning of the Johannesburg municipality. Many of the restaurants on the once world-famous 7th Street shut down during the lockdown and many of the buildings on the strip remain empty. If there had been some vision to support the strip, understanding it as a wider asset to the city, and the country, this could have been avoided. Driving into Melville recently with a group of students and academics was a depressing experience. Coming up Main Road, which divides Melville and Westdene, is bleak. There are three large holes, which are so big they cannot be described as potholes, on Main Road that have been left unattended for months — aside from placing a plastic barrier in front of them. Some of the shopkeepers dump their refuse on the pavement next to the pedestrian litter bins rather than keeping it for the weekly refuse collection. The homeless people on Main Road, many struggling with addiction, live in squalor and the lack of public toilets has inevitable consequences. Uber and delivery drivers face the same lack of access to toilets with the same unfortunate results. Turning into Melville itself is no less disheartening. Streets no longer have working lights, there are a couple of abandoned and looted or vandalised houses, and some of the electricity poles have a mess of dangling wires, some live. Around the suburb piles of rubble have been left on the pavements after work done by Egoli Gas and various arms of the municipality. It seems that it is no longer expected that rubble will be removed after maintenance work alongside the streets. The 7th Street strip, with its many empty buildings, has large ditches filled with sand at each end. They have also been there for months. On the corner of 3rd Avenue and 7th Street, part of the road has been left in a dug-up state and with a pile of rubble sitting on the road. It too has been like this for months. Private property owners are beginning to do the same. On the corner of 2nd Avenue and 7th Street a homeowner has left two large piles of building rubble on the pavement for months. A slow water leak has been trickling down 7th Street for months. There are no drain covers on the strip. This is unsightly and a hazard for pedestrians. The road markings have long faded away. Anyone on the strip who looks like they may have some money is immediately accosted by desperate people trying to get a few rand. Water outages are common in the area, sometimes going on for as long as two weeks. There are also occasional electricity outages that can go on for days. This makes things very difficult for the owners of the B&Bs that remain in the neighbourhood, as well as the surviving restaurants and other businesses. Driving out of Melville on 9th Street towards Parkview, a suburb that remains in good nick, there are more piles of rubble on the pavements and more deep holes in the road. As on Main Road, both the rubble and the holes have been left for months. It is not immediately clear why nearby suburbs such as Parkview, Greenside and Parkhurst are in a good condition while Melville is in decay. An academic neighbourhood requires a good bookshop and, thankfully, the good second-hand bookshop on the Melville strip endures, but it's no longer open in the evenings. There are some signs of new life after the devastation of the lockdown though. De Baba, a new bakery and coffee shop at the bottom of the strip is always buzzing. On the other side of the road there's a new and very hip coffee shop, Sourcery. It would fit right into Brooklyn, New York, and is perfect for an arty and academic neighbourhood like Melville. A vinyl-obsessed friend tells me that the music selection is extraordinary. Unfortunately, Sourcery seems empty most of the time. The same is true of Arturo, an excellent and equally hip African Latin-American fusion restaurant further on up the strip. Some of the problems faced by Melville are a result of South Africa's wider social crisis. For as long as we face catastrophic levels of unemployment people will be forced to live on the streets. The heroin epidemic is also a national problem. Although the municipality can take some steps to ameliorate some of the consequences of these problems it cannot fix them. But much of the sad state of Melville is a result of the failures of the municipality. Some of these failures could be resolved in a single day. Light bulbs could be installed on the street lights, the large holes on Main Street, 7th Street and 9th Street could be fixed, the rubble left along the pavements could be removed, the water leak on 7th Street could be attended to and the road markings redone. The private businesses dumping their waste alongside the pedestrian bins on Main Road could be fined, as could the private homeowner who has left piles of building rubble on the corner of 2nd Avenue. Other issues that fall within the remit of the municipality, such as the failure to provide public toilets on Main Road, cannot be resolved in a day, but with some vision and energy they could be resolved in a few months. Getting the water and electricity systems functional is a much bigger project but is also something that can be achieved with the right commitment. The abandoned properties, with at least one house stripped to nothing but its walls, should be expropriated and sold, with the money invested into regeneration projects. There should also be active support, including subsidies, for art galleries and live music venues. All the world's great cities actively support cultural life and the same should be done in Johannesburg. Again, this is something that would, even with the right vision and commitment, take at least a few months to kick into gear. When Melville was the vibrant and world-regarded home to Johannesburg's arty and academic scene it was a major asset to the city. It was an asset to the city's residents, and to visitors to the city, including its wider tourism economy. Melville was also an important asset to the city's two universities, making visits by academics and post-graduate students from elsewhere in the country and abroad an enriching and fun experience. There is scant hope that the municipality will, on its own, take the initiative to act to restore Melville to what it once was and can easily be again. Universities are powerful institutions in society; Wits University and UJ should lobby the municipality to act to restore Melville as one of the world's great academic neighbourhoods. A well maintained and vibrant Melville would be a boon for the city. With the right commitment it would only take a single day to begin to turn things around. Dr Imraan Buccus is a research fellow at the University of the Free State and the Auwal Socioeconomic Research Institute, ASRI.
Mail & Guardian
5 hours ago
- Mail & Guardian
Conventional and complementary healthcare professionals need to work together
Earlier this year, the US government took the drastic decision to terminate about 40 USAid-funded health projects in South Africa, a move that threatens the sustainability of these projects. The halting of funding has led to the closure of many clinics and a decrease in services rendered, such as HIV testing and treatment. To mitigate the problem, the health department, together with the South African National Aids Council, the Joint UN programme on HIV/Aids and World Health Organisation, has launched the Close the Gap campaign, which aims But this intervention leaves a gap of more than 2 million people who are lost to treatment for different reasons. According to the health department, nearly 8 million people are living with HIV in South Africa, with 5.7 million people stable on antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Among the reasons for the lost numbers could be the use of complementary medicine, instead of the conventional medicine offered in the mainstream healthcare system. Despite South Africa having diverse communities with multifaceted healthcare needs, who seek assistance from both conventional and complementary medicine practitioners, research shows that access to complementary medicine remains largely unsupported. According to the WHO, 80% of the world's population uses it. Complementary medicine includes treatments such as homeopathy, Unani-Tibb, ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, aromatherapy and Western herbal medicine. South African studies have highlighted the high use of complementary medicine, especially Western and traditional herbal medicine, among people living with HIV. Additionally, these studies have shown that people living with HIV use complementary and ARVs concurrently without the knowledge of their healthcare providers. This is a huge risk as it can compromise the safety and effectiveness of ARVs and cause herb-drug interactions. This is exacerbated by the lack of inter-professional communication between conventional and complementary healthcare practitioners. Professional inter-referral is a practice of healthcare practitioners referring patients to other practitioners to ensure complete, safe and high-quality patient-centred care. This practice is a requisite to improve patient outcomes and enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Despite the increasing evidence and popularity of complementary medicine use in South Africa, there is no formal inter-referral system between conventional and complementary healthcare professionals. Studies show that conventional healthcare practitioners do not refer patients to complementary practitioners, even though they receive referrals from them. For instance, complementary medicine practitioners refer patients to hospitals for laboratory blood tests and X-rays, as well as to various specialists. This finding is concerning and needs to be highlighted to improve the management of multidisciplinary care and continuity of patient care. Furthermore, evidence shows that the lack of an inter-referral system between conventional and complementary practitioners can lead to the fragmentation and compromise of the delivery of quality healthcare. This suggests that inter-referral relationship is a significant practice needed for comprehensive patient care, especially in South Africa, where diverse people use different modalities for healthcare. It demands that healthcare practitioners realise that their area of expertise is important — but not sufficient alone. This is not easy for some to accept and warrants highlighting. Inter-referral relationships require practitioners to step outside their professional pride to appreciate others. A 2025 South African study showed that conventional healthcare practitioners were willing to suggest that patients seek advice from complementary practitioners, yet they were unable to make a formal referral themselves. One can assume that conventional practitioners might have a perception that practising complementary medicine is not a legitimate profession. Their insufficient knowledge of complementary medicine could also be a reason for not referring patients. In South Africa, complementary medicine is regulated by the Allied Health Professions Council of South Africa. The licensing and registration requirements are regulated by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. These bodies prioritise the quality and efficacy of medicines and patient safety. Complementary healthcare practitioners are clinically trained as diagnosticians in higher institutions across South Africa. For instance, the Department of Complementary Medicine at the University of Johannesburg offers a postgraduate diploma in phytotherapy (medicinal plant-based therapy) to medical doctors to increase their scope of practice, enhance the cross-disciplinary approach and help them provide a holistic treatment for patients. The dominance of evidence-based medicine is identified as the main barrier to the inter-referral system. There is increasing documented scientific and clinical evidence on complementary medicines and safety data on the toxicology and possible herb-drug interactions. This evidence is sufficient to convince conventional healthcare practitioners to refer patients to complementary practitioners. A formalised referral system is significant to strengthening the healthcare system, especially within the integrated National Health Insurance that is to be implemented in South Africa. The lack of a formalised inter-referral system has implications for patient safety in the delivery of healthcare. The delivery of healthcare in South Africa needs to be considered alongside the broader cultural and social contexts, which necessitate a collaborative approach. South African healthcare must offer a holistic patient-centered approach that considers patients' preferences and includes them in the treatment plan. This will ensure that patients receive appropriate service according to their needs. Dr Tebogo Tsele-Tebakang is head of the Department of Complementary Medicine, in the Faculty of Health Sciences, at the University of Johannesburg. She writes in her personal capacity.
