When President Ruto stood on the sidelines of the G7 summit and announced Kenya was close to a minerals deal with the United States, the language used was the language of partnership: investment, not aid. In country processing, not extraction. A new chapter, not a repeat of the old one.
The Standard’s reporting on the deal frames it as Washington having “beaten China” to secure a foothold in deposits valued at $62.4 billion, Sh9.7 trillion. That framing tells you exactly what this deal is about, and who it is designed to serve.
We have heard this language before. The script of the 21st century scramble for Africa’s resources rarely calls itself colonial. It calls itself a strategic partnership, a supply chain diversification deal, a security cooperation framework. When two superpowers race to “clinch” access to your land and your minerals, the country whose resources are at stake is not the winner of that race. The underlying logic, that Africa’s land exists to feed the industrial and military ambitions of whoever arrives with the most capital, is the same logic that has shaped this continent’s relationship with foreign powers for over a century. Only now the prize is not rubber or gold alone, but the rare earths, lithium, and cobalt that power the, smartphones and weapons systems of the world that are courting us. And the urgency of a geopolitical competition between Washington and Beijing is being used to create pressure on African governments to move fast, sign quickly, and ask questions later.
The DRC is the clearest example of what resource wealth looks like when the terms are set by someone else.
The Democratic Republic of Congo holds some of the largest reserves of cobalt, coltan, lithium, tin, and gold on Earth, minerals essential to the same green and digital technologies every major power claims to want. The conflict in eastern DRC has deep roots that predate any current mineral deal, tracing back through colonial extraction under Belgian rule and decades of internal political struggle. What is happening today is the latest chapter of a much longer story, and Congolese institutions and citizens are actively contesting it, not simply enduring it.
The M23 insurgency, widely understood to be backed by Rwanda, seized large parts of North and South Kivu, and the mines in those territories, including Rubaya, which alone produces 15 to 30 percent of the world’s coltan supply, became a revenue source for the group, generating nearly $1 million a month through taxation of mineral activity. The DRC government responded by seeking US support, which led to a peace agreement signed in Washington in December 2025, bundled with new bilateral minerals access for American companies. That was a decision made by Kinshasa, not something done to it in a vacuum, and it reflects a government weighing hard tradeoffs under pressure.
Even so, the response from within the DRC has been openly critical. Corneille Nangaa, leader of the AFC alliance allied with M23 and currently administering the captured provincial capitals, publicly called the US DRC mining partnership “deeply flawed”. Congolese civil society and analysts have raised the same concern from a different angle: researchers at the Institute for Security Studies argue that trading mineral access for security guarantees does little to address the structural drivers of the conflict, and may instead reinforce the imbalances that produced it. These are Congolese voices actively shaping the public debate over their own resources, not passive subjects of it.
The extractive logic does not change with the geography. It adapts.
The presence or absence of armed conflict is not what determines whether a minerals deal serves the people whose land is being mined. What determines that is who set the terms, who was consulted, and who gets to say no. In-country processing is a genuine, important demand and a credit to the negotiating position Ruto has taken. But processing minerals at home is not the same as controlling what happens to them, or who profits, or what the land and water and communities around those processing sites look like in twenty years.
A deal valued at $62.4 billion, announced on the sidelines of a G7 summit and framed in the press as a geopolitical race against China, is precisely the kind of deal that gets signed before those questions are asked. The bigger the prize and the faster the clock, the less space communities, parliamentarians, and the public have to weigh in. That is not an accident. It is how extractive deals have always worked, everywhere on this continent.
A minerals deal that does not guarantee free, prior, and informed consent for affected communities, independent environmental oversight, transparent royalty and benefit sharing terms, and full parliamentary scrutiny is not a partnership. It is extraction with better branding.
Investment is not automatically better than aid if the people whose land, water, and labour make that investment possible are never asked what they want. Kenya has the chance to set its own terms before the ink dries, and that is the standard we are holding this deal to.
Africa’s minerals will power the next century of global technology. The only question that matters is whether that wealth builds Africa, or simply passes through it on its way somewhere else.
