In an AFNIS Insights CEO Conversation, Core International Managing Partner Suleiman Zakari and Steron Mining CEO Abubakar Sadiq Omar mni, join anchor Patrick Mulindwa to examine what it would take for Africa to move from fragmented resource economies to a more integrated continental model; one built around shared strategy, African capital, technology, local ownership and value addition.
Africa’s mineral wealth does not respect the borders drawn on political maps.
Deposits extend across jurisdictions. Geological formations run through neighbouring countries. Supply chains cross borders. Yet the continent’s approach to resource development remains largely national, fragmented and competitive; often leaving African countries negotiating individually for capital, technology and market access.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the “One Africa, One Resource Vision” articulated at AFNIS 2026.
The conversation moved beyond the familiar language of mineral abundance. Its central question was more consequential:
What would happen if Africa began treating its natural resources not as isolated national commodities, but as strategic continental assets capable of financing industrialisation, strengthening intra-African investment and creating shared economic leverage?
The answer, the discussion suggested, begins with a change in mindset.
From African Countries to an African Resource Economy
Zakari cautioned against seeing AFNIS as the work of one institution. The platform has evolved through the contributions of multiple governments, ministries, institutions and private-sector stakeholders.
The theme of One Africa, One Resource Vision represents another stage in that evolution.
The idea is straightforward but strategically significant: Africa’s ability to extract greater value from its resources will depend increasingly on its ability to act collectively.
As Zakari observed during the conversation, the continent’s political borders are real, but geological resources do not observe them. This creates an opportunity for a fundamentally different approach to resource development.
Instead of neighbouring countries developing mineral opportunities independently, cross-border geological formations and infrastructure corridors could become platforms for cooperation. Instead of competing against one another for investment by offering progressively more attractive concessions, African jurisdictions could explore mechanisms for coordinated strategy and shared value creation.
The objective is not to eliminate national interests.
It is to recognise that, in a global mineral economy, collective leverage can be greater than fragmented strength.
“When we come together, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.”
That philosophy is central to the AFNIS vision.
The Mineral Does Not Stop at the Border
One of the most powerful observations in the conversation was that Africa’s mineral geography frequently cuts across the political geography of the continent. The discussion referenced the Simandou iron ore system as an illustration of the complexity surrounding major resource developments whose strategic significance extends beyond a single jurisdiction.
The broader lesson is important.
A genuinely continental resource strategy requires governments to think not only about individual licences and projects, but about regional mineral systems, shared infrastructure, cross-border logistics, processing corridors and integrated markets.
- A mine in one country may require a railway through another.
- A processing facility may depend on power generated elsewhere.
- A mineral deposit may form part of a geological system that extends across several jurisdictions.
- An export corridor may only become commercially viable when production from multiple countries is aggregated.
This is where the concept of One Africa, One Resource Vision becomes more than a slogan. It becomes a question of infrastructure, policy and capital architecture.
Two Vehicles for a Continental Resource Strategy
Zakari identified two mechanisms that could help move the vision from aspiration toward execution:
- the Africa Minerals Strategy Group (AMSG) and the
- Africans for Africa Initiative (AFA).
Their roles, as described in the conversation, are complementary.
The AMSG provides a potential platform for policy coordination, strategic alignment and shared learning among African governments and resource jurisdictions.
The logic is that countries should not have to independently learn the same lessons.
Governments can share experiences around licensing, investment frameworks, mineral development strategies, infrastructure planning and resource governance. Neighbouring countries can coordinate around opportunities that transcend national boundaries.
The second vehicle is financial. The Africans for Africa Initiative is positioned around the mobilisation of African capital into African opportunities.
That distinction matters. Africa’s investment challenge is often described as a shortage of capital. But the conversation offered a different interpretation: part of the challenge is that significant pools of African capital remain disconnected from the continent’s resource opportunities.
The principle is simple.
If Nigerian capital participates in a Ugandan mining or infrastructure project, Nigeria develops a direct economic interest in Uganda’s success. If Ugandan capital participates in a Nigerian project, Uganda acquires a stake in Nigeria’s economic performance.
Economic interdependence begins to replace economic isolation.
Capital can become one of the mechanisms through which Africa begins to experience itself as one economic space.
This is perhaps one of the most important ideas emerging from the conversation. Regional integration is often discussed through the language of policy and diplomacy.
But investment creates a much more tangible form of integration.
When African citizens, pension funds, institutions and businesses own productive assets across the continent, the success of one African market becomes increasingly connected to the success of another.
From Resource Ownership to Resource Understanding
The conversation then moved into another structural challenge: awareness.
For Omar, the problem is not simply that Africa lacks minerals. It is that Africans too often remain disconnected from the economic systems built around those minerals.
The average African consumer may have limited interaction with raw lithium, mica, feldspar, quartz or other minerals. But that same person interacts every day with the products and infrastructure those resources ultimately enable; energy systems, electronics, transportation, housing, telecommunications and industrial equipment.
- The mineral is invisible.
- The finished product is visible.
- That disconnect has consequences.
If communities do not understand what lies beneath their land, what those resources are worth, how they enter international supply chains or what products can be manufactured from them, their bargaining position is weakened.
Omar’s argument is therefore broader than local ownership. It is about resource literacy. Africa needs citizens, entrepreneurs, communities, regulators, journalists, engineers and policymakers who understand not merely that minerals exist, but how those minerals create economic value.
Knowledge becomes part of the resource equation.
The Investment Readiness Problem
This point became particularly clear when the conversation turned to the challenge facing indigenous mining companies seeking finance. Omar described a familiar problem.
A company may possess a mineral licence and geological information demonstrating the existence of a deposit, yet still find that international financial institutions do not regard that information as sufficient for investment purposes.
Additional verification, independent technical certification and internationally recognised standards may be required before a project can enter the financing conversation.
For an early-stage African operator, that process can be prohibitively expensive. The result is a paradox.
The company needs capital to become investment-ready, but it needs to become investment-ready before it can access the capital.
That is one of the structural barriers holding back indigenous resource developers.
The conversation highlighted the scale of expenditure that can be associated with geological and airborne exploration programmes. It also raised the potential of emerging technologies, including advanced remote sensing and satellite-based intelligence, to reduce some of the costs and risks associated with traditional exploration.
The strategic implication is significant.
- Technology can potentially shorten the distance between mineral potential and investment confidence.
- Better data can improve geological understanding.
- Better geological understanding can reduce exploration uncertainty.
- Reduced uncertainty can improve project bankability.
- And improved bankability can broaden access to capital.
This is the emerging logic of resource intelligence.
Africa Cannot Remain the Source and the Customer
Perhaps the most striking theme in the Steron CEO’s contribution was the relationship between Africa’s minerals and Africa’s energy and industrial needs.
Omar challenged the idea that African mineral development should be evaluated primarily according to export potential. His argument is that Africans must also ask:
What can these minerals do for Africa itself?
- Lithium can become part of domestic energy-storage systems.
- Quartz can become an input into local manufacturing.
- Feldspar can support domestic construction materials.
- Minerals can feed processing industries, which can feed manufacturing, which can serve African consumers.
This changes the development sequence.
Instead of:
Extract → Export → Import finished products
the objective becomes:
Extract → Process → Manufacture → Consume → Export surplus.
That distinction lies at the heart of Steron’s R4T – Resources for Technology – philosophy.
The model seeks to connect mineral resources to technology and industrial production rather than treating mineral extraction as an end in itself. It is a fundamentally different proposition.
Africa does not simply need to sell more minerals. Africa needs to capture more of the value generated by those minerals.
The Cost of Selling the Cow and Buying the Milk
At one point in the conversation, the discussion produced an unusually simple analogy for a very complicated economic problem. Africa, the participants suggested, has too often behaved like someone who sells the cow and then returns to buy milk from the person who bought it.
The analogy captures the structural problem of raw-material dependency. A resource leaves Africa as a relatively low-value commodity. It is processed, refined, manufactured and incorporated into higher-value products elsewhere.
Those products eventually return to African markets; often at multiples of the original value of the raw material.
The result is an economic system in which Africa supplies the inputs but imports the value. That is why beneficiation cannot remain a policy aspiration. It must become an industrial strategy.
The Market Is Already Here
Another important dimension of the conversation was the recognition that Africa is not only a resource base.
It is also one of the world’s major emerging consumer markets.
That matters enormously for industrialisation. The traditional investment narrative often asks whether Africa can produce products competitively enough to export.
The conversation proposes another question: What if Africa first built industries around the needs of its own population?
- Energy.
- Housing.
- Transportation.
- Agriculture.
- Construction.
- Digital infrastructure.
- Manufacturing.
These are not hypothetical markets. They are existing and expanding demands.
The implication is that Africa’s population should not be viewed simply as a development challenge. It can also be an industrial asset.
A sufficiently large domestic market can provide the demand base necessary for companies to scale, develop capabilities and eventually compete internationally. The transition from resource economy to industrial economy therefore begins with recognising that the African consumer is part of the resource equation.
From Exporting Wealth to Creating Wealth
The conversation also connected these ideas to remarks made during AFNIS 2026 by Nigeria’s President, particularly the warning against “exporting wealth and importing poverty.”
For the participants, the statement captured the central contradiction facing resource-rich economies.
The problem is not that Africa exports. International trade is essential. The problem is exporting the lowest-value component of a value chain while importing the highest-value component.
A continent with significant mineral resources should be asking how much processing, manufacturing, engineering, intellectual property and financial value can remain within its economies before products enter global markets.
That is the deeper meaning of beneficiation. It is not simply about constructing processing plants. It is about building the industrial ecosystem around the resource.
A Different Architecture for African Mining
Taken together, the conversation points toward a broader model of resource development. It is an architecture built around several interconnected principles:
Continental coordination
African countries cooperate around resources and infrastructure that transcend borders.
African capital
Domestic and continental pools of capital participate more actively in resource development.
Investment readiness
Geological data, technical studies and project intelligence are developed to international investment standards.
Technology deployment
Satellite intelligence, advanced exploration technologies and digital systems reduce information asymmetry and exploration risk.
Indigenous ownership
African companies participate meaningfully in ownership, governance and value creation.
Beneficiation
Minerals move beyond extraction into processing, refining and manufacturing.
Domestic markets
African industrial production serves the continent’s own rapidly expanding needs.
Regional value chains
Production systems increasingly connect African countries rather than operating as isolated national projects.
The resulting model is considerably larger than mining. It is a pathway from resource ownership to industrial sovereignty.
The Strategic Question for Africa
The most important takeaway from the conversation may therefore be deceptively simple.
Africa does not need to discover whether it has resources.
It already knows.
The strategic question is whether the continent can build the institutions, capital structures, technical capacity, industrial systems and political coordination required to transform those resources into lasting economic power.
That requires a different definition of success. Success cannot be measured only by tonnes extracted, licences issued or foreign capital attracted.
It must also be measured by:
- How much value remains in Africa;
- How much African capital participates;
- How much processing occurs locally;
- How much technology is transferred;
- How many African companies move up the value chain;
- How much industrial capacity is created;
- How effectively communities participate;
- And how much negotiating power African countries possess when engaging global markets.
The One Africa, One Resource Vision therefore represents more than a call for continental unity.
It is a proposition about economic architecture.
A future in which African countries increasingly see their mineral wealth as part of a connected continental resource system.
- A future in which African capital invests across African borders.
- A future in which technology reduces the information disadvantage that has historically constrained indigenous operators.
- A future in which the mineral beneath African soil becomes the beginning, not the end, of the value chain.
- And ultimately, a future in which Africa moves from being predominantly a supplier of resources to becoming an owner, processor, manufacturer, investor and market participant in the global resource economy.
The challenge is no longer whether the opportunity exists. The challenge is whether Africa can organise itself to capture it.