The New Scramble: How Corporations Replaced Colonies

The New Scramble

The colonizers went home. The extraction never stopped.

In 1884, European powers gathered in Berlin to carve up Africa. They drew borders, claimed territories, and divided the continent like a pie. That was the first Scramble for Africa.

Today, there's a new scramble. No armies, no flags, no treaties signed at gunpoint. Just contracts, mining licenses, and corporate subsidiaries. The wealth still flows out. The poverty still deepens. The only difference is the paperwork.

The Phone in Your Pocket

Pick up your smartphone. Inside it is cobalt — a metal essential for the lithium-ion battery that powers it. There's a 70% chance that cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The DRC holds an estimated $24 trillion in mineral wealth. It has the world's largest reserves of cobalt, massive deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, coltan, and now lithium. By any rational measure, it should be one of the richest countries on Earth.

Instead, 62% of Congolese live below the international poverty line. It consistently ranks among the five poorest nations in the world. Over 25 million people need emergency humanitarian assistance.

How is this possible?

Because the minerals leave, but the money doesn't stay.

The Deal of the Century

In 2007, the DRC signed what was called "the deal of the century" with China — the Sicomines agreement. China would invest $3 billion in infrastructure in exchange for mining rights to copper and cobalt deposits.

The deposits were valued at $93 billion.

Three billion for ninety-three billion. That's the deal. And it gets worse: tax exemptions granted to Chinese companies under this agreement cost the DRC an estimated $132 million in 2024 alone.

The promised infrastructure? Much of it was never built, or was built poorly, or was built in ways that primarily served the mines rather than the population.

This isn't just a Chinese problem. Western companies pioneered this model. The Sicomines deal was modeled on decades of extraction agreements that European and American corporations had already established across the continent.

As Claude Kabemba, Executive Director of Southern Africa Resource Watch, puts it: "There are no bad or good investors in Africa. We've monitored dozens of Western companies, dozens of Chinese companies, dozens of African companies. All of them behave the same. The poorest communities in Africa are mining communities."

How the Extraction Works

The modern resource extraction machine operates through several mechanisms:

Opaque contracts. Mining agreements are often negotiated in secret between foreign companies and government officials. The terms are rarely disclosed to the public. When they are disclosed, they typically show that the host country receives a fraction of the value extracted.

Transfer pricing. Multinational corporations sell minerals from their African subsidiary to another subsidiary in a tax haven at artificially low prices. The profits are booked offshore, not in Africa. It's estimated that Africa loses $38.4 billion per year through trade mispricing alone.

Illicit financial flows. Beyond legal tax avoidance, outright illegal transfers drain another $25 billion annually from the continent. That's over $60 billion leaving Africa each year — more than the continent receives in foreign aid.

Infrastructure that serves extraction. When companies do build infrastructure, it typically connects mines to ports — not schools to hospitals, not villages to markets. The roads, rails, and power lines are designed to move resources out, not to develop the country.

Environmental destruction without compensation. Mining operations pollute water, destroy farmland, and displace communities. The environmental costs are borne locally; the profits are enjoyed globally.

The Cobalt Children

In the industrial mines, conditions are dangerous but regulated. In the artisanal mines — the small-scale operations where individuals dig by hand — conditions are something else entirely.

An estimated 20% of the DRC's cobalt comes from artisanal mining. That's not a small cottage industry. That's billions of dollars worth of minerals dug out of the earth by people, including children, using pickaxes and their bare hands.

They dig into unstable tunnels that collapse. They handle toxic materials without protection. They work for wages that can't feed their families. And their cobalt ends up in the same global supply chain as the industrial stuff — "cross-contamination," the industry calls it. Artisanal cobalt feeds into formal supply chains, gets laundered through legitimate-looking intermediaries, and winds up in your phone, your laptop, your electric car.

The average electric vehicle battery requires more than 13 kilograms of cobalt. Your phone battery uses about 7 grams. Demand is projected to quadruple by 2030.

Tech companies have made pledges about "responsible sourcing" and "supply chain transparency." Lawsuits have named Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla in connection with child labor in Congolese cobalt mines. The companies claim they're addressing the problem. The children are still digging.

Blood Minerals

The eastern DRC has been at war, on and off, for nearly three decades. Millions have died — more than any conflict since World War II. And the fighting has always centered on one thing: control of mineral-rich territory.

Coltan, used in the capacitors of electronic devices, became infamous as a "conflict mineral" — a resource whose extraction funds armed groups. During the worst of the fighting, Rwandan and Ugandan forces occupied mineral-rich areas and exported coltan, gold, and diamonds to fund their military operations.

The international community documented this. A UN report in 2002 noted that Western mining companies were "deeply involved in the large-scale and systematic robbery of the DRC's mineral wealth." Rwanda and Uganda exported minerals they don't produce — minerals that could only have come from the DRC.

Today, the M23 rebel group, backed by Rwanda, has captured major cities in eastern Congo including Goma and Bukavu. Over 7,000 were killed in the attack on Goma alone. The UN confirms a major motivating factor is control of valuable mineral resources.

The coltan from mines controlled by armed militants gets smuggled across borders, laundered through legitimate-looking supply chains, and ends up in devices worldwide. A 2024 Global Witness report traced smuggled coltan from the Rubaya mine to the global supply chain — and named Tesla as one of the companies potentially profiting from the system.

Nigeria: Oil and Death

The Niger Delta is one of the most polluted places on Earth.

For over 50 years, Shell and other oil companies have extracted billions of dollars worth of crude from this region. In return, the local population got poisoned water, contaminated farmland, acid rain from gas flaring, and an endless series of oil spills.

How many spills? Between 1976 and 1996 alone, 1.89 million barrels of oil spilled into the Niger Delta environment. Some estimates put the total between 1960 and 1997 at upwards of 100 million barrels. While the European Union experienced 10 oil spill incidents in 40 years, Nigeria recorded 9,343 cases in just 10 years.

In 2011, the United Nations Environment Programme released a comprehensive assessment of Ogoniland, a region in the Niger Delta. What they found was devastating: benzene in drinking water at 900 times the WHO guideline. Contamination so severe it would take 25 to 30 years to reverse. An entire ecosystem poisoned.

The people of Ogoniland organized. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), led by writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, demanded environmental cleanup and fair revenue sharing. In 1993, 300,000 Ogoni gathered to protest Shell's operations.

Shell withdrew from Ogoniland. But that wasn't the end.

In 1995, Nigeria's military dictator Sani Abacha executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists. Internal documents later revealed by Amnesty International pointed to Shell's complicity — "thousands of pages" suggesting the company's involvement in the Nigerian government's crackdown, which included allegations of murder, rape, and torture.

The promised cleanup? In 2016, the Nigerian government launched a $1 billion remediation project. By 2020, Amnesty International found that the project had failed — "emergency measures" never properly implemented, mismanagement and lack of transparency, and in some cases, cleanup efforts that left areas more contaminated than before.

In 2024, the Ogale community sued Shell again, this time in London, seeking £88 million in compensation. They couldn't trust Nigerian courts to deliver justice.

The Pattern

Look at any resource-rich African country and you'll find the same pattern:

Angola: The second-largest oil producer in Africa. China's fifth-largest oil supplier. Outstanding loans to China of $18 billion — 40% of the country's external debt. When oil prices collapsed, Angola nearly defaulted. The oil kept flowing; the debt kept growing.

Ghana: Gold mining has existed for centuries. In recent years, illegal mining by foreign actors, including many Chinese nationals, has become "uncontrollable." Rivers poisoned, farmland destroyed, communities dispossessed. The gold leaves; the pollution stays.

Zambia: Copper mines have contaminated the Kafue River, a major water source. In September 2025, spill victims launched a landmark lawsuit. They're still waiting for justice.

Guinea: Home to Simandou, one of the world's largest untapped iron ore deposits. A Chinese consortium outbid an Australian company by promising infrastructure development. The ore will be extracted; whether the infrastructure materializes remains to be seen.

The resources are African. The profits are not.

Who Benefits?

When African civil society organizations investigate mining operations, they find the same thing everywhere: "Communities don't see benefit, all they see are costs from mining: environmental pollution, involuntary displacement, and resettlement without compensation."

The people who live on top of these resources often don't have electricity. They don't have clean water. They don't have paved roads or functioning hospitals. They have mines that poison their wells and companies that promise development that never comes.

Meanwhile, we in the Global North enjoy cheap electronics, affordable electric vehicles, and the warm feeling that we're transitioning to "clean energy." The energy may be clean where we use it. It's not clean where it's extracted.

What Would Sovereignty Look Like?

Some African countries are pushing back.

The DRC is renegotiating the Sicomines contract. Zimbabwe has banned the export of raw lithium ore, trying to force processing to happen domestically. The African Union has called for continent-wide strategies to move up the value chain — to refine and process minerals in Africa rather than just dig them up and ship them out.

These efforts face enormous challenges. Processing requires electricity that many African countries lack. It requires technical expertise that has been deliberately kept outside the continent. It requires infrastructure that has been systematically underfunded for decades.

And it faces resistance from those who profit from the current arrangement. When African countries try to capture more value from their resources, they're accused of "resource nationalism" — as if it's radical to suggest that a country should benefit from its own minerals.

The Choice

There are two ways this can go.

The extraction continues as it has for the past 60 years, and for the colonial centuries before that. Africa remains the source of raw materials that power the global economy while African people remain poor. The clean energy transition happens on the backs of Congolese children. The phones and cars and batteries get made, and the mining communities get poisoned, and the wealth flows ever outward.

Or Africans take control of their resources.

Not just the mining rights — the whole value chain. The processing, the refining, the manufacturing. African lithium in African batteries. African cobalt in African electronics. African oil refined in African refineries.

This is what Lumumba wanted when he talked about Congo's wealth benefiting Congolese. This is what Sankara meant when he insisted Burkina Faso should produce what it consumes and consume what it produces.

They were killed for saying it.

The question is whether a new generation will succeed where they failed.