Europe’s Clean Hands Fantasy in the New Scramble for Africa
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The article under excavation, “In the new scramble for Africa’s resources, Europe tries to right old wrongs,” published by Politico Europe on November 24, 2025, presents itself as a straightforward piece of international reporting. At its surface level, the article narrates how the European Union—with Ursula von der Leyen as chief spokesperson—is attempting to reposition itself in Africa by modernizing the Lobito Corridor, a railway system first built by Belgium and Portugal to siphon minerals from the interior toward Atlantic export hubs.
The reporting frames Europe’s renewed presence on the continent as a morally conscious alternative to China’s expansive footprint, emphasizing “mutual benefits,” “ethical partnerships,” and “value chain development.” It acknowledges African skepticism, cites a few NGO critiques, and suggests that the EU still struggles to turn its lofty promises into grounded change.
But beneath this journalistic scaffolding lies a dense ideological choreography. Politico begins by briefly recalling the colonial origins of the Lobito railway—rubber, ivory, minerals extracted under the boots of Europe’s imperial administrators—only to immediately reframe that same infrastructure as a potential vehicle for European redemption.
The colonial railway is reborn as a “model initiative,” cleansed of its past through the application of Brussels’ new moral vocabulary. Europe, we are told, is not returning to Africa to extract but to atone, to “right old wrongs,” to engage in a “reset” with African countries celebrating fifty years of independence. The text performs this pivot quickly, the way a stage magician diverts the audience’s eyes just before the reveal.
Even without drawing on any outside context, the propaganda techniques surface clearly. The first is the moral reframing of continuity. Politico acknowledges history only as a backdrop, a somber prelude that allows Europe to appear enlightened in the present. T
he same extractive infrastructure is described now as a promising “lifeline” for sustainable development, as if the tracks themselves were not engineered for extraction but for some benevolent future partnership waiting patiently to be discovered. Brussels is cast as a penitent actor, struggling—not with its own long-standing interests—but with the burden of its own righteousness.
The second device is a soft erasure of power. The article speaks in the language of partnership: mutual benefits, shared prosperity, value chains built “together.” Nowhere in the narrative does the reader find clarity on who controls the financing, who sets the standards, who owns the corridors, or who ultimately profits from the movement of cobalt and copper down these rehabilitated colonial tracks. The structural asymmetry between Europe and the African nations it courts dissolves into a fog of technocratic goodwill.
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Throughout the article, the language of extraction is sanitized. Cobalt and copper are framed not as resources whose exploitation has historically generated displacement and violence, but as essential ingredients in the green transition—neutralized commodities necessary for the functioning of Europe’s industries.
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It describes this as a “model initiative,” a way for Europe to “right old wrongs” and build “mutual benefits” with African partners. It notes that China “got there first” in securing access to African minerals, while the EU and the U.S. are scrambling to catch up. African NGOs are quoted warning that without concrete change on the ground, all this talk of “value addition” may just mean faster trains carrying raw minerals out of the continent.
All of that is true as far as it goes. But it leaves out the scale of the stakes. Africa is not just one more supplier in a global shopping list; it sits at the heart of the material basis of the so-called green and digital transitions.
Studies cited by UN and African institutions show that the continent holds about 92 percent of global platinum reserves, 56 percent of cobalt, 54 percent of manganese, and 36 percent of chromium. Africa is also a dominant exporter of these minerals into global markets, feeding the factories that produce batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, and high-tech components. Without African cobalt, manganese, and platinum group metals, Europe’s industrial and energy plans simply do not function.
Official EU-related analysis is surprisingly frank about this dependency. The European Council on Foreign Relations notes that the Union is highly dependent on imports for critical raw materials and will “never be self-sufficient”. For several key inputs, Africa is already the main lifeline. The same briefing highlights that around 63 percent of EU aluminium imports come from Guinea, 41 percent of manganese imports from South Africa, and 35 percent of tantalum imports from the DRC.
Separate official information shows that South Africa alone supplies a large majority of the EU’s platinum needs. In other words, when Brussels talks about “diversifying away from China,” it is not talking about becoming independent; it is talking about deepening and reorganizing its dependence on African land, resources, and labor.
This is where the Lobito Corridor fits into a larger architecture. The EU’s new Critical Raw Materials Act sets binding targets for 2030: at least 10 percent of the EU’s annual consumption of strategic raw materials should be mined in the EU, at least 15 percent recycled in the EU, and a large share processed domestically, while reliance on any single external supplier is capped.
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To operationalize this, Brussels has been signing a web of so-called “strategic partnerships” with resource-rich African states. With Zambia and the DRC, it has launched a partnership on sustainable critical raw materials and the green energy value chain that explicitly links to the Lobito Corridor. With Namibia, it has an agreement on raw materials and green hydrogen. With South Africa, it has pledged to support “sustainable value chains” in minerals and metals.
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At the same time, African institutions are putting forward their own plans, which Politico largely brushes past. The African Union’s Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy insists that African countries must move beyond exporting raw ores and concentrates. It calls for building up regional processing, manufacturing, and industrial value chains, and for coordinating policies so that African states are not picked off one by one in bilateral deals. Policy platforms like the Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Discussions forum and research centers such as the Africa Policy Research Institute warn explicitly against Africa once again being reduced to “a raw material appendage” of wealthier powers, this time in the name of the green transition.
When you place these documents next to each other, a sharp contradiction emerges. On the African side, the baseline demand is for control over processing and industrialization—who adds value, who sets prices, who owns the plants. On the EU side, the main concern is securing steady flows of critical materials into European and allied supply chains, while shifting some refining to countries of origin to tick the “value addition” box. In many of Brussels’ own analyses of the Critical Raw Materials Act and Global Gateway, Africa is framed first and foremost as a supplier of unprocessed or semi-processed raw materials needed to keep Europe’s green and digital industries running. Civil-society reports from the Global South warn that, without deliberate corrective measures, the CRMA risks locking regions like Africa and Latin America into that supplier role as part of a new “green” division of labor.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The scramble for African minerals is one front in a broader EU strategy that the Commission and its allies now frame through the language of “resilience.” Analyses of the EU’s strategic foresight and resource policy describe a doctrine that includes securing supply chains, hardening infrastructure, strengthening economic and financial “security,” and ramping up defense cooperation, especially in relation to Africa’s critical minerals. The same logic running through that doctrine—stabilize a shaky order by tightening control over energy, finance, technology, and borders—runs straight into the global minerals game.
In energy, this resilience has already meant replacing one dependency with another. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, EU imports of Russian pipeline gas collapsed. By 2023, International Energy Agency analysis and European data show that the United States became the EU’s single largest LNG supplier, accounting for roughly half of LNG imports, alongside increased pipeline deliveries from Norway and others. In mid-2025, the EU and the Trump administration agreed to a massive deal committing hundreds of billions of dollars to US energy purchases over three years, marketed as a step toward “energy security” and diversification. Europe remains structurally dependent on imported fuel; it has simply changed who it buys from and on what terms.
In finance, resilience has meant turning custody into a weapon. The Belgian-based clearinghouse Euroclear reported around €4.4 billion in 2023 interest income on frozen Russian assets, generating over a billion euro in Belgian tax receipts. EU institutions have decided that profits from such immobilized assets will be used to support Ukraine’s war and reconstruction, effectively transforming frozen reserves into a tributary stream for European policy. Officials and analysts openly discuss this as part of the EU’s “economic security” toolkit. Whatever one thinks of the war, the precedent is clear: access to the EU’s financial infrastructure is now explicitly conditioned on political alignment, and property rights for targeted states are contingent.
In the digital sphere, the gap between rhetoric and reality is just as wide. The Commission speaks of “digital sovereignty,” but parliamentary briefings and market studies show that US cloud giants—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—control roughly two-thirds to 70 percent of the European cloud market. European providers account for a small and fragmented share. The Commission has launched Digital Markets Act investigations into major cloud providers, but for now the physical infrastructure—servers, data centers, and advanced chips—remains largely in foreign hands. Europe writes rules; others own the backbone.
The security dimension is not an afterthought. Strategic foresight material and related European Parliament research explicitly frame increased defense spending and deeper security integration as pillars of resilience. The EU is being told to arm up, invest in its military-industrial base, and align more tightly with NATO. Minerals, energy corridors, financial channels, and digital infrastructure are all drawn into a single picture in which “economic security” and “hard security” reinforce each other.
When we bring this back to Africa, the pattern sharpens. Brussels accepts that it will remain dependent on imports for energy, raw materials, and cloud infrastructure. Its answer is not to reduce the overall exploitation of resources, but to manage dependence through privileged access: strategic partnerships, Global Gateway corridors, standards and traceability requirements, and financial and security leverage. Africa’s green minerals, like its oil and gas before them, are treated as inputs into Europe’s resilience project—a project designed to stabilize a bloc facing crisis at home and competition abroad.
None of this has gone unnoticed in the Global South. In 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing an International Day against Unilateral Coercive Measures, after years of campaigning by states such as Venezuela, which argue that sanctions and asset seizures violate international law and human rights. African and Latin American commentators increasingly describe Western raw-materials and climate policies as a new wave of “green colonialism,” pointing out that energy transitions in the North are being built on intensified extraction in the South. Civil-society organizations tracking EU “strategic projects” in Africa document displacement, forest loss, and limited benefits for local communities, warning that sustainability language often disguises continuity with older forms of plunder.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a meeting with government officials. Photo: Volodymyr Zelenskyy / X
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