Bright Simons, Honorary Vice President of the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, has challenged the widely repeated claim that Africa holds 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves, arguing at the Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy that the figure appears in some of the world’s most prestigious publications without any underlying statistical analysis to support it.
Speaking on day three of SYPALA 2026 on Wednesday, August 26, under the title “The Seductive Illusion of Africa’s 30% Mineral Wealth,” Mr Simons said the figure recurs across International Monetary Fund reports, Atlantic Council publications and Western peer-reviewed journals, yet in every instance he examined, the number was presented without disclosing which minerals it referred to or how it was calculated.
Why the 30% Figure Doesn’t Add Up
Mr Simons said the claim collapses under a basic question: which of the roughly 5,000 mineral items found in the Earth’s crust is the 30 per cent supposed to describe. Many of those minerals, he said, are not globally traded and have no established market price, making any aggregate share meaningless.
To produce a workable estimate, he restricted his analysis to the 38 minerals that are widely traded internationally, including gold, diamonds and manganese, where reliable pricing and volume data exist. Using that narrower set, Mr Simons calculated that Africa’s share of global mineral output by tonnage is approximately 5.5 per cent.
Restricting the analysis further to minerals prioritised by wealthy nations reduces the figure to around 4 percent, and adjusting for each mineral’s actual weight in global trade, since a mineral like tanzanite is consumed in tiny quantities compared to iron ore, brings the figure down to roughly 1.8 percent.
“What is true and what is factual is that if you take the large set of minerals, the largely traded, the most widely traded minerals, and you do an application, there is nowhere you get 30%, nobody will be able to produce 30%, unless basically there is an increase, like you take 2 minerals or something like that”.
Bright Simons, Honorary Vice President of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education
Tracing the Number to Its Source
Mr Simons said he traced the 30 per cent claim to a report published by a prominent United Nations agency, which he said analysed only about seven minerals.
Applying a simple average across those seven produced a figure around 90.6 per cent, he said, while using a median, which he described as the statistically appropriate measure because it corrects for outliers, produced a figure closer to 99.9 percent.
Neither approach, he said, produced anything resembling 30 per cent. “Anybody tells you Africa has 30% of the world’s minerals, tell them to show me the data,” he said. “Where did they get it from? Which minerals? Which data set?”
Bright Simons was careful to draw a line between the debunked aggregate claim and a separate, more defensible one: that specific African countries hold substantial shares of specific minerals.
South Africa, he said, accounts for roughly 83 to 90 percent of global platinum group metals output. Morocco is a major phosphate producer, DR Congo dominates global cobalt supply, and Guinea holds substantial phosphate and bauxite reserves.
But he said this concentration in individual countries and individual minerals does not translate into a claim that Africa as a whole is rich in minerals across the board, calling this distinction critical to understanding the rest of his argument.
Not All Minerals Are Made Equal
Bright Simons illustrated the danger of conflating different minerals by comparing Australia’s mineral wealth to Africa’s. He said nearly half of Australia’s annual mineral earnings come from iron ore alone, a mineral consumed in vast global volumes even though each tonne is relatively cheap.
In 2022, he said, Australia, with a population of roughly 30 million, earned roughly as much from non-fuel minerals as the whole of Africa, with a population nearing 1.4 billion, combined.
He said the comparison shows why headline claims about mineral wealth are misleading without accounting for both the volume in which a mineral is traded and its price, and he noted that even Ghana’s own gold earnings have shifted dramatically with global price movements, rising to nearly $20 billion recently from roughly $3 billion a few years earlier as gold prices nearly tripled.
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