The Honorary Vice President of the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Bright Simons, has warned that Africa’s much-discussed mineral wealth does not include the specific minerals the continent will need most if it pursues genuine industrialisation, telling participants at SYPALA 2026 that Africa currently holds only a fraction of the reserves of industrial-scale minerals such as iron ore, lithium, nickel, tin and zinc.
Speaking in Accra on the third day of the event, Mr Simons said this shortage remains largely invisible today only because Africa is not yet industrialising at scale, meaning the continent has not yet felt the pinch of a deficiency that would become acute the moment industrial activity expanded.
The Minerals Africa Has Versus the Minerals It Needs
Mr Simons framed the distinction around what he called economic complexity, arguing that Africa’s core interest should not be industrialisation narrowly defined as manufacturing, but the broader set of activities that produce increasingly complex products and services.
He said the minerals Africa possesses in abundance tend to be produced and consumed in relatively small quantities in natural and industrial processes, while the minerals underpinning every modern industrial system, iron ore, lithium, coal, nickel, tin and zinc among them, are precisely the ones Africa has the least of.
He was explicit that his analysis concerned reserves rather than production. He distinguished between production, the easiest category to measure since it tracks what is actually mined and sold; reserves, meaning deposits that are known and can be profitably mined using current technology; and resources, deposits known to exist but not yet economically viable to extract.
His claim about Africa’s mineral shortage, he said, applies specifically to reserves. “The reason we don’t notice them is that we don’t do a lot of industrialisation in Africa yet, we are not industrialising yet, so we don’t feel the pinch of not having enough of these minerals.”
What Industrialisation Would Actually Require
Bright Simons illustrated the scale of the gap using a hypothetical in which Ghana consumed minerals at something close to the global average rate, roughly comparable to a country like Serbia rather than industrial leaders such as Taiwan, Korea or China.
Under that scenario, he said, Ghana alone would require roughly 14 times more steel than it currently produces, a striking figure given that Africa as a whole accounts for only about 0.6 percent of the world’s iron.
He said Ghana would similarly need around 5.5 million tonnes of pure copper to match average global consumption, a volume far beyond what the country currently produces or has readily accessible.
He connected this shortage to a very tangible problem: the theft of railway lines and traffic light components in Ghana, which he attributed partly to the absence of functioning domestic smelters and mining capacity for the metals those systems require.
“We need a lot of these metals, more so than fruits, and they aren’t really available, because we don’t have proper smelters, we don’t have proper mines.”
A Warning Wrapped in an Opportunity
Mr Simons framed the finding as a warning against complacency rather than a reason for pessimism. He argued that the popular narrative of Africa’s mineral abundance actually obscures a more urgent strategic question: whether the continent has, or can secure, the specific inputs its own industrial ambitions will require.
Without addressing that gap directly, he suggested, African economies risk discovering the shortage only once industrialisation is already under way and the shortfall becomes an active constraint on growth rather than a hidden one.
Mr Simons’s argument reframes a familiar African narrative into a more urgent one. The continent has spent decades hearing that it sits atop vast mineral wealth, a story that offers comfort without demanding action.
His data suggests the opposite is closer to the truth: the specific minerals that power industrial economies are the ones Africa holds least of, and that gap stays hidden only because industrialisation itself has barely begun.
Once it does, he warned, the shortage stops being theoretical. The choice facing African governments, in his framing, is whether to confront that gap now, through deliberate investment in mining, smelting and regional supply, or discover it too late, as a constraint on the growth they are trying to build.
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