Within a few years of independence, African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources. Prior to this, the resources were exploited by European mining corporations. Since the 1990s, transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force as owners and managers of major mining projects.

Ben Radley has researched economic transformation in central Africa, with a particular focus on resource-based industrialisation. He argues in this excerpt of his new book, Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, that the return of transnationals was carried out through a three-stage process beginning with a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. The ceding of resource sovereignty was enabled by pathologising the African state and demonising African miners.

Stage one: Blame the African state

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), president Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took steps early to place resources under state control. The Bakajika Law of June 1966 required all foreign-based companies to establish their headquarters in the DRC, then known as Zaire, by the end of the year. In addition, the largest Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union minière de Haut Katanga, was nationalised the same year. It became Société générale Congolaise des minerais (Gécamines). By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40% of national value added.

Nationalisation had no immediate adverse effect. In the DRC copper production increased steadily between 1960 and 1974 from around 300,000 tonnes to 500,000 tonnes. It grew over the same period from 500,000 tonnes to 700,000 tonnes in Zambia.