The New Gatekeepers: How the Global South Learned to Weaponise Its Minerals

Introduction

In the Manicaland province of eastern Zimbabwe, the red laterite hillsides conceal one of the most consequential deposits of lithium on the African continent. For years, trucks loaded with spodumene concentrate rolled out of those hills with barely a pause at the weighbridge, destined overwhelmingly for Chinese processing facilities thousands of miles away. Then, on February 26, 2026, the trucks stopped.

Harare had suspended all exports of unprocessed lithium concentrate, citing what officials called malpractices and leakages in the sector. Within six weeks, the mines ministry had dispatched a letter to the country's Chamber of Mines, dated April 2, establishing a discretionary quota framework: individual export allocations would be communicated to each producer, conditional on mandatory financial disclosure and, crucially, written commitments to build domestic lithium sulphate processing plants before January 2027. A 10 percent export tax would apply to every tonne that left in the interim. The message to the Chinese firms that dominate Zimbabwe's lithium sector, companies like Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine, and Chengxin Lithium Group, was unambiguous: the old arrangement is over.

What happened in Zimbabwe was not an isolated policy spasm. It was one data point in a pattern that has been assembling, with increasing speed, across the resource-rich developing world. In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo had already banned cobalt exports outright in February 2025, halting shipments from a country that produces roughly 74 percent of the world's supply. In Jakarta, Indonesia's Energy Ministry quietly reduced the country's 2026 nickel ore mining quota by nearly a third, deliberately engineering a supply constraint in a market where Indonesia controls more than 60 percent of global mined production. Taken together, these three decisions represent something qualitatively new in the geopolitics of critical minerals: a coordinated, if uncoordinated, awakening among the world's largest producer nations to the leverage their geology affords them.

The Cobalt Lesson: Kinshasa's Eight-Month Gamble

To understand how producer-nation leverage works in practice, and where it breaks down, the DRC's cobalt experiment is the place to start. When ARECOMS, the DRC's minerals regulatory body, imposed the export ban in February 2025, cobalt was trading at around $21,502 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange, a price so depressed by chronic oversupply that artisanal miners in Lualaba province were struggling to cover their costs. The government's logic was straightforward: the DRC held a near-monopoly on global cobalt supply, and it intended to use that position.

The gamble worked, in price terms, more dramatically than almost anyone had forecast. By early 2026, cobalt metal was trading at between $56,000 and $62,000 per tonne. The cobalt hydroxide benchmark tracked by Fastmarkets averaged $25.44 to $25.80 per pound in January and February 2026, representing a year-on-year increase of around 340 percent. ARECOMS Chairman Patrick Mpoyi Luabeya, speaking to Fastmarkets as the ban was replaced by a quota system in October 2025, was measured but satisfied: "Global cobalt stocks have already fallen significantly due to the export ban. We now believe that a total suspension of exports from the DRC is not necessary. The quota system will suffice to make the final adjustments needed."

The quota system that replaced the ban was itself a piece of calibrated market engineering. The annual allocation for 2026 and 2027 was set at 96,600 metric tonnes, roughly half of 2024 export volumes. Within that ceiling, 87,000 tonnes were distributed as a base quota among established producers, with a further 9,600 tonnes reserved as a strategic allocation for projects deemed of national importance, a category whose requirements remained deliberately opaque but that clearly pointed toward domestic processing investment. One trader, speaking to Fastmarkets, captured the commercial logic neatly: "With only 7,250 metric tonnes of contained material going out per month over the next two years, roughly half of what was being exported previously, it should significantly knock out excess Chinese cobalt metal production."

But the DRC's experiment also exposed the limits of resource nationalism when the institutional infrastructure cannot match the policy ambition. Robert Searle, senior analyst at Fastmarkets, noted that the quota framework had generated an expected market deficit of around 5,000 to 6,000 tonnes in 2026, but that implementation failures were compounding the tightness in ways the government had not planned for. The DRC extended the deadline for fourth-quarter 2025 quota utilisation twice, first into the first quarter of 2026, then by a further thirty days, because shipments were running so far below allocation. A logistics operator based in Kinshasa estimated that less than half of the allocated quota had actually cleared the country, citing paperwork delays and infrastructural bottlenecks. Africa Security Analysis, a political risk consultancy, concluded bluntly that the ban had been launched without the legal framework, oversight, or infrastructure needed to make it work.

None of this has deterred Kinshasa from doubling down. In mid-2026, the DRC established a strategic mineral reserve, handing ARECOMS the authority to acquire, hold, and market cobalt and other designated materials on behalf of the state. The agency released a statement describing the reserve as a mechanism to allow "the Congolese state to intervene in a targeted manner regarding the quantities of strategic mineral substances available in order to maintain the balance of the international market and contribute to strengthening its economic sovereignty." The language is ambitious. Whether the capacity matches the ambition remains the harder question.

Indonesia's Precision Instrument: Engineering Scarcity at Scale

If the DRC's cobalt intervention was a blunt instrument wielded by an institution still finding its regulatory footing, Indonesia's management of its nickel sector represents something more sophisticated: a sustained, iterative policy experiment now entering its fifth year of refinement.

The December 2025 announcement by Energy Minister Bahlil Lahadalia that Indonesia's 2026 nickel ore mining quota would be cut to between 260 million and 270 million metric tonnes, down from approximately 379 million tonnes approved for 2025, arrived with specific price targets attached. Septian Hario Seto, a member of Indonesia's National Economic Council, explained the rationale with unusual candour: "If we don't control the production, I think in 2026 we will create the largest surplus in the nickel market's history." His preferred price range, the "sweet spot" for Indonesian nickel, was $18,000 to $20,000 per tonne. The LME nickel price touched $20,000 per tonne on May 6, 2026, the highest level since May 2024.

The mechanism by which Jakarta achieved this was institutional as much as economic. Authorities shortened RKAB mining permit approvals from three-year to annual cycles, creating a regular compliance review that functions simultaneously as a market management lever. The impact on individual operations was severe and visible. PT Weda Bay Nickel, a joint venture between French mining company Eramet, Chinese steel giant Tsingshan, and Indonesia's state-backed PT Antam, saw its 2026 quota slashed from 32 million wet tonnes to 12 million, and had exhausted that allocation by the end of May. Natalie Scott-Gray, senior metals analyst at StoneX, observed that while the news had boosted market sentiment, "it is worth remembering that Indonesia has historically sought to prevent prices rising sustainably above $18,000 per tonne, as elevated prices risk undermining domestic EV sector competitiveness." That nuance is the key to understanding Jakarta's approach: Indonesia is not simply restricting supply, it is actively managing a price band, accepting tighter margins on ore to protect the downstream processing industry it has spent years building with Chinese investment.

The social cost of that strategy is becoming visible on the factory floor. Arif Perdana Kusuma, chairman of Indonesia's nickel industry association FINI, reported at the country's Critical Minerals Conference that utilisation rates at rotary kiln electric furnace smelters had fallen to 76 percent, compared with 84 percent a year earlier, with several production lines in South Sulawesi and Central Sulawesi running at less than 50 percent of capacity. Operators were keeping furnaces technically alive rather than shutting them down entirely, because restarting an idle furnace can take months and costs that the current quota regime makes difficult to justify.

What Indonesia has demonstrated, at a scale no other producer has matched, is that controlling the ore quota also controls the cobalt byproduct. Indonesian cobalt-in-MHP output, produced as a byproduct from Chinese-backed high-pressure acid leach plants, was forecast to climb 39 percent to 53,318 tonnes in 2026. But that figure is capped by whatever the nickel ore quota permits. In tightening one market, Jakarta has simultaneously tightened another, and done so with a level of technical intentionality that has attracted close attention from governments in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and across sub-Saharan Africa.

Zimbabwe's Value-Addition Ultimatum and the Chinese Dilemma

Zimbabwe's lithium intervention sits between the DRC's blunt initial instinct and Indonesia's precision management, closer in style to Jakarta's processing-mandate logic but operating in a far weaker institutional context. In 2025, Zimbabwe exported 1.128 million metric tonnes of lithium-bearing spodumene concentrate to China, representing roughly 15 percent of China's annual lithium concentrate imports. That single statistic explains both why Harare felt confident enough to act and why the Chinese firms controlling the sector have watched the policy evolution with considerable anxiety.

The April 2026 quota framework is more intricate than the initial export suspension suggested. Each producer receives an individual allocation, communicated directly by the mines ministry, creating a discretionary gatekeeper relationship between government and company that is without precedent in Zimbabwe's mining history. The six-month allocation cycle, evidenced by the quota terms granted to Yahua Industrial Group, signals that Harare intends to maintain regulatory flexibility rather than offering long-term export guarantees. Companies that comply, meaning those that commit to building lithium sulphate processing plants by January 2027, avoid the worst penalties; those that do not face both the 10 percent export tax and the risk of reduced quota in subsequent cycles.

The financial stakes are substantial. Zimbabwe's lithium sector generated around $571 million in export revenues in 2025. Economic modelling across the industry suggests that processed lithium chemicals can generate three to five times the revenue of equivalent volumes of raw concentrate, meaning that a successful transition to in-country processing could transform the sector's contribution to the Zimbabwean economy within a decade. Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt has already committed approximately $400 million to lithium sulphate plant construction, a signal that at least some Chinese investors have concluded that compliance is cheaper than confrontation.

The Zimbabwe Lithium Producers' Association filed a formal request in June 2026 for an extension of the January 2027 processing deadline to June 2027, citing construction timelines. The request is a reminder that the gap between policy ambition and industrial reality is rarely bridged on the government's preferred schedule. But the request itself also confirms what the policy was designed to achieve: the Chinese firms that entered Zimbabwe expecting to extract and export with minimal encumbrance are now locked into a negotiation about their industrial future in the country, on terms that Harare, not Beijing, is setting.

Superpower Competition as Producer Leverage

The price moves in cobalt, nickel, and lithium are the most visible consequence of Global South resource nationalism, but they are arguably not the most important one. The deeper transformation is geopolitical: producer nations are learning to exploit the competition between Washington and Beijing to extract value-addition commitments that neither superpower would have conceded in a less contested environment.

The DRC's copper story is the clearest illustration. When President Felix Tshisekedi wrote to Donald Trump in February 2025, offering U.S. access to Congolese critical minerals in exchange for security assistance as M23 rebels occupied Goma and Bukavu, he was not simply making a desperate plea for help. He was making a calculation: that American strategic anxiety about Chinese dominance of Congolese mining, where Beijing-aligned firms controlled roughly 80 percent of output by early 2025, could be converted into something more durable than goodwill. The Washington Accords, signed in June 2025, created a preferential access framework for American companies, backed by a U.S. Development Finance Corporation equity investment in a Gecamines-Mercuria joint venture. By July 2025, the DRC had exported nearly $1.3 billion worth of minerals to the United States, surpassing the cumulative total of the previous eight years. June 2025 alone approached $400 million, a monthly record. The surge concentrated on copper from the Tenke Fungurume Mine, with Gécamines CEO Placide Nkala Basadilua describing the first 100,000-tonne shipment as "the culmination of more than a year of work to strengthen the Democratic Republic of Congo's position on the global raw materials stage."

Building on my analysis of FORGE in my June 2026 piece on that alliance's governance challenges, it is worth noting that the framework Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled at the February Critical Minerals Ministerial carries a structural tension that the DRC's copper diplomacy exposes directly. FORGE's price floor mechanism, backed by adjustable tariffs and the promise of $30 billion in U.S. government financing, is premised on the idea that producer nations will align their export policies with Western market preferences. But the DRC's dual strategy, managing cobalt supply through quotas while expanding copper exports to the United States, shows a government that is not aligning with any single bloc. It is playing them against each other.

The Natural Resource Governance Institute has flagged the structural risk embedded in this dynamic. The bilateral agreements signed at speed through FORGE's predecessor architecture, and now under FORGE itself, do not appear to expand policy space for African governments to impose export levies, require local processing, or mandate local content rules. Historically, those tools have been central to moving resource-rich economies up the value chain. Jean-Claude Mputu, spokesperson for the Congolese civil society network Le Congo n'est pas a vendre and deputy director of Resource Matters, was direct in his assessment: "This is a race for minerals at any cost." The DRC has not, as some Washington analysts hoped, moved away from China as a trade partner. It has added the United States as a second major buyer, on terms that benefit Kinshasa regardless of which superpower ultimately dominates the relationship.

Indonesia has played this game the longest. Its 2020 nickel export ban, which forced Chinese investment into domestic processing at scale, grew its share of global mined nickel supply from 31.5 percent in 2020 to 60.2 percent by 2024, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Jakarta is now the template that governments from Lusaka to Manila are studying. The G20 Critical Minerals Framework, adopted at the Johannesburg Summit in 2025, gave this dynamic an institutional expression, seeking to reconcile the Global North's demand urgency with the Global South's industrial ambitions. It has not resolved the tension, but it has named it.

The Architecture of Western Response and Its Gaps

The irony of the current moment is that the Western de-risking architecture assembled over the past two years, from the IEA's expanded minerals mandate discussed in my July 2026 analysis of the 1974 stockpiling framework, to the EU's sixty Strategic Projects under the Critical Raw Materials Act, to FORGE's plurilateral price floor ambition, was designed primarily to counter Chinese supply leverage. It was not designed to handle a world in which Zimbabwe, the DRC, and Indonesia are also running their own supply management regimes, with their own strategic objectives that do not necessarily align with Washington or Brussels.

The USMCA review, which formally opened on July 1 and which I examined in detail in my piece on America's five converging deadlines, illustrates the bind. Critical mineral processing has emerged as one of the central issues in that review. The Trump administration wants to strengthen North American extraction and processing; Mexico sees the moment as an opportunity to attract investment in advanced manufacturing and electromobility. But the raw materials that a North American processing industry would need, the cobalt from the DRC, the lithium from Zimbabwe and Chile, the nickel from Indonesia, are all now subject to supply management regimes controlled by governments pursuing their own industrialisation agendas. Tightening North American rules of origin without securing stable feedstock supply from producer nations is an exercise in building a factory without ordering the raw materials.

The numbers make the dependency concrete. The United States accounts for just 3.6 percent of global cobalt consumption, 5.1 percent of nickel, and 1.7 percent of rare earth elements. That small consumption share limits the leverage Washington can exercise through market access threats alone. Vice President JD Vance's description of FORGE as a "preferential trade zone for critical minerals protected from external disruptions through enforceable price floors" rests on an assumption, that producer nations will want access to the FORGE zone badly enough to align their export policies with it. The DRC's behaviour in 2025 and 2026 suggests that assumption needs testing. Kinshasa is simultaneously implementing cobalt quotas that tighten supply to Chinese refiners, expanding copper exports to the United States under a security-backed minerals deal, and mounting a legal challenge in its own Constitutional Court to the validity of the minerals agreement on sovereignty grounds. That is not a country aligning with a bloc. That is a country optimising its position in a multi-polar auction.

The Gibson Dunn law firm, in its assessment of the shifting regulatory landscape, noted that resource nationalism is now "expanding beyond taxes and royalties, forcing lithium and rare earth investors to navigate export controls, production quotas, processing mandates and government intervention as governments compete for control of critical minerals." The shift, the firm concluded, is "turning critical minerals from a traditional mining business into a geopolitical contest." That framing captures the transformation accurately, but it understates the degree to which the Global South's producer nations are not merely participants in that contest. They are, increasingly, setting its terms.

Conclusion: The Trucks Will Move Again, on Different Terms

Back in Manicaland, the lithium trucks are moving again, more slowly, in smaller numbers, under quota allocations reviewed every six months by a government ministry that now holds a degree of leverage over the sector it has never previously exercised. The Chinese firms that built Zimbabwe's lithium industry on the assumption of open, low-cost concentrate exports are spending hundreds of millions of dollars building processing plants they did not originally intend to build, on timelines set by a government they previously dealt with from a position of structural advantage.

The pattern repeating across three continents carries a straightforward message for the governments, companies, and multilateral institutions that have spent the past three years designing architecture to secure Western supply chains. The Global South is not simply a source of raw materials waiting to be mobilised by the right combination of finance, diplomacy, and de-risking frameworks. It is a collection of sovereign governments that have watched China's export control playbook operate with devastating effectiveness, studied Indonesia's processing mandate experiment, and drawn the obvious conclusion: geology is leverage, but only if you are willing to use it.

Demand for critical minerals could increase nearly fourfold by 2030, according to UNCTAD projections. That demand trajectory concentrates bargaining power in the hands of the countries sitting on the deposits, provided those countries can build the institutional capacity to convert mineral endowment into durable industrial policy rather than episodic supply shocks. The DRC's cobalt quota system, running at less than 50 percent utilisation because paperwork and logistics cannot match policy ambition, is a reminder that the distance between the two is not trivial.

But the direction of travel is now clear. The world that Western critical mineral strategy was built to navigate, one in which China was the sole practitioner of strategic supply management and Global South producers competed passively on price, no longer exists. In its place is something considerably more complicated: a multi-polar resource nationalism in which Jakarta, Kinshasa, and Harare are each, in their own way, learning to be gatekeepers. Washington and Brussels are still adjusting to a world where Beijing alone held the keys. They now need strategies for a world where the keys are distributed across a dozen capitals, each with its own price.