Why Africa’s Green Energy Shift Risks Repeating Colonial Exploitation

The metals driving the so-called green revolution are being pulled out of African soil under the same colonial scaffolding the West swore it had dismantled. According to an analysis published in The Independent by Dr. Melania Chiponda, the global rush for lithium, cobalt, graphite, manganese, nickel and rare earth minerals across the continent is reproducing displacement, land dispossession and labour exploitation, just rebranded in the vocabulary of sustainability and net zero.

The extraction beneath the megawatts

The pitch is clean: electrify the world, retire fossil fuels, install renewables at scale. The reality on the ground, Chiponda documents, is anything but. In the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Hanyanya, Bikita, Zimbabwe, communities adjacent to critical mineral deposits are absorbing the costs of accelerated battery and renewable supply chains: environmental destruction, violence, and the quiet erasure of whatever consultation was promised on paper. The pattern extends into Mozambique, Uganda and Madagascar. What gets marketed globally as clean energy begins with dirty extraction. The branding department has changed; the material conditions have not.

Kenya illustrates the contradiction with particular clarity. More than 90 percent of its electricity now comes from renewable sources, a figure routinely cited as a continental triumph. Behind the geothermal plants and wind farms, Masai and Turkana pastoralist communities have lost grazing land, ancestral territory and cultural inheritance. Multinational operators and their investors count megawatts; host communities are left with expensive electricity, limited access to the grid the project feeds, and compensation packages designed to close complaints rather than redistribute value.

JET-P and the limits of political promises

South Africa's Just Energy Transition Partnership was packaged as the template: an $8.5 billion international financing arrangement designed to move the country off coal while shielding workers and frontline communities. The template has a crack running through it. Most of the commitments around reskilling, local economic transformation and fair compensation were political, not legally enforceable, and the analysis finds that many remain unmet. The lesson is structural. Without binding obligations on extractors, financiers and host governments, a "just transition" is whatever the most powerful actor in the room decides it is that quarter.

What to track from here

Three pressure points deserve attention. First, the legal status of community consent and benefit-sharing in mining contracts across the DRC, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda and Madagascar — whether sovereignty translates into enforceable rights or remains a negotiating chip. Second, whether the JET-P architecture gets retrofitted with binding labour and compensation clauses, or whether its shortcomings are quietly absorbed into the next partnership iteration. Third, the financing flows behind Kenyan renewables and similar showcase projects — who captures the revenue, who carries the displacement, and whether host communities have any mechanism to claw back value when the marketing and the material reality diverge.

The continent does not need saving. It needs the extractive architecture that has profited from its people and its minerals for five centuries to stop relabelling itself. Anything less is just colonialism with a sustainability report.