The area around Hotazel in the Northern Cape contains much of the world’s known deposits of manganese.
Geopolitical tensions over critical minerals have become the focus of the global energy transition. The worldwide shift toward decarbonisation has transformed industrial strategy while reshaping worldwide power dynamics through control of strategic resources.
The United States, together with the European Union and China, are racing to secure supply chains that power clean energy technologies, including electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.
The US’s Inflation Reduction Act supports domestic manufacturing through incentives that transform worldwide trade patterns. The EU implements the Critical Raw Materials Act because of similar emergency conditions while building alliances with African nations to diversify mineral supplies and reduce strategic dependencies. China moved first and strategically built up its mineral treatment and component assembly capabilities while leaving other nations to pursue substitute development and protection against excessive dependency.
Other nations have taken strategic positions to secure critical mineral supply chain security along with these major powers. Canada and Greenland maintain active development of their critical mineral resources and Ukraine holds strategic lithium deposits, which will serve to reduce dependency on Chinese supply networks.
The world witnesses a broader shift where countries establish mineral accessibility according to their geopolitical and security goals.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a leading global supplier of cobalt for high-density batteries and coltan for capacitors for high-tech systems, entered negotiations for a strategic agreement with the US in March 2025 that seeks to grant the US exclusive rights to extract the country’s critical minerals. This proposed partnership reflects a broader trend of resource-rich African nations leveraging their mineral resources to create powerful international partnerships which secure long-term industrial and geopolitical benefits.
South Africa possesses platinum group metals together with manganese and vanadium, which makes it a prime candidate to lead the worldwide energy transition through renewable energy and electric vehicle batteries. The government allocated R1 billion in March 2025 to bring in R30 billion private investments which will establish electric vehicle manufacturing by 2035.
During its G20 presidency South Africa is concentrating on developing local processing facilities for critical minerals to enable resource-rich nations to gain monetary benefits from their natural resources. To achieve its potential, South Africa needs to resolve fragmented institutional mandates along with infrastructural impediments and inconsistent regulatory frameworks.
The EU dedicated R490 million to support South Africa’s green hydrogen industry in 2024. The question remains whether foreign investments will establish industrial autonomy in South Africa or pander to external supply chain requirements. True strategic autonomy requires more than hosting production facilities; it demands control of technology at the local level combined with manufacturing value addition capabilities and stronger export negotiation power.
To reduce overdependence and increase strategic influence means South Africa needs to expand global alliances outside the conventional Western and Eastern blocs. South Africa can create value chains that are more robust and focused on Africa by interacting with rising countries, regional allies, and international forums. Geopolitical hedging will enable South Africa to protect against external shocks while ensuring mineral benefits produce enduring industrial and economic value by increasing its strategic options.
According to the 2025 US Geological Survey (USGS) Mineral Commodity Summaries report, the US has identified 50 minerals which serve both economic operations and clean energy transformation. South Africa ranks as a leading global producer of at least 15 of the critical minerals, which include rare earth elements along with platinum group metals, vanadium, manganese, and chromium.
These critical minerals needed for clean energy and advanced industrial use face major supply issues. The USGS does not mention South Africa in its report yet its mineral reserves make it an essential player in the shifting global mineral landscape. South Africa needs to ensure its mineral engagements support a geopolitical hedging strategy that protects national sovereignty while creating regional processing facilities, developing domestic manufacturing, and enhancing Africa’s position in clean energy value chains.
A strategic and coordinated approach needs to be implemented by South Africa to achieve this potential. First, a sovereign beneficiation fund would serve as an effective risk management tool to protect investments made by private parties in mineral processing and component manufacturing operations. A public capital-based fund would help bring in private and development finance to effectively link resource extraction to industrial production. The fund would need to select projects which increase domestic value creation while allowing technology exchange and establishing local production facilities.
High-value component localisation would need to be incentivised as a necessary second step. The following incentives are potential options to localise high-value components: export refunds for value-added commodities, preferred procurement of local components, and tax incentives for regional processing facility investments. Long-term research together with talent development and local supplier integration should receive support from these incentives to drive industrial growth.
Third, improving interdepartmental interaction is essential. The government’s economic cluster oversees economic matters but the critical minerals sector needs departments to work together to execute policy — mineral and petroleum resources to work together with trade, industry and competition; electricity and energy; science and technology; and the treasury. The establishment of an inter-ministerial council dedicated to critical minerals will enable South Africa to join global value chains through unified strategy development, process optimisation, and policy unification.
The African Continental Free Trade Area offers regional cooperation opportunities to build processing centres and merge infrastructure while strengthening Africa’s united bargaining power. Using complimentary abilities may promote cooperation rather than competition in Southern Africa.
In April 2025, China enforced strict export controls on seven rare earth elements together with related magnets. These materials serve as fundamental components for creating advanced defence technologies along with wind turbines and electric vehicles. The trade measure has intensified worldwide market conflicts while revealing potential breakdowns in supply chains to industries around the world.
The recent developments demonstrate why South Africa needs to develop local value chains and increase processing capabilities and reduce its exposure to external threats.
The approval of South Africa’s Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy and the gazetting of the Mineral Resources Development Bill of 2025 represent a major policy transformation that unlocks industrial capabilities. The minister of mineral and petroleum resources announced on 20 May that the strategy defined platinum along with manganese, iron ore, coal and chrome ore as high-critical minerals followed by vanadium, palladium, rhodium, gold and rare earth elements as moderate to high criticality.
The strategy includes six strategic pillars which aim to establish resilient value chains and industrial ecosystems that link to clean energy technologies through exploration, local beneficiation, research and development investment, infrastructure development, financial support mechanisms and regulatory harmonisation. The strategy supports South African objectives to move past mining operations through the development of local talent and regional alliances for creating industrial inputs of high value. It provides an essential framework that enables mineral resource utilisation to achieve enduring economic stability and national strategic autonomy.
The competition for critical minerals in the global market extends beyond resources to determine how economic relationships will be governed in the future. South Africa controls the necessary mineral resources while having defined appropriate policy directions. The main obstacle is to convert this potential into strategic influence and enduring economic resilience through purposeful coordinated actions.
LebohangMafokosi is a public servant while pursuing her Master of Management in Energy Leadership degree at the University of the Witwatersrand.