Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Introduction: The pitfalls of resource-national consciousness

“History teaches us clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of nationalism. For a very long time the native devotes his energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc. This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle, will give rise to tragic mishaps.”

Frantz Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,’ Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961

Recent history teaches us that the battle against super-exploitative extractivism does not run straight away along the lines of resource nationalism. For a very long time the critic devotes their energies to ending certain definite abuses: lack of revenue transparency, inadequate community consultation and participation, abuse of worker safety and health, and Illicit Financial Flows (not to be confused with ‘Licit’ outflows, no matter how dubious are profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. and dividend repatriations). This fight for clean mining and fossil fuel extraction, against the oppression of multinational corporations and captured states, will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people (and the environment), their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle, will give rise to tragic mishaps.

The ideology known as resource nationalism is one such tragic mishap. The universal neo-liberal utilisation of Gross Domestic Product GDP
Gross Domestic Product Gross Domestic Product is an aggregate measure of total production within a given territory equal to the sum of the gross values added. The measure is notoriously incomplete; for example it does not take into account any activity that does not enter into a commercial exchange. The GDP takes into account both the production of goods and the production of services. Economic growth is defined as the variation of the GDP from one period to another. (GDP) and national income accounts to assess progress and prosperity is another. Those supporting – or for some scholars, even merely investigating – resource nationalism have, as, Samir Amin (2018, 86) put it, “passed an eraser over the analyses advanced by Marx on this subject and taken the point of view of the bourgeoisie – equated to an atemporal ‘rational’ point of view – in regard to the exploitation of natural resources.” Thanks to this eraser, the very term ‘pitfall’ can be understood in the pages that follow, by the invisibility or unexpected character of a danger, disruption or blind spot that lies directly ahead. Amin’s condemnation of an atemporal ‘rational’ point of view points to resource nationalists who simply consider the laziest aspects of immediate extraction-related costs and benefits (without consideration of future generations’ legitimate interests), usually stressing benefits: technology transfers, new infrastructure for the project and related transport of mineral ores, smelted product or fuels, jobs (no matter how temporary), economic linkages backwards to suppliers or forwards to purchasers, royalties and taxes, and foreign exchange revenues.

To illustrate, for three of the most prominent resource-national advocates – Alexander Caramento, Richard G. Saunders and Miles Larmer (2023, 340) – the regulatory agenda therefore entails harnessing these benefits to aid extraction and capital accumulation:

First, maximisation of public revenue from resource extraction, which includes measures such as increased royalties, taxes, and duties on extractive industries and the removal or limitation of tax exemptions and deductions. Secondly, the regulation and ownership of extractive industries, which includes measures such as the creation or renovation of state regulatory bodies and the outright or partial nationalisation of privately owned assets. Lastly, the enhancement of developmental spillovers from extractive industries, which typically includes the cultivation of backward and forward linkages, such as the implementation of local content measures in the case of the former, or the utilisation of domestic mineral processing and metal fabrication facilities in the case of the latter.

However, in the revival of a post-colonial resource-nationalism identified with the 2009 African Mining Vision process, reforms were muted (Caramento, Saunders and Larmer 2023, 341):

Resource nationalism’s second wave, which emerged in the late 2000s, has been restrained in its preferred regulatory interventions compared with typical first-wave strategies. For the most part, private-sector control of the large-scale extractives sector was left intact. There were few attempts to nationalise or indigenise substantial mining assets and, instead, strategies typically aimed to increase mineral revenues through new taxation measures, improve regulatory oversight through capacity-building and cultivate productive linkages between mining and other economic sectors.

The problem with this perspective is not only the environmental and gender eraser, because nowhere in such a list would a resource-nationalist scholar, NGO advocate (e.g. in the Publish What You Pay network), or policy-maker ever encounter the need to calculate – much less attempt to minimise – resource depletion, local pollution, greenhouse gas emissions or unreasonable forms of gendered social-reproduction subsidies to capital. But there are hundreds of community-based movements making this case, and they also typically suffer erasure. To be fair, Caramento, Saunders and Larmer (2023) do recognise conflicts where activists claim the costs of extractive industries outweigh benefits:

In cases where communities protested such encroachment, national governments – who increasingly depended on resource extraction as a source of fiscal revenues – tended to side with the foreign investors. More fundamentally, critics argued, neo-extractivism led to the ‘reprimarisation’ of Latin America, returning regional economies to their dependence on primary commodity exports, rendering them increasingly vulnerable to market price fluctuations.

But these are partial caveats about resource nationalism, mostly erasing costs of extraction, processing, transport and consumption of non-renewable natural resources. Such costs depend upon the extent of an extractivist project’s reach into economy, society and nature, and upon local conditions – e.g., the relative laziness of the state (or of resource-nationalist experts) – and, in a far deeper way than resource nationalists would recognise, entail these categories:

• ecological: degradation and pollution of local land, air, water, ecosystems, living bodies
• socio-psychological: displacement, gendered violence, aesthetic destruction
• labour and health: migrant work systems (family degradation), workplace safety, disease
• spiritual/traditional: despoliation of sacred sites (e.g. graves) and common spaces
• political (local, national): elite formation, corruption and compradorism
• geo-political: imperial, sub-imperial and local turf battles over extraction and transport
• mal-developmental: ‘Dutch Disease’ economic skew (against local manufacturing) and abuse of electricity (needed for labour-intensive industry, small businesses, households)
• financial: price volatility, Illicit (and Licit) Financial Flows, raises unnecessary foreign debt
• ecological-economic: ‘natural capital’ wealth depletion adverse for future generations
• climatic: fossil fuel emissions including in mining, processing, smelting and transport

What David Harvey (2003) terms systematic ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is evident in these costs. They are what economists term ‘externalities’: costs beyond market self-correction, carried by societies and ecologies. To take them seriously implies a full accounting, one that may result in this pessimistic conclusion: resource nationalism has such vast pitfalls, that serious sovereign consciousness would result in support to anti-extractivist movements aiming to leave minerals and fossil fuels underground, not half-hearted reforms (e.g. the African Mining Vision) with no prospect of changing power relations or ending resource-driven underdevelopment.

To avoid asking such questions, resource-nationalist research funding – e.g. for the team assembled by Caramento, Saunders and Larmer (2023) – is often available from agencies within the imperialist/subimperialist pro-extractivist circuits. In Canada, the world’s most expansive extractive industry’s interests are continually being advanced, against African interests. Still, even authors without such funding – e.g. most contributors to the Review of African Political Economy’s special issues on political ecology (42, 74 and 177-178) – also suffer the Amin eraser: carelessly ignoring the implications of depletion, pollution, emissions and social reproduction.

As a rare exception, in 2018 Zsuzsánna Biedermann conceded at Roape.net “the finite nature of exhaustible natural resources: transitory extra income allows increased consumption but only for a certain period of time. What happens when the resource is depleted?” She answered, using a Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis projection, that after diamond depletion, between 2025-27 GDP will fall “47% below the non-depletion path.” But the broader point relates not to the ubiquitous and highly damaging concept of GDP (developed in 1934 by a white male U.S. economist, Simon Kuznets), but instead to the central feature of Africa’s ‘dependency curse’ (to quote Biedermann): the decline in mineral wealth suffered by Botswana as a sovereign state, one of the three worst cases in Africa (World Bank World Bank
WB The World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states’ contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries’ payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMF’s therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

2021). Yet management of diamonds in Gaborone is considered a best-case site for resource nationalists, due to state-owned Debswana’s sharing of diamond mining spoils, even if wealth depletion has occurred in a manner favouring an acquisitive, unproductive elite in the bureaucratic managerial class. Added to land-holding inequality, Botswana is one of the world’s worst cases of wealth disparity: “the top 10% of households in the income distribution own 57% of all assets and 61% of financial assets, while the bottom 50% own only 4.2% and 3.3%, respectively” (United Nations 2023).

As the late Ian Taylor (2020, 9) reported in The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy – one of two authors in this major work to consider the continent’s non-renewable resources – integral to “this depletion of finite resources and a subsequent negative debit on a country’s stock, inequality has been reinscribed,” given the comprador nature of resource managers. Taylor (2020, 7) continues, “calculations of GDP do not make deductions for the depreciation of fabricated assets or for the depletion and degradation of natural resources. Thus, a country can have very high growth rates calculated using GDP indicators, whilst embarking on a short-term and unsustainable exploitation of its finite resources.”
In that collection’s other resource-conscious essay, Alexis Habiyaremye (2020, 713) observes how “Depletion of natural capital by foreign exploitation also contributes to impoverishing the continent. The World Bank estimates with 1995–2015 data indicate that Sub-Saharan Africa has been losing roughly $100 billion of Adjusted Net Savings per year, mainly due to natural resource depletion.”

As discussed later, this is a profound underestimate in part because of Bank methodological shortcomings, in relation to climate damage and natural capital accounts. Adding greenhouse gas emissions costings – prolific in the extractive industries due to energy consumed in deep mining, processing and smelting – and local pollution costs, as well as social reproduction subsidies by women, should be central concerns for any scholar aiming to balance Balance End of year statement of a company’s assets (what the company possesses) and liabilities (what it owes). In other words, the assets provide information about how the funds collected by the company have been used; and the liabilities, about the origins of those funds. resource potentials and pitfalls. Damage done by extractive industries is especially vivid in the case of South Africa, as documented below, prior to an assessment of resistance narratives capturing these phenomena in ways resource-nationalism advocates have not yet begun to contemplate.

Accounting for resource depletion, (local) pollution and (global) emissions

Natural resource valuation is vital mainly because the standard unit of mainstream economics, GDP, measures income from sales of natural resources. But GDP contains no formal debit for depletion of non-renewable resources. In Marxian terms, such depletion – as well as eco-system damage through local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions – was termed a ‘free gift of nature’ to capital. As Rosa Luxemburg (2003) argued in 1913, followed by Harvey (2003) and Amin (2018), this represents capitalism’s systemic appropriation of the non-capitalist realms (Bond Bond A bond is a stake in a debt issued by a company or governmental body. The holder of the bond, the creditor, is entitled to interest and reimbursement of the principal. If the company is listed, the holder can also sell the bond on a stock-exchange. 2021). Luxemburg (2003, 349-350) condemned capital’s environmental degradation in Africa, citing “land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc… The most important of these productive forces is of course the land, its hidden mineral treasure…” For Amin (1974), ecological implications of super-exploitation emerged both from the differential rates of surplus-value extraction he identified in Accumulation on a World Scale, and later from capitalism’s abusive contact with non-capitalist ecological relations: “Capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment” (Amin 2018).

Even bourgeois economists began to address resource depletion and eco-system destruction once Nobel Laureate Robert Solow (1974) and his colleague John Hartwick (1977) established an asset Asset Something belonging to an individual or a business that has value or the power to earn money (FT). The opposite of assets are liabilities, that is the part of the balance sheet reflecting a company’s resources (the capital contributed by the partners, provisions for contingencies and charges, as well as the outstanding debts). -measurement lens. They asked whether shrinkage of ‘natural capital’ due to exploitation of natural resources can be offset by the resulting investment in productive capital and ‘human capital’ (education expenditures). They insisted that if pollution or shrinkage of ecological wealth (e.g. minerals extraction) were to occur, it should only be permitted if benefits – i.e., profits, taxes and wages that can be counted up and down the value chain – then flow into the expansion of productive or human capital. The point, here, is to protect the interests of future generations who have a notional ‘right’ to also draw down a society’s non-renewable natural resource base, the way ‘family silver’ is considered the basis for responsible stewardship and in some cases, formal ‘trusteeship’
Bond and Basu 2021). A net positive outcome (termed ‘weak sustainability’) assumes the substitutability of these various capitals: lost natural capital is offset by reinvestments of profits into machinery, infrastructure or schooling that makes capitalism more productive. ‘Strong sustainability’ – championed by and Robert Costanza and Herman Daly (1992) – advocates raising natural capital in absolute terms.

To assess the dynamics behind these capitals, World Bank data are the most comprehensive available (Bond and Basu 2021). Recent Bank findings in a 2024 Changing Wealth of Nations (CWON) study confirm a 60% per person decline in non-renewable natural capital from 1995-2020 in low-income countries (most of Africa) and 17% in lower-middle income countries. The upper-middle income countries include the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South African (BRICS BRICS The term BRICS (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) was first used in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, then an economist at Goldman Sachs. The strong economic growth of these countries, combined with their important geopolitical position (these 5 countries bring together almost half the world’s population on 4 continents and almost a quarter of the world’s GDP) make the BRICS major players in international economic and financial activities. ), which are often both agents of extraction and manufacturing middle-men. Most profits still go to high-income economies benefiting from royalties, copyrights, R&D and financing (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Change in wealth per capita, by income group and asset class, 1995-2020

Source: World Bank 2024, p.69

Such calculations draw on the World Bank’s (2021, 2024) CWON database and conceive of natural capital dynamics within a broader Adjusted Net Savings measure for each economy, one that also aims to account for pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. CWON utilises the national state as a unit of analysis (Lange et al 2018) which, to be sure, is inappropriate due to the transnational scope of both unequal ecological exchange and ecocide, given that pollution and greenhouse emissions do not respect borders. Moreover, an extremely unequal society like South Africa is not a coherent ‘nation,’ in part because of divergences in social reproduction responsibilities due to a migrant labour system that has bedevilled large-scale mining as well as the artisanal extractive industries. After democracy was won in 1994, migrancy was not ended.

South Africa’s depletion, pollution and emissions accounts

Among the world’s worst-ever cases of uncompensated natural capital depletion are the diamonds and gold extracted from Kimberley since the late 1860s and Johannesburg since the mid-1880s. Nevertheless, a vast amount of underground natural wealth still exists in South Africa in the form of minerals, measured conservatively at $2.5 trillion by Citibank in 2012 (I-Net Bridge 2012). There are, however, methodological shortcomings in World Bank (2021) studies of mineral wealth: not including platinum group metals, manganese and chrome, where South Africa has led the world for most of the period under discussion; nor zirconium, vanadium and titanium (South Africa is the world’s second highest producer); nor diamonds. The Bank’s natural capital accounts count fossil fuels and other minerals and metals: bauxite, cobalt, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, lithium, molybdenum, nickel, phosphate rock, silver, tin and zinc.

Even without counting several valuable minerals, South Africa is revealed as a major net loser of non-renewable resource wealth (World Bank 2021, 204). Just three African economies suffered worse mineral wealth decline – the Central African Republic, Botswana and Zimbabwe – and “88 percent of [Sub-Saharan African] countries were found to be depleting their wealth... even as they show growth in annual income. As these countries grow, they are not compensating for depletion of natural resources” (World Bank 2014). Evidence of degradation can be found in Bank natural capital accounting charts (again, highly conservative, due to missing minerals):

1. The first reveals that in South Africa, mineral depletion is substantial, with losses rising to $10.9 billion in 2021 even without counting platinum and many other minerals (Figure 2).
2. Second, South African and international ‘Natural resource rents’ as a share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. of GDP reveal income ebbs and flows from what are mainly depleting sources (Figure 3).
3. Third, specific coal resource rents reveal the South African economy’s comparative addiction to fossil fuels, both for burning in Eskom coal-fired power plants and for export, even if such rents do not capture enormous damages from local pollution and global emissions (Figure 4).
4. So, fourth, if natural capital depletion, pollution and emissions are combined with (positive) educational funding (‘human capital investment’) and depreciation of physical capital (wear and tear on machines), the Bank’s full Adjusted Net Savings measure reveals that the South African economy has been shrinking, especially from 2012-20, a time the rest of the world recorded relatively high rates of positive saving (9%–11% of GDP) (Figure 5).Figure 2: SA Adjusted Net Savings due to losses from minerals depletion (US$ bn), 1970–2021

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.DMIN.CD?locations=ZA-1W&view=chart

Figure 2: Resource rents (% of GDP), 1970–2021: South Africa (top) and the world (bottom)

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.TOTL.RT.ZS?locations=ZA-1W&view=chart

Figure 4: Coal resource rents (% of GDP), 1970–2021: South Africa (top) and the world (bottom)

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.COAL.RT.ZS?locations=ZA-1W&view=chart

Figure 5: Adjusted Net Savings (% of GNI), 1970–2020: world (top) and South Africa (bottom)

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.SVNG.GN.ZS?view=chart&locations=ZA--1W

Not only is uncompensated depletion a major source of corporate plunder by multinational and also local firms. Local pollution and greenhouse gases also result from the extractive industries, as residents and workers suffer toxic emissions, and as future generations inherit a degraded environment. South Africa’s economy suffers some of the world’s worst airborn particulate matter (sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide), especially from a dozen Eskom coal-fired power plants and Sasol’s petrochemical complexes south east of Johannesburg (Greenpeace 2024) (Figure 6). There are obvious costs to polluted air – not to mention land and water – associated with such high particulate matter (PM). The World Bank’s conservative measure of adverse “health impacts from exposure to ambient PM2.5 pollution and household air pollution” in South Africa ranges from $1 billion to $2 billion over the period 1990-2020 (Figure 7).

Figure 6: African emissions of Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), 2018-23

Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HZ4JAbS06x6vMV3V2VSNaU2JVoR0b0OB/view

Figure 7: Particulate emission damage (current US$), South Africa, 1990-2020

Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.DPEM.CD?locations=ZA

Also due to reliance upon coal-fired power plants plus high levels of carbon-intensive industrial output, South Africa is the third highest greenhouse gas emitter per person per unit of GDP output amongst all countries with more than 10 million people. Per capita CO2 emissions has certainly fallen from the peak of 9.7 tons in 2008 (just over twice the global average of 4.7), but that was mainly because from 2008, sustained electricity load-shedding meant Eskom’s coal-fired power plants were emitting less CO2 than when running at peak (Figure 8).

Figure 8: CO2 emissions (fossil fuels and industry): tons/person, SA (top) and world, 1900-2023

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions

Moreover, starting in March 2024, declines recorded in coal depletion, local pollution and greenhouse gas emissions were at least temporarily reversed due to repairs at Eskom’s two largest coal-fired power plants, which dramatically increased supply. On the other hand, industrial and mining demand for electricity also declined from mid-2022 due to falling smelted-metals prices (aside from gold). That in turn led to reduced output by the Energy Intensive Users Group (2024) of 27 multinational corporations that would typically consume 42% of the country’s electricity (while creating just 4% of its jobs). As a final policy factor of interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. , the South African carbon tax of $0.38/ton (compared to Europe’s typically at $70/ton in its carbon markets) was not a reason for declining emissions in this period. But from 2026, a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism imposed by the European Union will likely have a major impact on cutting carbon intensive exports, and hence output and emissions (Bond 2025).

There are enormous damages associated not only with approximately 30 billion megatons of greenhouse gases South Africa has emitted from 1850-2021, but in the last quarter century, with the 500 megatons of annual greenhouse gas emissions, especially since the commodity super-cycle kicked in and much more deep mining, smelting, petrochemical and other heavy industries increased output. The early-2000s increases were associated both with Eskom coal-fired power and process emissions in processing and smelting industries. With the Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG) representing the economy’s two dozen largest mining, smelting and petrochemical firms, their share of Eskom’s emissions – which in mid-2024 (a winter, higher-use period) averaged 18 megatons/month – was typically 42%, or 90 megatons/year.

Measuring climate damage done to the world by these emissions – in the forms of extreme weather events, drought-related fires, sea level rise, and long-term disruptions to agriculture – entails generating a ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ (SCC) variable. One 2024 SCC estimate, in a National Bureau of Economic Research study (Bilal and Känzig 2024) endorsed by the World Economic Forum (2024) and Forbes (Kobayashi-Solomon 2024), is $1056/ton. Other SCC estimates of damage/ton emphasising future feedback loops are as high as $3000, by researchers at University College London (2021, Kikstra et al 2021). In the middle range at $1056/ton, the aggregate annual SCC (times 90 megatons) from South Africa’s extractive and processing industries – what are sometimes termed the ‘Minerals Energy Complex’ – would be $95 billion. The entire economy’s GDP was $378 billion in 2023; mining contributed less than $12 billion.

The most obvious way that climate managers in high-emissions jurisdictions have avoided SCC-level polluter-pay penalties of anything like this magnitude, is by instead offering a patchwork of carbon pricing strategies consisting of taxes and emissions trading Market activities
trading Buying and selling of financial instruments such as shares, futures, derivatives, options, and warrants conducted in the hope of making a short-term profit. schemes (ETSs). The same year the Kyoto Protocol was ratified, 2005, the European Union (EU) ETS was launched, although it was only from 2019 that it began pricing emissions above €20/ton, due to Brussels’ generous ‘free allowances’ (Figure 9).

Figure 9. Carbon pricing jurisdictions, prices and coverage, 2024

Source: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/253e6cdd-9631-4db2-8cc5-1d013956de15/content

South Africa’s carbon tax is, for effective purposes in 2025-26, only $0.38/ton, given exemptions to many firms and a particularly low rate ($0.33/ton) for the two main emitters, Eskom and Sasol. The logic of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – to be introduced by the EU in 2026 and the United Kingdom in 2027 – is obvious, given the vast gaps in pricing between South African aluminium and iron and steel production, versus European and British competitors. Importers of South African aluminium and steel will from 2026 purchase CBAM certificates to identify both direct (‘process emissions’) and indirect (e.g. embedded energy) CO2, thus raising prices on exports.

In future, methodological rigour will be vital, given that export of CBAM-listed goods – especially smelted metals – also entails unequal ecological exchange: raw materials within these products include vast quantities of non-renewable resources which are extracted and processed by multinational corporations (Bond and Basu 2021).The CBAM-proscribed products are not only subject to process emissions during production; there is a very high electricity input content in their extraction, manufacture, smelting and processing. In South Africa and many other countries suffering chronic electricity shortages, if CBAM results in lower EU consumption demand for such goods (which are typically among an economy’s most capital-intensive, not only carbon-intensive), and if the goods are therefore not consumed in other export or domestic markets, then lower output caused by CBAM would allow redistribution of scarce electricity to labour-intensive industries, small businesses and households. In turn, electricity redistribution would boost economic output (compared to present use), and usually also would occur without the non-renewable-resource depletion and extreme levels of pollution and emissions now associated with CBAM-affected sectors’ extraction and production systems.

If not extracted now as a result of CBAM penalties or community activism, the resources could be used by future generations, including raw materials found within targeted sectors: core ingredients bauxite and energy sources for aluminum; iron ore, ferroalloys and metallurgical coal in steel; calcareous materials and argillaceous substances in cement; and coal, oil and gas for energy combustion. In the latter case, preventing extraction today allows in future for higher-value hydrocarbon use: as lubricants, synthetic materials and pharmaceutical products.

Even without such opportunity-cost correctives, the World Bank’s (2023) ‘Relative CBAM Exposure Index’ identified EU exports and CO2 emissions intensity (Figure 10). The Bank (2023) assumes a $100/ton CO2 price: “In the index, green signifies an increase in relative competitiveness while red implies a decrease.” The measures combine shares of an exporting country’s CBAM-covered products into the EU, and the embodied carbon payment per dollar of export to the EU, determined by the carbon emissions intensity. South Africa is counted as over-exposed to Europe in view of the CBAM’s impact, in aluminum and iron and steel (as well as in fertilisers). Due to CBAM’s impact on emissions management, the likely loss of EU and British markets are yet another factor that resource nationalists typically erase.

Figure 10: Embodied CO2 emissions in aluminum and iron and steel, 2023:

Emissions intensity with ‘pivot point’ (where imports are competitive with EU production)

Source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/data/interactive/2023/06/15/relative-cbam-exposure-index

‘The Right to Say No!’ to resource looting, from Southern Africa to the World Social Forum

Evidence above reveals dangers of extracting non-renewable resources without regard for depletion, pollution and emissions, under conditions of super-exploited labour (with the highly gendered and geographical implications of migrancy). The adverse wealth effects should lead any objective observer to question the sustainability of contemporary mining, even using the mainstream definition of Gro Harlem Brundtland for the United Nations (1987) – “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” – augmented by the environmental-economic Hartwick Rule for reinvestment of the income proceeds from natural capital depletion.

Once depletion and other factors are considered, it is clear that the current extractivist system leaves South African society much poorer, given that mining revenues are not reinvested in adequate productive capital or education, but instead externalised to foreign-headquartered mining houses. The same is true across most of the African continent. Even the most obvious exception, Botswana, has not broken free of constraints associated with its primary raw material dependency, in part because it has limited its ambitions to a partnership with De Beers within the context of what is merely a resource nationalist agenda.

Strong critiques of South African mining-corporate power and capture of state policymaking are not particularly controversial. The 1955 Freedom Charter called for ‘mineral wealth’ to be ‘transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole,’ a demand revived more than a half-century later when the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League (2010) insisted,

our economy should break free from total dependence on the power of the mining-energy-finance monopoly capital. This is important because minerals resources are non-renewable resources, which will be depleted with the passage of time… Minerals resources are non-renewable resources and the further we extract these resources, the further we deplete South Africa’s potential wealth and strategic economic importance and significance in the world economy. It is therefore the responsibility of the ANC government to ensure that minerals wealth is utilised in an environmentally friendly fashion and economically durable manner for the benefit of all people. All the big Mining corporations that currently benefit from South Africa’s wealth were built on the foundation of poor people’s sweat and blood as cheap labourers, slaves and underpaid workers in the Mines. The people of South Africa should share in the country’s wealth. The mineral wealth beneath the soil, monopoly industries and banks should be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.

The Youth League’s leaders were soon expelled in part because of Julius Malema’s insistence on mine nationalisation, with Cyril Ramaphosa playing the decisive role (Reuters 2012). Malema then founded the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (typically gaining 10% of the vote) which consistently advocates for nationalisation, even if the other three features of the critique – pollution, emissions and social reproduction – are not part of his narrative.

Moreover, depletion is part of a nationalist critique of ‘White Monopoly Capital’ and ‘all the big mining corporations’ – but is not yet as a line of argument invoking inter-generational justice. One reason is that scholarship and NGO advocacy have thus far erased natural wealth depletion. Indeed many if not all aspects of the critique of resource-nationalism above are ignored by proponents, including the hosts of a recent Canadian conference held at York University (2024). The tragedy therein, is that in part because the deeper critique is not contemplated, the only oppositional public-interest forces noticed by Caramento, Saunders and Larmer (2023, 356-57) are of a mildly reformist character:

Local communities surrounding mine sites have sought greater employment opportunities and the decentralised redistribution of fiscal receipts. Civil society organisations (CSOs) have advocated for greater transparency in the collection and allocation of resource rents and have encouraged African governments to counter mining companies’ efforts to evade taxation. CSOs have also sought to challenge the dislocation and environmental devastation of communities that reside near large-scale mining operations. Mining labour has sought less precarious work, improved and harmonised compensation packages, the domestication of mining employment, greater investment in skills development and increased workplace health and safety. Finally, artisanal and small-scale miners have sought to challenge property rights regimes and to secure better access to finance, machinery and services in support of expanded operations. Many of these constituencies were marginalised under neoliberal structural adjustment Structural Adjustment Economic policies imposed by the IMF in exchange of new loans or the rescheduling of old loans.

Structural Adjustments policies were enforced in the early 1980 to qualify countries for new loans or for debt rescheduling by the IMF and the World Bank. The requested kind of adjustment aims at ensuring that the country can again service its external debt. Structural adjustment usually combines the following elements : devaluation of the national currency (in order to bring down the prices of exported goods and attract strong currencies), rise in interest rates (in order to attract international capital), reduction of public expenditure (’streamlining’ of public services staff, reduction of budgets devoted to education and the health sector, etc.), massive privatisations, reduction of public subsidies to some companies or products, freezing of salaries (to avoid inflation as a consequence of deflation). These SAPs have not only substantially contributed to higher and higher levels of indebtedness in the affected countries ; they have simultaneously led to higher prices (because of a high VAT rate and of the free market prices) and to a dramatic fall in the income of local populations (as a consequence of rising unemployment and of the dismantling of public services, among other factors).

IMF : http://www.worldbank.org/ and the ‘good governance’ reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s.

This mild-mannered approach can be considered a ‘reformist reform’ (Gorz 1974), because if successful, not only will it legitimise prevailing adverse systems of natural wealth depletion, local pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and social reproduction, by erasing most of the deeper analysis of the extractive industries above. Such reformism also ignores a ‘Right to Say No!’ movement which is increasingly arguing that minerals should be left underground. The further argument (and popular demand) that it ignores concerns ‘ecological debt’: reparations are due from those institutions – including Canadian corporations, the Canadian state and wealthy shareholders – which have unfairly benefited from extractivism.

Given the net negative role of the extractive industries in Africa, surely the first step is to halt the damage. To that end, some resource-nationalist advocates suggest that mining – even fossil fuel extraction – can be reformed through initiatives aimed at shining a harsh spotlight on extractive-industry transactions to disinfect them of corruption and opacity. Establishment efforts through states and multilateral agencies include the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and African Mining Vision. Civil society groups with that limited agenda include the Soros-funded Publish What You Pay Network, Global Financial Integrity, Tax Justice Network, Eurodad and many other NGOs who are mainly disconnected from grassroots struggles.

Others take an anti-extractivist approach, typically agreeing that there is a degree of minimally-necessary mining that must occur for life to continue, but that contemporary consumption norms require a ‘degrowth’ rethinking because of enormous waste, socio-ecological and economic externalities, and unjust systems of accumulation by dispossession. The latter typically occur through support of micro-struggles that can periodically be brought together in coalitions, such as the Right to Say No! movement to leave minerals underground (in South Africa, supported by the Alternative Information and Development Centre), or Mining Affected Communities United in Action, or the network Women against Destructive Extraction (WoMin).

A few South African examples are illustrative. On the Indian Ocean ‘Wild Coast’ beaches starting in 2007, activists in the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) led by Nonhle Mbuthuma – an internationally-known eco-feminist who in 2024 was Goldman Environmental Prize co-winner – began battling an Australian mining house which aimed to extract titanium oxide from the world’s tenth largest ilmenite deposit, located in the dunes of Xolobeni in the Eastern Cape (ACC 2016). Between 2007 and 2018, the struggle appeared not only futile but dangerous, and one leader (Bazooka Radebe) was assassinated in 2016, amidst other suspicious deaths and constant threats (Ellis 2020b). For the ACC, a crucial shift in power was realised in 2018 when a High Court judge was persuaded to reject mining at Xolobeni because the community had not given its ‘Free, Prior and Informed Consent,’ a concept the United Nations endorsed in the early 2000s and which infuriated the state (Matikinka 2019). In 2020, another judge required disclosure of previously-withheld details about the Australian firm’s deals (Ellis 2020a).

And in 2021-25, the ACC embarked on a much higher-stakes battle, demanding a halt to offshore fossil fuel exploration by Shell Oil and its main local ally, Johnny Copelyn’s Impact Africa (Bond 2023a). Co-plaintiff Sinegugu Zukulu of Sustaining the Wild Coast (a Goldman Prize co-winner alongside Mbuthuma) explained: “Oil and gas will lead to more emissions, and in the face of climate change, this is wholly irresponsible. We as Amadiba people unanimously oppose this oil exploration and destruction of our sacred land” (Welz 2022). The ‘sacred’ also included the Indian Ocean, for Zukulu and Mbuthuma, aided by renowned lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, added to some of the case’s main narratives – failure of the oil firms to consult the community, likely marine-biological damage, greenhouse gas emissions, and hydrocarbon resource-depletion (Bond 2023a) – a creative cultural- and spiritual-rights-based argument to leave fossil fuels underwater. In an interdict against oil exploration in 2021, a High Court judge agreed that the Wild Coast residents’ ancestors were threatened:

“How ancestors can reside in the sea and how they can be disturbed, may be asked. It is not the duty of this court to seek answers to those questions. We must accept that those practices and beliefs exist. In terms of the Constitution those practices and beliefs must be respected and where conduct offends those practices and beliefs and impacts negatively on the environment, the court has a duty to step in and protect those who are offended and the environment.” (cited in Graham 2024, 21)

While the Constitutional Court is to finally decide the merits of Shell/Copelyn drilling in 2025, the cultural-rights provision was confirmed in both a 2022 High Court judgement against Shell/Copelyn, and a 2024 Supreme Court appeal judgment. Some of the other oil and gas drilling – e.g. at Brulpadda/Luiperd – was then halted by Total. Such linkages of local and global consciousness came at a time more than a hundred protests were occurring against Shell, Total, Impact Africa and other oil companies across South Africa’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean beaches, demanding that fossil fuels be left underground (Bond and Rempel 2024).

A few hundred kilometers up the Indian Ocean coastline, another leading community activist demanding the Right to Say No! to fossil fuels, Fikile Ntshangase, and her Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation – with 4000 members – appeared to be winning a battle against coal extraction that had encroached on their rural villages since 2007. But in 2020, she was assassinated by several local pro-mining thugs (shot in front of four grandchildren), and then the local coal mine Tendele – originally financed by the World Bank – continued its expansion, ignoring the communities’ resource depletion, local pollution and greenhouse gas critiques (Bond 2023b).

Even before Ntshangase’s assassination, a WoMin (2017) research report about the Mfolozi activists’ grievances, “No longer a life worth living”, documented the gendered eco-social atrocities caused by Tendele coal mine near the continent’s oldest nature reserve (iMfolozi-Hluhluwe), including theft of water. That latter battleground is becoming more common due to the extractive industries’ wide-spread despoliation of fresh water, and has led to further consideration about not only women’s burdens during specific climate-catastrophic events, but also the responsibility that patriarchy places upon women to steward ecological inheritances, natural resources and life itself into future generations (Madhanagopal, Bond and Bayón 2022).

Earthlife Africa is another women-led civil (and often uncivil) society movement with community allies who insist on leaving fossil fuels underground, especially coal in Limpopo Province’s Waterberg and the Limpopo Valley just north of the city of Makhado. There, Chinese plans for a $10 billion metallurgical Special Economic Zone were resumed in 2024, resulting in community-based and conservationist fusion against extractivism (Bond 2025). Visionary women’s leadership there comes partly from as another Goldman Prize winner – Makoma Lekalakala – who, according to Dineo Skosana and Jacklyn Cock (2023, 87), is one of the “black working-class women in mining-affected areas doing important eco-feminist work in four respects,” namely social reproduction, meeting “collective rather than individualised needs,” a “respect for nature that goes beyond the expansionist logic of capitalism,” and “their role in taking responsibility for and caring for the sick,” e.g. those in labour-sending as well as local-mining areas that are among the most victimised by Covid-19, tuberculosis or AIDS, running rampant due to migrant-work conditions.

One initial step towards a Right to Say No! consciousness is to address the lack of public awareness about the implications of wealth drainage. To illustrate, by 2050, the viable extraction of South African gold is anticipated to end, after a period of rampant depletion. As Jason Kirk et al (2003) reminded, “Nearly half the gold ever mined in human history has come from these conglomerates in South Africa’s Witwatersrand basin.” But the wealthiest of the Reef’s reinvestment sites, Johannesburg, was by the 2020s suffering widespread collapse of its basic water reticulation system, in part due to having run out of fiscal resources; again, another leading voice in the struggle for water justice was an eco-feminist socialist, Ferial Adam (2024).

Moving to Zimbabwe, during the 2010s, it became obvious that the world’s largest diamond find since Kimberley was also being drained of wealth, without reinvestment: “We have not received much from the diamond industry at all. I don’t think we have exceeded $2 billion, yet we think more than $15 billion has been earned,” according to then-president Robert Mugabe (Magaisa 2016). As explained by the main civil society watchdog, Farai Maguwu (2016, 5), founder of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, “mining is a disaster unfolding across Zimbabwe. Mining is creating an enclave economy full of white-collar criminals, who make virtually no positive linkages to the broader Zimbabwean economy. They simply deplete our natural capital and provide an inconsequential return.” According to the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, that “Diamond revenue represents natural capital depletion and, therefore, its expenditure should be judicious” (Sibanda and Makore 2013, 29).

These sorts of engagements allow WoMin (2019, 9), for example, to

foreground a feminist analysis of costs, showing that this places particular burdens on the cheap and unpaid labour of impacted women. We will grapple further with the problematic of costing damage and impacts, immediately and on a cumulative basis, to show that an extractivist model of development does not advance people and their economies, but rather destroys and immiserates them. We will show the inter-generational costs of extractivism and we will work to argue that Africa and African nations are losing sovereign wealth through extractivism and only becoming poorer. These efforts lay the basis for advocacy and campaigns to build wider popular and public consciousness, build the grounds for advocacy on development alternatives, as well as advocate and campaign to force the internalisation of real costs, which would render the majority of projects unsustainable.

Activism, anti-extractivist argumentation and alternatives should all go hand in hand, as in WoMin’s advocacy. To pay for this process, the (polluter-pays) ‘ecological debt’ owed by those corporations guilty of resource looting is often invoked. What sorts of reparations narratives should emerge logically from these critiques of unequal ecological exchange? Consider the most obvious: the failure of export-oriented extractive industries to contribute sufficiently in transforming natural resources into local state fiscal revenues. An extreme case is British imperial appropriation of India’s tax revenues and the proceeds of the Indian economy’s trade surpluses; the “drain for the period 1765–1900 alone cumulated up to 2020 is estimated at about $65 trillion” (Iyer 2023), as calculated by Utse and Prabhat Patnaik (2016). In South Africa such transfers and trade surpluses were also prominent in underdeveloping the settler-colony, including unequal ecological exchange associated with diamond and gold exports.

However, so far, the only historical critique of the slavery-colonialism-apartheid history of exploitation that led to concrete reparations for South Africans has come from the opposite process: multinational corporations paying tax to the racist white regime. As the main test case, General Motors acknowledged it had made such tax payments, as well as allowing the use of its vehicles by the apartheid police and military. After extensive lobbying, litigation and protest by the Khulumani Support Group and Jubilee 2000, GM was in 2012 compelled to repay $1.5 million in profits as at least a tokenistic reparations statement, during a period it was recovering from near-bankruptcy (Davis 2012).

More broadly, reparations should serve to offset long histories of unequal ecological exchange, but the process of natural wealth drainage is not considered a ‘crime’ in South Africa. Elsewhere it is; for example, in Goa, India there are prohibitions on mining, imposed because resource depletion is not compensated for properly (Bond and Basu 2021). Even more explicitly, in 1993, the Pacific island nation of Nauru compelled Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and Britain to compensate for a similar plunder, of phosphate. The reason, as Ramon Reyes (1996, 53) summed up, was that “accelerated mining in the face of eminent depletion and inevitable rehabilitation provides evidence of the breach of the duty of diligence and prudence.” Extending that jurisprudence is one of the tasks ahead.

Such aspects of primitive accumulation transcend the colonial and apartheid eras, when what the UN understood to be a racist crime against humanity raised profit rates to such high levels. After apartheid ended, both the labour super-exploitation and resource-depletion systems continued and indeed were amplified, given that migrant labour and extractivist processes were further deregulated.

But so too did community resistance also rise. Some anti-extractivist activism reflects resistance movements fighting locally, against pollution and displacement. To achieve a holistic approach that extends to unequal ecological exchange, geographically, and to inter-generational justice, temporally, requires addressing relevant grievances associated with the ten ‘resource curse’ damages discussed at the outset, including both historical and future costs. Reparations are reasonable for the past, but likewise serious planners will consider the rights of future generations to a survivable environment, e.g. by requiring mining-area rehabilitation after depletion, and decarbonisation so as to avoid the current prolific levels of greenhouse gas emissions – a conscious case of resource internationalism.

Most expansively, the ‘rights of nature’ now also entail leaving unexploited various kinds of natural resources, e.g. insisting on letting a river flow all the way to the sea (a ‘right’ which in South Africa has been part of water legislation since 1998). Letting future generations have access to mineral and hydrocarbon resources is especially critical in societies whose current power structure does not facilitate appropriate reinvestment (e.g. according to the Hartwick Rule). This is the case for the 88% of African economies which are net losers from natural resource outflows and degradation, as recorded by even the World Bank (2014) using an extremely conservative accounting methodology.

Against such resource looting, the Right to Say No! is increasingly a global movement, with a World Social Forum (2023) “Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism” having convened in 2018 in Johannesburg, in conjunction with the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations (Bond 2018), and then again in 2023 in Semarang, Indonesia. Hundreds of radical activists from community groups and social movements, grounded in concrete local grievances, met in both places to agree on their systemic critique. The 2023 Thematic Forum declared:

The right to say NO is the right to defend our communities and our rights, including the right to self-determination, guardianship, and the right to a healthy environment, among others.

At the same time is clear:

- YES, to the right to defend our communities, people, air, land, livelihoods, water, forests, biodiversity, and ways of living in harmony with the rest of the web of life.

- YES, to the recognition that nature is not a collection of resources for exploitation and (maximal) profit.

- YES, to valuing the care work over economic growth and profit.

- YES, to production for subsistence / common good and not exchange.

- YES, to respecting the rights and valuing Indigenous People’s identity, traditional knowledge, and perspectives.

- YES, to women’s struggle to dismantle patriarchy and any system oppressing them, and

- YES, to reparations for the historical, ecological, and social debt owed to the people who have borne the cost of slavery and colonial exploitation, which has gained new relevance through the concept of climate debt.

 

The planetary emergency rising from centuries of capitalist extractivism requires a deep transformation not only of our energy systems but also of how we relate to energy, how we relate with nature, and how we produce, consume, and organise our lives. (World Social Forum 2023)

Conclusion: Against covering up the pitfalls of resource nationalism

The activist critiques leveled against extractive industries operating in Africa – especially South Africa – are profound, because they address the class, race, gendered, generational and ecological damage done by corporations, global and local. That the Dutch East India Company, De Beers and Anglo American have been largely replaced by local South African black-owned, or Indian and Chinese mining houses (with Russians and Brazilians making an occasional entry), makes no difference to activists. Their ability to not only marshal data, but to articulate why resource extraction amounts to looting, grows as they learn in the course of their battles, win partial victories (or suffer losses) and, step by step, generate a very different philosophy to govern future state-society-nature relationships.

In early 2025, South Africa’s anti-extraction activists were saddled with two controversies that, for good reason, distract attention from the critiques of depletion, pollution, emissions and social reproduction. First, the Stilfontein Massacre involved debates about ‘stealing’ mineral resources, specifically gold that formal-sector mining corporations had left in unsealed mines as unprofitable, and that informal-sector artisanal miners were extracting as part of a complex, even more super-exploitative value chain (Vavi 2025). As the Addendum to this paper shows, xenophobia associated with leading politicians’ understanding of resource depletion stands in contrast to a progressive, inter-generational approach to geographical resource-looting.

Second, an anti-xenophobic and simultaneously anti-extractivist approach was logical for those opposed to the South African National Defense Force (SANDF) deployment in three African sites notorious for plundering:

• the Central African Republic, where 15 SANDF soldiers were killed in 2013 defending South African corporations in the Battle of Bangui against Séléka rebels (Bond 2022);
• northern Mozambique where several SANDF troops died defending TotalEnergies gas extraction operations from Islamic Al-Shabaab attacks during a 2021-24 deployment requested by French President Emmanuel Macron (Bond 2022); and
• the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where SANDF involvement from 1999 – and a large-scale presence starting in 2003 – gave South African mining firms the confidence to invest in an area in which the deaths of more than five million Congolese accompanied warlord policing of the mineral belt, with more than two dozen fatalities in 2024-25 at the hands of rebel group M23, once a much larger-scale deployment began.

Consider the history of looting this region, to put the SANDF’s losses in context. The DRC’s role in the world economy began with Belgian colonial smash-and-grab control of rubber trade from the Congo River Basin dating to the late 19^th century, following which the most profound neo-colonial attack was the Belgian-U.S. assassination of independence leader Patrice Lumumba on January 17, 1961. The pro-Western dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who then ran ‘Zaire’ until his death in 1997, was reputedly worth billions of dollars thanks to graft mainly fueled by Western corporations and the International Monetary Fund IMF
International Monetary Fund Along with the World Bank, the IMF was founded on the day the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed. Its first mission was to support the new system of standard exchange rates.

When the Bretton Wood fixed rates system came to an end in 1971, the main function of the IMF became that of being both policeman and fireman for global capital: it acts as policeman when it enforces its Structural Adjustment Policies and as fireman when it steps in to help out governments in risk of defaulting on debt repayments.

As for the World Bank, a weighted voting system operates: depending on the amount paid as contribution by each member state. 85% of the votes is required to modify the IMF Charter (which means that the USA with 17,68% % of the votes has a de facto veto on any change).

The institution is dominated by five countries: the United States (16,74%), Japan (6,23%), Germany (5,81%), France (4,29%) and the UK (4,29%).
The other 183 member countries are divided into groups led by one country. The most important one (6,57% of the votes) is led by Belgium. The least important group of countries (1,55% of the votes) is led by Gabon and brings together African countries.

http://imf.org and World Bank, supported from Washington, Brussels and other neo-colonial sites of power. And it was no accident that until 1994 when democracy was won in South Africa, the white apartheid regime was comfortable with Mobutu, considering Zaire part of Foreign Minister’s Pik PIK
Payment In Kind A PIK or PIK loan is a loan characterized by the fact that the payment of interest is not necessarily made in currency. The interest can be paid, for example, in the form of another debt security, by securities issued by the borrowing company or via the issuing of stock purchase options. Botha’s reactionary ‘Southern African Constellation of States.’

The mid-1990s resurrection of violence in the minerals-rich eastern DRC was mainly due to the Resource Curse and socio-political desperation due to sustained underdevelopment of rural Africa, the 1994 genocide in next-door Rwanda, and high interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher…

The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. imposed by the U.S. Federal Reserve FED
Federal Reserve Officially, Federal Reserve System, is the United States’ central bank created in 1913 by the ’Federal Reserve Act’, also called the ’Owen-Glass Act’, after a series of banking crises, particularly the ’Bank Panic’ of 1907.

FED – decentralized central bank : http://www.federalreserve.gov/ (known as the ‘Volcker Shock’) that led to structural adjustment programmes, extreme austerity, and state failure from the early 1980s until Mobutu was forced out in 1997. By the 1990s, huge commodity and mining corporations – some possessing Johannesburg Stock Exchange listings, such as Glencore and AngloGold Ashanti – facilitated warlordism in exchange for facilitation of mineral looting. After being exposed by Human Rights Watch in 2005, the CEO of AngloGold Ashanti (Bobby Godsell) publicly apologized (“mistakes will be made”), but firms using Congolese minerals – at the time, based mainly in Europe and South Africa – profited while the mass killings continued (Bond 2008). So far there have been no reparations.

Global value chains then shifted during the 2010s, to the extent that increased extraction from the eastern DRC was done on site by Chinese firms, with Taiwanese-based Foxconn then getting access to minerals during manufacturing of electronic devices, abusing Chinese working-class sweatshop labour. Foxconn was so exploitative that worker suicide was common. But after the AngloGold Ashanti revelations, other Johannesburg extractive-industry firms in the DRC – most possessing strong connections to South Africa’s ruling party – took on a more visible presence thanks to well-known personalities Tokyo Sexwale (Mvelaphanda), Khulubuse Zuma and Michael Hulley (Caprikat and Foxwhelp), the late Tito Mboweni (South Africa Congo Oil), Andrea Brown (Divine Inspiration Group), the Moseneke family (Encha Group) and Patrice Motsepe (African Rainbow Minerals ARM).

Other SA-DRC links are even more explicitly connected to imperialism’s global value chains, including Glencore, whose main South African partner is Motsepe, brother-in-law of President Ramaphosa. Currently, with former SA Reserve Bank Governor Gill Marcus as a board member and Johannesburg-born Gary Nagle as CEO, Glencore’s South African operations are most notorious for digging Mpumalanga Province coal and shipping it from Richards Bay port to the main Israeli coal port of Hadera, for use in the Orot Rabin power plant. This process explicitly violates the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 finding that Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank (not to mention genocide then underway in Gaza) should result in trade sanctions on coal (part of the energy supply to illegal settlements), which was ratified in the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024. Glencore’s Colombian operations violate an August 2024 presidential decree by continuing to ship coal to Israel. Glencore also long aided Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler in his looting of DRC minerals, and in the early 2020s paid heavy fines for bribing Congolese and other African officials, but the proceeds went to the U.S. and UK governments, not to the Congolese people (Bond 2025).

For AngloGold Ashanti, Mvelaphanda, Caprikat, Foxwhelp, SACOIL, DIG, Encha and ARM, access to DRC mineral, petroleum and hydropower resources is a reminder that the sub-imperial agenda of the South African ruling class may have changed colour from the apartheid era, but the location of these firms – and SANDF troops – as looters of the DRC within imperialism’s global value chains, continues to prevent an African renaissance. And the intra-subimperial contestation of Kivu by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Ramaphosa led to mutual war declarations in late January 2025.

For activists opposed to such extractivism, one question passes from history to the present to the future: how to best argue for their rights to collective reparations for unequal ecological exchange, while continuing present struggles for environmental justice that entail the Right to Say No! (especially in cases where the extractive industries cause violence such as most of those noted above), while simultaneously considering the rights of their descendants to have access to natural resources? To succeed, it appears that all three temporal settings (past, present and future) are required as fields of struggle, simultaneously. They should be backed by lawyers, ideally, but ultimately their campaigns must be won not in the courts but in the hearts and minds of society.

Particular forces in the case sites in society discussed above may well generalise their Right to Say No! to the global scale, as attempted in 2018 in Johannesburg and 2023 in Semarang. Yet even setting aside predictably paranoid politicians (especially South Africa’s), some of the leading resource-nationalist NGOs and researchers remain uninterested. Consider this ten-word mandate at the start of the Publish What You Pay (2024) Impact Report on its 2025 Strategic Vision: “natural resources are stewarded responsibly for current and future generations.” That rhetoric aside, none of these four ways of making such a sentiment actionable appears to be on the PWYP radar screen (nor is extended social reproduction in cases of labour migrancy):

• depletion of non-renewable mineral and fossil fuel wealth, as a negative Adjusted Net Savings in which costs of natural capital extraction typically far outweigh reinvestment and compensation;
• the oversized role of deep mining, smelting, refining and processing in excessive CO2/CH4-generated electricity consumption, hence causing a vast net negative Adjusted Net Savings using even the ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ suggested by the World Economic Forum (2024) of $1056/ton of CO2-equivalents; 
• the need to leave fossil fuels underground for mitigation of climate-catastrophe, for which poorer countries’ peoples should receive compensation in the form of genuine Just Energy Transition Partnership subsidies from the high-emissions Western/BRICS+ economies as a downpayment on their climate debt; and
• the need to leave fossil fuels underground, because hydrocarbons that are not burned by current generations canbe used for future generations, if extracted with maximum sensitivity for lubricants, synthetic materials, pharmaceutical products, tarmac, etc.

With respect to leading resource-nationalist researchers, the Canadian project referred to periodically above also shows no interest in anti-extractivist movements, judging by the lack of mention – much less sustained study – of their existence, and of their principles, analyses, strategies, tactics and alliances. Yet Canadian mining houses represent some of the most predatory institutions on earth, with widespread revolts against their operations. Admitted the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2023), “Canada is home to an estimated 60 percent of the world’s mining companies. They operate in all corners of the globe, including countries where mining activities have been linked to human rights violations.” Elaborating, lawyer James Yap observes that Canadian mining companies have “acquired a particularly bad reputation globally for causing serious human rights abuses… Six UN treaty bodies have specifically called out Canada for not doing more to ensure that its companies comply with international human rights and environmental standards” (CBC 2023). In another study, EarthRights International, MiningWatch Canada and the Human Rights Research and Education Centre Human Rights Clinic at the University of Ottawa (2016, 1, 3) submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women observing,

Canada’s mining companies are involved in such abuses and conflict more than any other country’s. Canada has been supporting and financing mining companies involved in discrimination, rape, and violence against women in their operations abroad, when it should be holding those companies accountable for the abuse… A study from 2009 found that since 1999, Canadian mining companies were implicated in the largest portion (34%) of 171 incidents alleging involvement of international mining companies in community conflict, human rights abuses, unlawful and unethical practices, or environmental degradation in a developing country. Of the Canadian-involved incidents, 60% involved community conflict, 40% environmental degradation, and 30% unethical behavior. Moreover, a database compiled by the McGill Research Group Investigating Canadian Mining in Latin America currently lists 85 socio-environmental conflicts surrounding Canadian mining projects…

As Yves Engler (2021) summed up, “Canadian mining firms are mired in corruption and human rights abuses around the world… Pick almost any country in the Global South, from Papua New Guinea to Ghana, Ecuador to the Philippines, and you will find a Canadian-run mine that has caused environmental devastation or been the scene of violent confrontations.” To cover up this record, Engler (2021) continues,

Justin Trudeau has reneged on pledges to regulate them and end the abuses… The Trudeau government has channeled more than $100 million in assistance for international projects whose real purpose is to support mining. Those projects often come with sanitising, euphemistic titles such as “West Africa Governance and Economic Sustainability in Extractive Areas,” “Enhanced Oversight of the Extractive Industries in Francophone Africa,” and “Enhancing Resource Management through Institutional Transformation in Mongolia.”

And in what appears to be the same sanitising spirit, for Saunders (2020), the project of resource nationalism can apparently facilitate the (research-funder) Western state’s ‘regulatory’ role in legitimising corporate investment in Africa:

Canada is one of the major international investors in African mining. Its investments in African mining in fact increased tenfold in the first decade of the 2000s, so the Insight grant looks at the experience of Canadian miners in Africa… and encouraged them in ways which would improve the relations with local hosts, which would boost the developmental outcomes in terms of skills training, transfer of skills and technology, and better corporate social responsibility overall. So we’re looking … at the various ways in which the new Canadian regulations have encouraged and elicited better behavior, but also ways in which the Canadian measures have enabled host countries and host communities and local businesses to demand and receive better deals, a better share of revenues, and a bigger piece of local content and provisions procurement from Canadians… There’s been a real wave in the last 10 to 15 years of resource nationalism, pushed from below as people have realised that in the commodities Commodities The goods exchanged on the commodities market, traditionally raw materials such as metals and fuels, and cereals. boom where mineral prices have gone up the local benefits have been minimal so this has led to a political response… The focus is more on building research capacity and policy engagement with local governments and with continental mining regimes through the African Mining Vision and it’s about building new young scholars and their capacity and then their engagement with research but also with policy making processes.

Conveniently for Canadian mining capital, the African Mining Vision (AMV) makes the dubious point – unsupported by evidence – that “arguably the most important vehicle for building local capital are the foreign resource investors with the requisite capital, skills and expertise” (African Union 2009). Civil society critics include ActionAid, a Johannesburg-based international donor agency with strong connections to local anti-extractivist movements like Mining Affected Communities United in Action. ActionAid South Africa (2017, 3,19) expressed disgust because of the AMV’s orientation to:

domesticating old European universalising ideas of domination and control. Thus the AMV succeeds in replicating old colonial extractivist models which have historically and contemporaneously produced extreme inequality… The neo-colonial models of extracting Africa`s mineral and natural resources have resulted in pockets of obscene wealth and vast swathes of extreme poverty while a growing body of evidence suggests that much of the wealth extracted from Africa is realised outside of the continent… By ramping up and promoting models of maximum extraction, the AMV once again stands in direct opposition to our own priorities to ensure resilient livelihoods and securing climate justice.

If such critiques of the extractive industry’s wealth depletion, local pollution, global greenhouse gas emissions and super-exploitative social reproduction processes have merit, then the research capacity building required might be essential for Canadian scholars who never contemplate such a research skills set. And if these critiques lead to the conclusion that Canadian mining houses – along with their Western and BRICS brethren – are so predatory and such a source of systemic underdevelopment, then surely, building new young scholars to engage with – and support (not ignore) – anti-extractivist movements makes more sense.

Would the Canadian government fund such work? Probably not. Should progressive Canada-based scholars (like Caramento and Saunders) therefore do the bidding of state and mining capital by entirely neglecting some of the mostly costly features of extractive industry underdevelopment in Africa, as well as the social movements fighting to leave non-renewable resources underground? Definitely not.

Otherwise, Fanon’s (1961) complaint – about “the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people [and environment], their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle” – will be invoked as forcefully as the times demand. This is an especially serious complaint when directed against those who stumble into the pitfalls of resource-nationalist consciousness, because in the process they simply erase both the vast costs of capitalist extractive industries, and the many Right to Say No! critics who want to see the back of them.

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Addendum:

Stilfontein mine disaster reveals a regional labour crisis

By Patrick Bond, 30 January 2025

The last few weeks witnessed the state-imposed starvation of hundreds of informal-sector mineworkers in central South Africa, shocking the country and the world. Only around 100 bodies have yet been discovered at the Stilfontein mine, in relatively close proximity to rescue gear, but many more remain deep in the gold mines.

These corpses mark a low point in an explicit class war disguised by rampaging xenophobia that will please Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump visiting Johannesburg in November, when President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts the G20 G20 The Group of Twenty (G20 or G-20) is a group made up of nineteen countries and the European Union whose ministers, central-bank directors and heads of state meet regularly. It was created in 1999 after the series of financial crises in the 1990s. Its aim is to encourage international consultation on the principle of broadening dialogue in keeping with the growing economic importance of a certain number of countries. Its members are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, USA, UK and the European Union (represented by the presidents of the Council and of the European Central Bank). leaders’ summit, is ironic. In a November 2024 speech made at the Rio de Janeiro G20, Ramaphosa railed against “the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as we are now seeing in some parts of the world, including in Gaza and Sudan.”

But just days before, the Minister in the Presidency whom Ramaphosa often calls upon to explain state policy to the public, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, had rationalised many weeks of police oppression of Stilfontein mineworkers by calling them ‘criminals’ and proclaiming that the police should “smoke them out!” Denial of food, water, and vital medicines – e.g., immune-strengthening antiretrovirals for workers living with HIV – was by then underway for three months.

When more than 1800 Stilfontein mine workers surfaced, they were arrested. The vast majority were immigrants from neighbouring countries, toiling in hellish conditions. Surviving workers starved out for weeks had finally resorted to cannibalising flesh from their dead comrades, as well as eating insects.

Multiple forms of extractive exploitation

About two hours’ drive southwest of Johannesburg, old gold mines established in the 1940s-60s stretch across the landscape. Their depth of 2.8 kilometres – indeed 4 kilometres at the Carletonville mine halfway from Stilfontein to Johannesburg – reaches into the world’s most prolific seam. Indeed the Reef’s gold, discovered in the mid-1880s, comprised at its peak half the world’s historic gold reserves.

But alongside exhausted gold, diamond, coal, platinum, manganese, iron ore, and other mineral lodes for which South Africa is infamous, are detritus of capitalist degradation: more than 6,000 mines were never shut properly. Once considered exhausted for the sake of formal mining, many are being picked clean by desperate artisanal mineworkers. Residues still exist — e.g., in the columns that hold up roofs that are over a century old, or in scrapings along the tunnel walls — all of which are exceptionally hazardous.

Writing on conditions at Stilfontein, Sunday Times reporter Isaac Mahlangu described “an underground hierarchy in which those who did the digging and mining at the lowest levels were mainly foreigners, the majority from Mozambique. Very few South Africans did this work. Those at higher levels were rope-pullers or were involved in processing the gold. Others were tasked with distributing food… gold dust was the main currency for buying goods from the shop deep underground on level 10.” One worker told him, “‘The gold that fills a Colgate [toothpaste] cap is worth R3,000 [$162] underground, although the shop does not give change.’” A 5-kilogram bag of maize meal costs R5,000 [$270], which is 25 times its cost above ground.

Accounts are still emerging of the way police and the hard-to-track corporate directors responsible at Stilfontein Gold Mining (who had long ago abandoned the site) contributed to the mass murder. Although capital is responsible for extreme environmental, social, and economic irresponsibility across the Reef, many in South Africa were provoked into making heartless, xenophobic remarks. They were egged on by high-profile right-wing populists catching the energy of the Trump Effect.

As pressure rose to save the mineworkers’ lives, Deputy Police Minister Shela Polly Boshielo announced, “We are setting a wrong precedent, to say ‘people can get under the ground, do illegal mining, get all the money and everything, and then we will then come and rescue them as government’… So we are not even dealing with South Africans, who really, you can say, they’re trying to make a living. They are not. They are illegal.”

Even more vitriolic remarks were made by Patriotic Alliance Deputy President Kenny Kunene: “I have no sympathy for those who have died stealing the wealth of our country… I have absolutely no sympathy. They must die like rats underground there, all of them. They must burn in hell.” A common theme is that the artisanal mineworkers steal from society, as implied by another politician, Action SA President Herman Mashaba, who said, “I personally have got no sympathy whatsoever for criminality.”

Also in mid-January, Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe announced his opposition to local community activists who suggested regularisation of artisanal mining, i.e., that his ministry “give licences to steal gold to Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Lesotho nationals. It’s a criminal activity. It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main.” Mantashe attempted to put a number to the theft: “Illegal mining is a war on the economy… it is criminals attacking the economy. Precious metals illicit trade is estimated in 2024 to about R60 billion ($3.2 billion), a leakage on the value of the economy of the country.”

Against sub-imperialism

There are three possible replies to xenophobes. The first appeals to basic ‘ubuntu’ humanistic values (“we are who we are through others”). The most active trade union supporter is General Industries Workers Union of South Africa president Mametlwe Sebei, who is also a human rights lawyer. As two government ministers (Mantashe and the police minister) visited Stilfontein in mid-January, Sebei told a community meeting not far from the mine shafts: “These ministers are here at the scene of the crime. Hundreds of miners have died underground in what can only be a bloody culmination of their treacherous policies of the police operation, planned and executed with the approval at the highest echelons of the state, including the Cabinet.” The community responded by refusing to hear the ministers, forcing them to retreat in shame.

A second rebuttal is to point out that compared to the artisanal mineworkers’ low-tech extraction systems, there is a vast outflow of mineral wealth carried out by multinational mining corporations, nowhere near compensated for by reinvestment in the economy, society, and infrastructure.

A third is that surplus value feeding South African capitalism has been drawn from immigrant workers dating back at least 150 years, and those countries are today themselves resource-cursed by Johannesburg firms. As explained by Solomon Mondlane from Mozambique’s opposition Democratic Alliance Coalition, “50% of our gas in Mozambique goes to South Africa. 80% of our electricity in Mozambique goes to South Africa. And they buy it on a less amount, while here in Mozambique, we pay double the amount for what is produced in our country. And they will tell us we are busy flocking into their countries, when in actual fact our country is being looted by South Africa.”

The best-known South African labour leader, Zwelinzima Vavi of the SA Federation of Trade Unions, agreed: “South Africa is often being accused of being a sub-imperialist and playing that role to its neighbours and to the rest of the African continent. Our daughters and sons [serving in the SA military] have been sent to the northern parts of Mozambique to fight a war on behalf of multinational companies [Total, ExxonMobil, ENI, BP, etc.] that are lining up to exploit the massive gas fields around Cabo Delgado. And they have been there, of course, with a clear instruction from France. The French President, if you remember, came unscheduled to Union Buildings [in May 2021], clearly to lobby South Africa to ensure that it has soldiers to put guards on the vast gas fields in the northern parts of Mozambique.”

Vavi continued, “This is what makes me sick — when people say, ‘They are stealing our mines, they are stealing our gold.’ Hold on, what are you talking about? Whose gold? How have you benefited, as a black South African, from this gold that you want to protect? And to celebrate the death of 78 people ‘who are stealing our gold and who are illegal foreign nationals’? Mozambicans do not come to South Africa by choice. They do not cross the Kruger National Park such that they discover only a wallet [after immigrants are eaten by lions, leopards and hyenas], when a whole body cannot be traced… If you were to spend four or five days in a week with your children crying to you, sitting helplessly, not knowing what to do? People are driven by desperation. The fact that most of the people who are being rescued in these mines — ‘zama zamas’ — are from Mozambique is not a coincidence. It’s because the revolution there failed, just like the revolution here in South Africa is failing.”

Ramaphosa’s own failings are indisputable; once the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, his major investment in Lonmin in 2012 led him to treat a wildcat strike as ‘dastardly criminal’ in emails he wrote 24 hours before the police massacred 34 platinum rock-drill operators demanding a $1000/month wage. Ramaphosa was a board member of Lonmin and had advised the company to continue offshore illicit financial flows.

Going forward, we must rebuild South African solidarity with those struggling in Mozambique – a solidarity which had motivated student protests in 1976 not long after left-nationalists beat brutal Portuguese colonialists to win independence. That solidarity is needed today to forge stronger community-worker ties, especially as new rebels have risen up against the now-corrupted nationalists. That’s the agenda being forged by the artisanal miners themselves, backed by GIWUSA, SAFTU, Mining Affected Communities United in Action, and progressive lawyers.

As they take forward demands for a Commission of Enquiry into the hundreds of deaths, part of the work is a psychological reversal of the hatred found in state and society. This is necessary so that the ‘stealing’ of sovereign mineral wealth is better understood — and so that internationalism replaces xenophobia.