A new scramble for Africa is underway - and the continent is unprepared: Justice Malala

Key topics:

• African states cut solo trade deals as global powers regroup

• AU sidelined as critical minerals talks fragment across borders

• New “scramble for Africa” looms without a united strategy

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By Justice Malala

It’s raining trade deals. 

The UK’s Keir Starmer has agreed to closer trade ties with China’s Xi Jinping. The European Union and India have signed “the mother of all deals.” That was after the EU’s mega-deal with Mercosur. Canada’s Mark Carney struck a “new strategic partnership” with China. And, later this month, Germany’s leaders will also beat a path to Beijing. 

Everywhere you look, key trade blocs and powerful countries are pivoting from the US administration’s mercurial foreign and trade policies in an effort to build more stable relationships. Everyone is doing it — except the African Union. While others are taking up Carney’s celebrated Davos challenge to come together or end up “on the menu,” African countries — some as small as Lesotho, population 2.3 million — are signing bilateral deals with powerful world powers such as the US and China without consulting or seeking guidance from their neighbors or wielding the collective heft of a regional or continental combination. 

If African leaders don’t act swiftly to develop a set of guiding principles and a united voice, as Wamkele Mene, the secretary-general of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), argued at the World Economic Forum in a discussion on critical minerals, Africans will end up losers in a new “scramble for Africa.”  

The continent’s countries are being served up as hors d’oeuvres as major powers including Turkey, Russia and others strike bilateral deals that are remarkable for how African countries seem to be junior partners in their configurations. In Kenya, for example, the High Court suspended a $2.5 billion health cooperation pact with the US in December 2025 after activists argued that the deal would allow the US to access sensitive personal health data, including HIV status and tuberculosis treatment history, risking a breach of constitutional rights to privacy. 

There are two impediments to the African Union acting decisively and collectively on trade. Unlike the EU, the AU is not a supranational body: It doesn’t have direct legal jurisdiction over member states. The AU is powerless to override national legal systems or compel compliance. Moreover, Africa’s economic diversity and some countries’ high dependence on tariff revenue has made agreeing a single trade policy difficult. Given the depth of the problems facing Africa, however, both reasons should be a challenge to politicians to find a solution quickly rather than allow a chaotic Wild West environment to flourish.  

The situation is particularly discombobulating as a united Africa would have greater leverage than most. The continent has one of the world’s fastest-growing consumer markets, projected to boast 1.7 billion consumers by 2030. It holds vast and indispensable reserves of critical minerals (required for the global green-energy transition and high-tech industries) ranging from 70% of the world’s cobalt to 80% of platinum group metals. Yet the countries at the forefront of production of these minerals — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mali, Namibia, South Africa and Morocco — all negotiate with various world powers separately and without a codified, united, stance.  

Last month, the US House of Representatives approved a three-year extension of the 25-year-old African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which offered 32 African nations duty-free access to the US market for thousands of exports. AGOA was wrecked by America’s “reciprocal” tariff increases last year; poverty-stricken Lesotho was hit with 50% tariffs, for example, leading to the near collapse of its textile industry. But instead of unified negotiations for repairing AGOA, Africa has been dealing piecemeal with the US. Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and even tiny Lesotho have, individually, petitioned the White House to cut trade accords: The AU has been absent.

Although a new AGOA deal is in the cards, some countries — like South Africa — may be unilaterally excluded by the US. Neither the AU nor any African country has stood up for South Africa. Several African delegations are — again, individually — in Washington this week for Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s inaugural Critical Minerals Ministerial. 

The same divisions extend to Africa’s negotiations with China. Following on its 2024–2027 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Action Plan, China has in the past year signed bilateral agreements with at least eleven African countries regarding the mining sector. And last week Turkey, an increasingly significant trade partner in Africa, signed trade deals with Nigeria to boost bilateral commerce to $5 billion. Turkey is hunting elsewhere on the continent.  

So each of Africa’s 55 jurisdictions is fashioning its own response to the great powers. Some, like Zimbabwe and the DRC, have restricted exports of critical minerals; others, like Botswana, have demanded greater local ownership of new concessions. This fragmented approach means only crumbs are available from the trade table.  

And it’s not just trade. Last month, President Donald Trump reversed his previous support for the UK’s deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, calling it “an act of great stupidity” despite his endorsement of the deal in May 2025. The International Court of Justice and the UN have ruled that the territory should be returned to Mauritius, but the current discussion involves only Britain and the US; Mauritius has been excluded. There are more than 100 active territorial disputes in Africa stemming from colonial-era border arrangements, many causing significant instability and wars. Where is the AU’s integrated stance on these disputes — or on the US travel bans that primarily target African countries ahead of the soccer World Cup?

At such a pivotal moment in world history, Africa’s leaders need to act with urgency to put in place measures that guide individual countries’ negotiators on trade and other matters. If they don’t show a united front — and soon — they may find the new “scramble for Africa” ends badly for them all. 

© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.