The U.S. Trade and Development Agency signed a formal agreement in February to provide $1.8 million for a feasibility study at the Monte Muambe rare earths project in Mozambique, another move in the scramble by powerful states to lock down mineral supply chains while ordinary people remain far from the table. The project sits inside a broader U.S. push to increase mining involvement in Africa as China dominates the sector.
Who Has the Power
Patience Mususa, a mining specialist at the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden, said the U.S. was “trying to catch up in terms of investment in mining” on the African continent, where China is the dominant player in mining. That line captures the competition plainly enough: not a contest over public need, but a race among states and their corporate partners to control extraction, access, and profit.
The Monte Muambe project is a rare earths project in Mozambique. The U.S. Trade and Development Agency’s $1.8 million agreement is for a feasibility study, the kind of paperwork that helps turn underground resources into assets for distant power centers. The article said the development came despite a diplomatic clash, though it did not provide further details on the clash.
What the Bosses Are Building
The article also said the Trump administration has invested in critical mineral mining in the U.S. and has pursued deals to secure access to these minerals abroad, including in Ukraine. Greenland’s rare earths are part of the reason Trump has wanted to acquire the Arctic island. The pattern is familiar: the powerful do not merely want minerals, they want the territory, the leverage, and the right to decide who gets what.
The Trump administration is also continuing U.S. financial support for the Lobito Corridor, a Biden administration initiative to build an 800-mile (1,290-kilometer) railway linking mineral-rich regions of Congo and Zambia to Africa’s Atlantic coast. The scale of the project makes the purpose hard to miss: infrastructure built to move wealth out of mineral-rich regions and toward export routes, while the people living there are left to absorb the consequences.
The Same Machine, Different Managers
The article said the Phalaborwa project is one of several mineral projects in Africa with DFC investment. The DFC was created during the first Trump administration and committed its investment in the Phalaborwa project in 2023 under former U.S. President Joe Biden. The current Trump administration moved forward with the project despite a major diplomatic rift with South Africa.
That rift began when Trump returned to office and issued an executive order last February to halt all financial assistance to South Africa. The timing shows how quickly state support can be turned on and off depending on the needs of power, not the needs of people. The machinery keeps moving either way, with different administrations signing the papers and calling it policy.
The article did not describe any grassroots response, mutual aid effort, or community-led alternative around the Monte Muambe project, the Lobito Corridor, or the Phalaborwa project. What it did show was a familiar hierarchy: state agencies, development finance, and presidential orders shaping mineral extraction across borders while communities in Mozambique, Congo, Zambia, South Africa, and elsewhere sit at the bottom of decisions made far above them.
The U.S. push in Africa is framed as competition, investment, and development. On the ground, it reads like another round of corporate capture backed by state power, with rare earths and critical minerals treated as prizes in a global contest among rulers.