Resource Governance begins with Inner Worth: Leadership in Africa’s New Extractive Era

As new global interest in critical raw minerals (CRMs) unfolds, Africa’s leaders must confront the legacy of extractive trauma to avoid repeating old patterns of disempowerment and subordination.

Leadership in Africa’s resources sectors is not just about negotiating contracts attracting foreign capital, or drafting policies and laws.  It requires vision grounded in awareness of what is truly valuable.  Every year, Mandela Day reminds us that principled leadership starts from within.  As we once again honour that legacy against a global backdrop of power too often won through threat, spin and spectacle, nothing matters more than holding true to inner leadership – integrity, agency, dignity – with steady conviction and courage.

Beyond the legal and economic challenges, resource governance in Africa poses a challenge to our humanity. Right now, this matters profoundly: Global powers are scrambling to access Africa’s share of critical minerals and Africa’s dealmakers and lawmakers – the ones who steward these resources – need more than good strategy.  They need a deliberately long-term perspective.

Extractive trauma’s scars

Africa carries the visible scars of extractive trauma: decimated landscapes, displaced communities, and weakened cultures. There are unseen scars, too: a sense of powerlessness that besieges people and institutions, survivalist tendencies that might be overriding integrity and stewardship, not to mention the pervasiveness of scarcity. Even if the formative experiences that created those scars may lie long in the past and were not personally experienced, they can still shape the beliefs, behaviours and policy choices of today.  Trauma therapist and public intellectual Resmaa Menaken says that “trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, can look like personality” and “trauma in a people decontextualised over time can look like culture.”

There is not enough appreciation of the potentially devastating manifestations of unacknowledged societal trauma in relation to natural resources.  “Trauma-infused” resource governance can manifest in a culture of recurring patterns of short-termism, overreliance on external validation, and low self-value. Here are some examples:

• Short-term deal-making, that sacrifices long-term benefits and capacity building for quick wins, may reflect urgency-thinking or perceived powerlessness in negotiations. The African Development Bank warns against such reactive approaches, warning that continued reliance on raw material exports that sacrifice local beneficiation opportunities risks more than just depletion of Africa’s most valuable assets: it will deprive the continent of a long-term mechanism to mitigate currency exchange rate fluctuations and convertibility risk.
• A recurring willingness to accept contractual terms that prioritise external gain over national resilience often reflects an entrenched, inherited belief that value must come from outside. Such patterns of subordination to external interests abound. A recent example from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reveals a repetitive dynamic of outsourcing national agency in the hope of external rescue: the 2008 Sicomines deal with a Chinese consortium, criticised for its unfavourable terms for the DRC, echoes its more recent alignment with the US, offering access to CRM resources in exchange for vague assurances of security.
• Inadequate and superficial community consultation processes, such as those exposed by the Xolobeni judgment, may reflect a deeper pattern of undervaluing local voices. This may be unconscious or unintentional, but the point is exactly this: their internalised devaluation is the result of a legacy of extractive systems that privileged external authority over community insight, perhaps over generations.

In healthcare and education, there is growing recognition for trauma-informed leadership. Not so much (yet) in mineral resource governance. Yet, long-harboured, unresolved societal trauma can inadvertently shape policy landscapes. It can create emotional conditions and underlying beliefs, such as diminished self-worth or internalised subordination to external power, that make it difficult to sustain long-term vision or self-trust. In such conditions, lawmakers and dealmakers may unconsciously revert to a scarcity mindset or a state of survival. The inadvertent result could be permitting extract-and-hoard strategies by external actors, rather than fostering decisions rooted in a stewardship mindset.

Corruption, too, can be seen through this lens: Unresolved trauma erodes boundaries. Systems become vulnerable to exploitation when external and internal boundaries are undefined. When trust is low and institutional integrity eroded, governance can slide into self-serving patterns. Corruption in resource governance is not just failure of character; it’s failure of containment.

Importantly, trauma is not an illness or an infirmity. It is a response to harm. Leadership shaped by unrecognised trauma is not inherently flawed, but it may be reactive. Especially when the exploit, or the conditions that create the trauma, cannot be escaped, self-awareness offers the possibility of relating to the exploit differently. Even when the power imbalance remains, awareness instils a sense of self-worth and agency in the sufferer that allows patterns of exploitation to shift, independent from any expectation that the exploiting parties must be part of the healing. It empowers the ones holding awareness to interrupt inherited cycles of exploitation from their side of the relationship. They can then choose to reclaim agency, even within enduring power asymmetries, thereby disrupting patterns of exploitation. In the resource context, this awareness encompasses not only how society responds to extractive trauma but also how one’s own decisions are inadvertently shaped by it, long after the fact. 

Lawmakers and dealmakers who cultivate and sustain such awareness will be the ones who enable the mineral and energy resources sector to recover from extractive trauma. Not just from poverty and the “resource curse” but from the deeper social scars left by colonial, post-colonial and ongoing exploitation.

Iconic examples

Africa has had iconic leaders who practised this kind of awareness to enable repair and growth. Despite the trauma of apartheid, Nelson Mandela chose to be a systemic healer. Rather than leading from vengeance, he led from his essence. So did Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who emerged from the trauma of an abusive marriage and guided Liberia from the ruins of civil war toward democratic reconstruction. Such leaders remind us that being principled doesn’t mean being perfect. It means staying grounded, even in the face of inevitable contradictions. They could evolve, stay connected to a purpose beyond themselves, and continue learning while holding power. They modelled what it means to be resilient.

Principled Governance in Action

The healing of Africa’s extractive systems does not begin in parliaments or at negotiation tables. It begins with the wholeness of those who govern Africa’s valuable resources. What leaders bring into the room – not just what they propose, but what they believe their inner worth to be – matters as much as what is on the agenda.

Trauma-informed resource governance begins with cultivating emotional awareness and inner steadiness. These qualities will enable leaders to interrupt reactive patterns shaped by history, conditioning or survival needs.

Reactive patterns will not serve Africa now, as it stands on the edge of a new extractive era driven by the global demand for critical minerals.  Grounded in self-worth and agency, the governance needed now calls for ethical courage, inner clarity and the strength to hold healthy boundaries, even when experience, conditioning or external pressures make subordination feel safer.

The AU initiative to create an African credit rating agency is a powerful example of a continental effort to assert confidence in Africa’s ability to value itself on its own, informed terms. Deference to external validation, such as foreign credit ratings or global indices, which may be unreliable and can entrench economic vulnerability, has fostered internalised beliefs that worth cannot come from within, and that governance cannot be self-reliant, for far too long.

The African Union’s 2009 Mining Vision also already articulates many of the values that trauma-informed resource governance would require: transparency, equity, long-term sustainability, and a new, inclusive social contract. But these principles cannot remain aspirational. Trauma-informed governance must extend beyond policy design and focus on how such commitments are implemented, embodied, and protected in day-to-day decision-making.

Leading from grounded self-worth means forming a different relationship with yourself, those you serve, and the history that shaped you. This is what enables you to ask:  What patterns am I repeating? Am I being responsive or reactive? Am I pressured by fear or urgency, or guided by a long-term vision? Awareness of how trauma shapes responses can be a doorway to wisdom and better decision-making.

The clarity that such inner work cultivates is more than a mere personal competency. It is a governance imperative. A precondition for sovereignty. It protects resources – one’s own, and the continent’s critical minerals. It creates the space to see long-term value and benefits clearly and resist repetitive exploitation. It creates the true conditions for resource stewardship when the world wants to “extract, extract, extract”.

This Mandela Day, let us honour leadership that is grounded in awareness of intrinsic worth. It is not just our resources that need this kind of governance; it is the soul of our continent.  :

Bio:
Hanri Mostert is a legal scholar and Integral® and ORSC®-trained Coach whose work focuses on the deeper patterns shaping leadership, law, and governance in Africa’s resource sector. She holds the DST/NRF SARChI Research Chair for Mineral Law in Africa at the University of Cape Town.

Email:  Hanri.Mostert@uct.ac.za  
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/hanri-mostert-0775466a

Photo Credit: 

Generated Media consisting off:

1) The President of Liberia, HE Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, discussed 'The Challenges of Post-war Reconstruction: The Liberian Experience' on 13 June 2011. Wikimedia Commons: Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HE_Ellen_Johnson_Sirleaf_(6011337236).jpg (Creative Commons Licence 2.0).  

2) Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, Gauteng, on 13 May 2008. Wikimedia Commons: Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nelson_Mandela-2008_(edit).jpg (Creative Commons Licence 2.0).