Conclusion: Mining, Dispossession, and Transformation in Africa

This book has detailed Zambia’s resource dependency, different state strategies to deal with international mining houses, and local political struggles to win greater financial return from copper extraction.1 The accounts offered raise issues at the heart of contested development debates that go beyond the case of Zambia and the important mining region of Southern Africa. This concluding chapter briefly explores the broader debate about mining in Africa and themes linked to characterizations of resource dependency. Countries like Ghana and Guinea, and also Mali, Tanzania, the DRC, and Burkina Faso, to select just a few, have wrestled over many years with the challenges of finding strategies to regulate and control transnational companies (TNCs), engaged in mining, facilitate increased and sustained levels of foreign direct investment (FDI), and manage the influence of the international financial institutions (IFIs)—the World Bank and the IMF. This chapter explores the nature of the problems that have beset African countries and surveys a range of diagnoses and cures promoted by individual African governments, locally based popular formations, and the IFIs themselves.