Pastor Chris makes case for African minerals sovereignty

Every artificial intelligence that promises to think for humanity is, at bottom, a mining operation.

The model in your phone runs on data centres. The data centre runs on chips, cooling and grid-scale power. The chips run on tantalum from coltan, on copper, on gold, on high-purity silicon. The batteries behind the backup generators run on cobalt and lithium. The casings run on graphite and rare earths. Follow the chain far enough and it terminates, again and again, in African soil.

Now read the ledger, and read it slowly.

Africa holds roughly 30 per cent of the world’s critical mineral reserves — lithium, graphite, cobalt, coltan, manganese, platinum, tantalum, bauxite — and captures only about 10 per cent of the revenue those minerals generate. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone accounts for some 69 per cent of global cobalt extraction, and the continent supplies around 76 per cent of the world’s manganese. Yet Africa refines only about one-fifth of the key energy minerals it digs up — less than 5 per cent for most others — and commands under 1 per cent of the value generated by clean-energy manufacturing.

Thirty per cent of the rock. One per cent of the value. Do not call that participation. Call it what it is.

This is the old colonial arithmetic wearing a new uniform. Our ore leaves as rock; it returns as a battery, a server rack, a phone, an inference bill. The West never stopped extracting from Africa — it simply learned to extract downstream, where the margin lives. And now the scramble has a fresh pretext: strategic competition. The United States itself concedes that the critical minerals market is “highly concentrated, leaving it a tool of political coercion.” Every delegation arriving in Abuja, Kinshasa and Lusaka with a partnership framework is negotiating from that concession.

So the question for this continent is not what we have. It is what we are willing to keep selling cheap.

The position Pastor Chris has taken.

Rev Dr Chris Oyakhilome, President of the Loveworld Nation, has spent decades refusing that arithmetic, and his instruction to Africa is unambiguous: “No one will build Africa for us. Africa will be built by Africans.”

He has publicly called on the continent to wake up and step out, and to reject the manipulators and oppressors who would keep it a passenger in its own resources. His teaching on what he terms wealth liquefaction cuts directly against the raw-materials mentality: wealth is created by converting ideas, resources and opportunity into value — not by hauling them elsewhere for someone else to convert. Hence his challenge to African enterprise: “We will turn waste into profit.” Where the world sees scrap, the innovator sees a factory.

He teaches that the power to get wealth is a divine enablement to produce, create and attract value. Note the verbs. None of them are “transport.” None of them are “lease our land to a foreign processor.” A theology of production cannot bless an economy of extraction.

And Loveworld is not merely preaching it. The Tsion vehicle line, unveiled by Pastor Chris, and PraxiomAI (PraxiomAI.io), the biblical-worldview AI platform, are proof that the ecosystem builds rather than hosts.

What must be demanded

First, no export of unprocessed critical minerals without a binding, dated beneficiation plan. Second, refining and processing capacity built on African soil, with African ownership stakes — not special economic zones where Africans serve coffee. Third, sovereign compute: African data centres that are owned, not merely inhabited, because hosting is tenancy. Fourth, aggressive skills development through our own technical universities. Fifth, negotiate as a bloc, because a cartel of sellers is the only answer to a cartel of buyers.

The African Center estimates that local processing could lift the continent’s mineral value by nearly 50 per cent by 2035, to roughly US$220 billion. That is not a projection. That is an invoice we have not yet presented.

Africa’s minerals should not merely power artificial intelligence. They should pay for African schools, African hospitals and African servers. Refuse to sell the rock twice.

Henry Williams is a veteran Journalist. Pro-life advocate and International Affairs analyst.