Imagine you’re the landlord of a prime piece of real estate in the middle of a booming city. You lease it out to a tenant for 25 years at a flat monthly rate, with no right to revisit the rent based on market conditions. The tenant then builds a luxury apartment complex, earns millions each year, while you collect the same modest sum for decades. Worse still, during the lease, you can neither live in the property, resell it, nor use it to raise money.
If this sounds like a ridiculous deal, it’s because it is.
Yet, this is precisely how many African governments have structured their agreements with multinational mining companies through mineral concessions.
Much like that hypothetical landlord, African states technically own their mineral resources. Constitutions across the continent enshrine this principle of sovereignty over subsoil assets. But when it comes to practice, many governments sign long-term concession agreements that hand operational control and the lion’s share of profits to private companies, often foreign-owned. These agreements stretch across decades, contain rigid stabilisation clauses, and are rarely subject to meaningful public scrutiny.
But let’s take the analogy further. In a typical tenancy agreement, the landlord retains some flexibility: to raise rents, to inspect the property, to terminate the lease under certain conditions. In bankruptcy law, creditors can recover and repossess assets if a company mismanages its obligations. The system is designed to preserve the rights of the underlying asset owner and ensure that economic realities are reflected in legal
