John McDermott
speaker
167 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 1 Jun
John McDermott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So in Tanzania,
support for the government from Washington is conditional upon making progress on this Kabanga mine, but also a couple of other projects that American firms are involved in.
And it's part of this bigger story.
So in DRC, in Zambia, other resource rich places, you're seeing a much more muscular effort by the US to try and have a greater role for American firms in African mining, whether that's doing the mining themselves or accessing the mining once it's coming out of the continent.
about
Well, it's the result of being the primary player for the past twenty, twenty-five years, and America is still very much playing catch up.
Even the Kabanga project, there seems to have been several Chinese companies sniffing around and making bids for it.
And I think the most interesting development of all, especially for the perspective of African governments, is that
China having seen this renewed Western interest.
Is actually becoming more amenable to some of the requests that these African governments are making, especially around processing some of the raw materials, because this age-old African concern that all we do in mining is just ship out the ore and none of the refined stuff with more value.
China has been following that model as well.
But there is some evidence that it is responding, perhaps because of this new.
competition from the West and doing a bit more of the processing on site as well.
Potentially, but it's not going to happen by default.
Every now and again you get these kind of huge estimates of Africa's untapped mineral wealth.
So the last one I saw was something like kind of nine trillion dollars.
This was an estimate by the Africa Finance Corporation, but it doesn't mean anything so long as it's just a line on a piece of paper.
What African countries need to do is have the infrastructure and policy environment where those critical minerals can be extracted in a way that is of most benefit to them.
At the moment, you are seeing a kind of slapdash effort to put in export bans on a lot of the raw materials, which often comes from an understandable place.
They don't just want to be selling the raw material, but the risk is it actually leads to a decrease in the very investment they need.
Showing 141–160 of 167 · page 8 of 9
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