Mancur Olson's idea of roving and stationary bandits was meant to explain why some systems of domination endure while others collapse. Roving bandits loot violently and move on. Stationary bandits settle in, extract methodically, and maintain just enough order to keep the system productive for their own benefit.

Africa today is trapped between both. But the most damaging truth is this: many of the stationary bandits are African elites themselves, operating in open collusion with foreign governments, corporations, and financial interests. This is not a story of helpless victims. It is a story of shared plunder.

A Global Economy Designed to Extract

The global economy does not merely disadvantage Africa—it actively organises its exploitation. In the absence of any intervening force or value addition, the continent perennially supplies the raw materials that power modern life: DRC’s cobalt for electric vehicles, the Angola and Nigeria’s oil for global energy markets, the Ghana and south Africa’s gold that anchors financial systems, Guinea bauxite that support the global aluminum industry, Zimbabwe’s lithium that fuels the green transition, Mozambique’s raw heavy sands primarily used for the production of titanium minerals, ilmenite, rutile, and zircon, which in turn are utilized in various industries, including paint manufacturing, ceramics, and more.. The list is endless. Yet Africa remains locked at the bottom of value chains, made worse by the bleeding of an estimated USD 88billion in illicit flows annually, exporting wealth and importing poverty, being rule takers and not rule makers, and perilously detained in this extractive political economy.

This is not a coincidence. Pricing power, processing capacity, shipping, insurance, finance, and legal arbitration are controlled elsewhere. Africa provides the soil, the labour, and the risk; others reap the margins. With unfettered colonial continuity, minerals move from pit to port with speed, concealing the damage to the environment and the impoverishment of communities that are otherwise owners of the resource. Into this structure step the bandits, some who raid quickly, others who stay.

Roving Bandits: Quick Deals, Lasting Damage

Roving bandits thrive in instability. They arrive clad in smart suits, spotting ray ban sun glasses and armed with fancy iPads during crises—conflict, sanctions, debt distress, political transitions—offering fast money, technical assistance, security assistance, or "strategic partnerships." Their contracts are serially opaque but seductive, their timelines short but appealing, and their exit strategies clear.

They do not build institutions; they bypass them. When the environment becomes politically costly or economically inconvenient, they leave behind polluted land, armed groups, broken communities, and unsustainable debt burdens. Africa has seen this pattern repeatedly: extract, destabilise, undermine, move on.

Stationary Bandits in African Garb

More dangerous, however, are the stationary bandits who never leave. These are political, military, and commercial elites who capture the state and instrumentalise it for primitive accumulation, personal aggrandisement, and convert it into an extraction machine or worse still weaponize it against the people. They do not loot chaotically; they loot legally—through contracts, licenses, tax waivers, and security decrees. They weaken regulatory agencies, neutralise communities, and treat national resources as private assets. Through state capture, they render the state an instrument at the service of this thirsty coterie.

Their power lies in mediation. They position themselves as indispensable brokers between global capital and local resources. In return for personal enrichment and external protection, they guarantee uninterrupted access to minerals, oil, land, and labour. This is not mismanagement. It is a “business model”, highly lucrative.

Cobalt in the Congo: Blood Minerals for a Green World

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is home to some of the richest copper deposits in the world, with high-grade ore grades significantly higher than the global average. The DRC holds over 70 million tonnes of copper reserves, with the central African copper belt being a major source of these deposits. The country's mineral wealth includes not only copper but also cobalt, silver, uranium, gold, and rare metals like coltan. The country supplies over 70 per cent of the world's cobalt, a mineral essential for batteries powering electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Yet Congo’s enduring paradox is troubling. Rich in mineral wealth, yet Congolese mining communities remain among the poorest on earth.

Artisanal miners, including children, work in lethal conditions. Environmental destruction is rampant. Revenues disappear into offshore accounts while political elites and multinational firms split the profits. The "green transition" in the Global North is built on a supply chain soaked in Congolese suffering and protected by Congolese and foreign stationary bandits alike.

Oil in the Niger Delta: Wealth Without Water

Nigeria has earned hundreds of billions of dollars from oil. The Niger Delta, where that oil is extracted, remains polluted, impoverished, and militarised.

Decades of oil spills have destroyed fisheries and farmland. Communities protest and are met with force. Meanwhile, political elites, oil majors, and international traders continue to profit through joint ventures and sweetheart deals. Cleanup is promised, rarely delivered. Accountability is endlessly deferred. The oil flows. The people drink poisoned water.

Further down in southern Africa is Angola, another country with a worrying paradox. Five decades after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, the proceeds from Angola’s oil have not liquidated inequality and poverty, which remain among Angola’s most pervasive challenges. In 2019, three out of every five Angolans — over 19 million people — were living under the extreme poverty line for lower middle-income countries (US$3.20 per day). Two out of five Angolans are living on less than US$1.90 per day, the income level used to measure global progress towards the United Nations’ first SDG to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030.” These statistics underscore the stark disparity between Angola’s natural resource wealth and the living conditions of its citizens, the income gap between the wealthy suburb of Miramar and the squalor of Boa Vista. This contradiction stems from a range of causal factors, including corruption, large-scale embezzlement of public funds, and a lack of economic diversification.

Gold in the Sahel: Extraction Amid Insecurity

Across the Sahel, gold mining has expanded rapidly, often under conditions of extreme insecurity. Revealing the false claim of the timidity of capital, foreign companies operate alongside shadowy intermediaries and armed actors. Local communities are displaced. Revenues bypass national development and instead finance elite lifestyles and regional instability.

In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Sudan, gold has become both a source of wealth and a driver of conflict extracted in zones where the state is either complicit or absent. Conflicts are at a historic high. In 2024, there were 61 active state-based conflicts across 36 countries globally- the highest number since WWII. Resources are not “the cause” of every conflict, but they often finance, shape & prolong them. Roving bandits exploit chaos; stationary ones profit from permanence.

Lithium in Zimbabwe: The New Rush

Zimbabwe's lithium reserves have attracted intense global interest as demand for electric vehicles surges. Deals are struck quickly. Raw lithium is exported with minimal local processing. In fact, in total, the acquisition of lithium mines in Zimbabwe between 2021 and 2022 ran close to US$1 billion.[ Nqobani Tshabangu and Tafadzwa Chikumbu (2025) Zimbabwe’s Lithium Boom And Chinese Investment: Navigating Opportunity And Risk In The Energy Transition Chain]. These transactions did not have any recognisable impact on the local and national budgets. Communities see little benefit. Transparency is a value in short supply. And once again, Africa supplies the future while remaining excluded from it.

Collusion, Not Conspiracy

What links these cases is not conspiracy but collusion. Foreign corporations and governments prefer predictable elites over empowered populations. Deals are easier when scrutiny is low. Western financial systems quietly absorb Africa's stolen wealth through tax havens, shell companies, and luxury real estate. Anti-corruption rhetoric flourishes; enforcement stalls.
This is a transnational alliance of convenience: African stationary bandits manage local control; foreign partners provide markets, protection, and legitimacy. The risks stay in Africa. The profits leave.

And the Rest of Us

The cost is borne by ordinary Africans—by farmers whose land is poisoned, youths locked out of opportunity, communities sitting atop riches they will never enjoy. Africa's problem is not a lack of resources. It is a lack of power over its resources.

Until the alliance between domestic stationary bandits and external extractive interests is confronted and dismantled, the story will not change. New minerals will replace old ones. New powers will replace old empires. The extraction will continue.

The choice is no longer between roving and stationary bandits. The real question is whether Africa will continue negotiating the terms of its exploitation or finally refuse to play the role assigned to it. In a world built on plunder, silence is not neutrality; it is consent. In an era of possibility of people power, the population must rise to defend Africa’s sovereignty, demand that ‘enclave development’ must give way to holistic people-centred development, and that the proceeds of the continent's natural resources must be directed at ending the triple burden of unemployment, poverty and inequality. And alongside this demand is the central one of improving governance, restoring democracy and protecting rights. This needs agency, solidarity and courage!

Are we ready for these challenges?