In Part 2 of THSJ’s ongoing series unpacking Bright Simons’ mineral strategy trilogy, the argument shifts decisively.
If the first instalment dismantled the comforting illusion of Africa’s “30% mineral wealth,” this one asks a harder question: what would it mean to govern minerals as if data, not ore, were the real strategic asset?
Because the next contest over Africa’s subsoil will not be won with excavators alone. It will be won with algorithms.
In his paper, Getting Smart about Africa’s Mineral Wealth, drawn from his wider trilogy first developed during a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency and refined with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Bright Simons contends that West Africa’s mineral future hinges less on new discoveries and more on smarter governance.
The problem, he argues, is not just geology. It is architecture.
Across West Africa, mineral booms are colliding with fiscal systems designed for a slower century. Governments remain data-poor in an era where geological intelligence has become the primary currency of exploration. AI models now scan decades of survey data in minutes. Investors simulate deposit probabilities before a single drill core is cut. Yet many African states still manage mineral wealth through static gazettes and analogue royalty tables.
The gap is widening, and it is strategic.
Ghana’s experience with lithium offers a revealing case. The Ewoyaa project emerged at a moment of intense global battery optimism. Prices surged. Then they fell sharply. But Ghana’s sliding-scale royalty system, built with step thresholds rather than smooth adjustments, produced what Simons calls a “cliff effect.”
In one striking illustration, selling lithium for just $10 less could generate $66 more in net revenue for the producer. The fiscal structure, unintentionally, created incentives for under-invoicing and gaming.
The flaw was not corruption. It was design.
Simons proposes something deceptively simple: smooth the royalty curve using interpolation formulas so that marginal price changes produce marginal fiscal outcomes. It is an applied version of what he terms “Rules as Code”, expressing fiscal logic in computational form rather than relying solely on static legal text.
Here, the argument becomes bolder.
If legislation were published as paired legal-and-code instruments, version-controlled, machine-readable, publicly auditable, mineral governance would cease to be merely declaratory. It would become computable. Royalty calculations could be automated. Enforcement could become transparent. Policy drift could be reduced.
In this framework, geological data itself becomes strategic infrastructure.
A National Data Cloud, under sovereign control, would allow African states to retain ownership of geological intelligence rather than allowing foreign AI systems to extract value from fragmented, poorly curated datasets. Exploration knowledge would no longer leak outward by default. It would compound domestically.
And then comes perhaps the most pragmatic proposal of all: start small.
Instead of testing digital governance reforms on politically sensitive minerals like gold or lithium, Simons suggests using feldspar, an industrial mineral that is fiscally important but not existential. Because it is not a primary revenue lifeline, feldspar becomes the ideal sandbox for ECOWAS and WAEMU to pilot harmonised digital royalty systems before scaling upward.
It is reform without drama. Experiment without fiscal risk.
The deeper provocation running through this paper is that Africa’s mineral sovereignty in the twenty-first century will depend less on extraction rights and more on information rights. Less on what lies underground, more on who governs the data above it.
The minerals are finite. The intelligence is not.
In the next instalment, THSJ will continue unpacking Bright Simons’ trilogy, examining how digital public infrastructure, regional harmonisation and fiscal redesign could redefine Africa’s position in the global mineral economy, not as a passive rent-taker, but as an active architect of its own resource future.
