…Critical minerals, battery production and vehicle manufacturing emerge as regional priorities
ROTIMI ASHER
South Africa’s assumption of the chairmanship of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has placed the country at the centre of a fresh push to turn Africa’s vast critical-mineral wealth into a powerful electric-vehicle and clean-energy manufacturing industry.
The 46th SADC Summit in Durban, held under a theme focused on industrialization, infrastructure development and the transformation of the region’s critical minerals, has triggered renewed calls for urgent implementation of the African Union’s Continental Framework on Electric Mobility.
The Electric Mission, a Johannesburg-based non-profit organization focused on mobility and the energy transition, said the summit should serve as a political springboard for translating the continental electric-mobility framework into practical regional action, with South Africa’s automotive industry providing the ideal testing ground.
The stakes are enormous. According to figures cited by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the SADC region possesses an estimated 25 to 30 per cent of global reserves of critical energy-transition minerals, including cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, nickel and platinum-group metals.
Yet Africa continues to export much of its mineral wealth while importing the high-value products manufactured from those resources.
ECA Executive Secretary, Claver Gatete, captured the challenge bluntly at the summit, noting that while Africa exports minerals, other regions manufacture batteries, electric vehicles and renewable-energy technologies.
For Hiten Parmar, Executive Director of The Electric Mission, the combination of South Africa’s new SADC leadership and the African Union’s continental electric-mobility blueprint presents an opportunity that cannot be postponed.
He warned that unless SADC countries move aggressively into component manufacturing and regional battery-value-chain development, the same industrialisation debate could return at the next summit without meaningful progress.
South Africa already has policy instruments that could help drive the transformation. Amendments to the Automotive Production and Development Programme (APDP2) provide incentives for battery components and critical minerals sourced within the SADC region for local vehicle manufacturing.
Further support comes from Section 12V of the Income Tax Act, which provides a 150 per cent deduction for qualifying investments in battery-electric and hydrogen-powered vehicle production over the next decade.
Together, these measures could help South Africa connect vehicle assembly with regional production of batteries, components and critical minerals, potentially creating a broader SADC electric-vehicle manufacturing ecosystem.
The opportunity is particularly urgent for South Africa’s automotive industry, which produced more than 600,000 vehicles last year and relies heavily on exports to markets such as the European Union and the United Kingdom.
With both markets moving towards tighter restrictions on new internal-combustion-engine vehicles, the transition to electric mobility is no longer simply an environmental ambition for South Africa—it is becoming an industrial and export survival strategy.
Parmar has therefore called for South Africa to unlock component manufacturing across both the automotive and energy sectors.
With South Africa now holding the SADC chair, the coming year could prove decisive. The region has the minerals, South Africa has an established automotive manufacturing base, and the African Union has already provided a continental electric-mobility framework.
What remains is the political will to connect the pieces—and turn Southern Africa from a supplier of raw minerals into a major manufacturing hub for batteries, electric vehicles and clean-energy technologies.
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