African Lawmaker Urges Continent To Rewrite The Rules With Mining Giants, Citing Rio Tinto’s Madagascar Dispute

Emmanuel LoWilla says the unresolved fallout in Fort-Dauphin should shape how Guinea and Mozambique handle the company’s next projects

Emmanuel LoWilla, President of the East Africa Caucus of the Pan-African Parliament, is calling on African governments to fundamentally change the way they negotiate with global mining companies, arguing that the unresolved dispute over Rio Tinto’s mineral-sands operation in Madagascar should not be treated in isolation from the company’s expanding footprint elsewhere on the continent.

In an opinion piece published by Financial Afrik, LoWilla said Africa has been negotiating “country by country” with companies that think and operate globally, an asymmetry he described as inevitably weakening the continent’s bargaining position.

His intervention lands at a moment of consequence for Rio Tinto in Africa. In Guinea, the company is the lead Western partner in the roughly $23 billion Simandou iron-ore development, which shipped its first ore at the end of 2025 and is now ramping up towards a target of 60 million tonnes a year. In Mozambique, Rio Tinto holds the undeveloped Mutamba mineral-sands project.

From Bougainville to Fort-Dauphin

LoWilla frames his argument around a precedent from outside Africa entirely: the Panguna copper and gold mine on Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, which Rio Tinto operated for 17 years before activities ceased in 1989. Close to a billion tonnes of mine waste went into local rivers, and resistance from customary landowners fed into a civil war.

Rio Tinto never returned. In 2016 it gave away its stake in Bougainville Copper Limited. Only in 2021, after sustained pressure from communities and human rights organisations, did the company agree to fund an independent assessment of the mine’s legacy. A study published at the end of 2024 found serious harm in every area it examined. Thirty-seven years on, the question of reparations remains open.

Bougainville should not be seen as a distant accident in global mining history, according to LoWilla. “For Africa, it represents a precedent to study.”

He sees the same pattern developing at Fort-Dauphin in Madagascar’s Anosy region, where QIT Madagascar Minerals (QMM), 80%-owned by Rio Tinto, has extracted ilmenite-rich mineral sands since 2009.

Hydraulic infrastructure, altered coastal ecosystems, land losses and water-quality concerns have strained relations between the company, residents and civil society for years. A 2014 extension of operations beyond an environmental buffer zone raised questions about radionuclides and heavy metals; incidents involving the mine’s water-management system in 2022 sharpened them further. Analysis commissioned by civil society has found uranium and lead in the waters downstream at up to 50 and 40 times the World Health Organization’s drinking-water guidelines. Fifteen thousand people drink from those waters.

Rio Tinto rejects those findings and points to studies of its own.

That standoff, LoWilla says, is exactly the argument for independent, transparent counter-expertise, something Rio Tinto, according to the lawmaker, has repeatedly refused to Malagasy civil society, to international organisations and to its own shareholders.

The dispute has also moved into the courts. Communities are seeking compensation for lost land, and around 6,000 residents living near the mine are preparing to sue Rio Tinto in the United Kingdom over alleged lead exposure risks.

The Richards Bay comparison

His counter-example is South Africa. At Richards Bay, where Rio Tinto also mines mineral sands, years of social and security tensions have repeatedly interrupted production. But communities there hold equity in the operation, have representation structures, and operate within a regulatory and judicial environment that gives them leverage. The company has negotiated, financed local development and worked to secure the conditions its investment requires.

The difference from Fort-Dauphin, LoWilla argues, is not the legitimacy of the grievances but the structure of the relationship between company, communities and state. He is emphatic that the lesson is not that unrest works: community shareholding, institutional representation, functioning courts and state regulatory capacity are precisely the instruments meant to stop mining conflicts from reaching breaking point.

What he wants written into contracts

For Guinea and Mozambique, LoWilla presents a window that Madagascar and Bougainville no longer have – the chance to act before problems arise. He wants the lessons translated into binding contractual provisions: economic participation for communities rather than corporate social responsibility programmes; legally autonomous rehabilitation trust funds; genuinely independent environmental expertise; transparent compensation mechanisms; publication of environmental data; financial closure obligations; and clearly assigned responsibility in the event of a change in ownership.

He also wants the Madagascar controversies resolved while Rio Tinto is still there, before any shareholding change converts a current problem into a historical one.

Leverage, and where it sits

LoWilla is candid that the Pan-African Parliament lacks coercive power over a company operating inside a member state. National legislators, he notes, have considerably more: licences, permits, port concessions, export authorisations, taxation, rehabilitation obligations, financial guarantees and the conditions attached to transfers of mining titles — each of them a lever to ensure obligations to communities are discharged before an operator departs.

None of this, he insists, is opposition to mining investment; Africa needs capital, technology, infrastructure and partners able to develop its resources. It is an argument about terms.

“A resource that takes millions of years to form cannot be exchanged for a few decades of tax revenue and an environmental liability that could last for generations,” he added.

Bougainville, in his reading, was a warning Africa largely ignored. Madagascar is a much closer version of the same story. Guinea and Mozambique, he says, still have time to read the chapter before writing their own.