Rare Earth

Uzoma Eze’s technology transactions practice at Romano Law includes a niche that’s as rare as its name: African minerals and rare earths. “Our entire march toward electric vehicles and electric motors is backed by Africa,” says Eze. “Africa is the solution for the U.S.”

Countries and communities throughout the continent are sitting atop some of the world’s largest untapped deposits of 17 rare earth elements that power everything from cellphones to wind turbines to, yes, electric vehicles. Even small countries like Burundi and Malawi hold elements such as neodymium and dysprosium that are found in iPhones.

The big question is whether Africa can turn this opportunity into an advantage, and whether it can transcend its history as a place where workers have been oppressed, exploited and abused. 

“Making Africa equitable for all parties to do business is something that’s near and dear to my heart,” says Eze. “I’m a Nigerian, born and raised. I came here to go to college and then life just happened and I go back four or five times a year. I’m a [U.S.] citizen now and I have this duality to who I am—very much an African, very much an American. This dual identity makes it such that I want success for both. So I need to look at solutions that exploit neither one, and advance both.”

An example of the problem, he says, exists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “It’s probably the hottest bed of activity in Africa, violence-wise, over the past 70 years,” says Eze. “And the reason has been because it’s probably the world’s largest reserve of every single one of the rare earths, including cobalt. You can’t make an EV battery—you have no Elon Musk—without cobalt. This is a crown jewel right now. And DRC has 70% of it.”

Armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa have been on the rise since 2014, says a report from The International Institute for Strategic Studies. “These are private wars fought by private contractors paid off by China and mostly Russia to go in and create conflict and violence so that the extraction can happen outside of the realm of the state,” Eze says. “You give these guys guns and say, ‘Go after these guys’ and while they’re doing that, you dig, dig, dig, dig.

“It’s an exploitation model,” he adds. “If you can keep the people fighting against each other based on religion or land or politics, you don’t see the government in concert with Russia, with China—with any exploitative Western regime—carting the wealth away.”

At the same time he’s aware of ineffective ways of framing the issue. He describes children scraping in mines with their fingers rather than going to school. “So this is exploitation, yes, but at the same time they’re working,” he says. “So you don’t preach to people because they’ll tell you, ‘This is how we feed our families. It’s horrible work. We’re 13 years old, but I’m feeding my widowed mom who’s disabled.’

“We don’t do this whole ‘The great savior’ or ‘We know what’s best for you’ or ‘You are being oppressed.’ What we do say is, ‘How can we make the work more humane and higher paid?’ What I say to investors and employers is, ‘These people, they’re surviving on $3 a day right now. If you raise it to $10 a day, it wouldn’t change anything about your financials, but you would give them everything they need.’”

His clients are U.S. investors—often from the African diaspora. “We have a relationship with Africa,” he says. “They know us, we know them. But we’re coming as Americans now, and we’re saying: ‘Why don’t we do a little different, based on what we know?’ … The first thing we do is, we go to the politics at the very local level—the chieftains, the clans, the elders, the families. We start to engage them very early. We have these people telling us what the community expects: ‘We want healthcare. We want care for our women having babies. We want schools, but we don’t want just any kind of school. We want technology schools.’ 

“So you engage them. … And when the government tries to change its mind, or tries to play games, it’s the community at the table acting as if they were you. … If these people are seeing that every time I export their life gets better, then they don’t have an interest in doing anything that would hurt their interests.”

The key is sustainability, he adds. “A lot of what kills us as capitalists is everybody wants to make their annual bonus.”

Overall, Eze sees China, Russia and the U.S. in an existential battle. “They know whoever gets Africa wins,” he says. “The U.S. is the only one that has 50 million Africans already living in it, so there’s a natural umbilical. And we’re not exploiting that. We know how America thinks, we know how Africa thinks—and we can reconcile the two. That’s usually what I find myself doing.”

Eze describes the concept as a win-win. “An analogy I use all the time is: ‘You keep looking at the pizza like it’s got eight slices and who gets five versus who gets three—when you and I can get in the kitchen and bake 30 pies,’” Eze says. “‘All I want is one slice per pie, but now it’s 30 slices that I’m getting. And all I had to do was bake with you.’”

AI for Africa

“For decades, Africa has been treated as a market to be entered, a resource to be extracted, or a risk to be managed,” Uzoma Eze wrote on the Romano Law blog last November. “AI changes that calculus by leveling the playing field.” 

It does it, Eze says, by upending what he calls the “asymmetric information advantage” that Western powers have long enjoyed.

“For the longest time, knowledge was for sale,” he says. “Big law firms, big consulting firms—I’m ex-Ernst & Young, I’m a CPA—we sold knowledge. Thanks to AI, knowledge has been mostly commoditized and it’s becoming more so. … We used to have ignorant clients who came to us. Now you have a client coming to you with some form of understanding of what’s going on here. So, to the extent you had given them 100% knowledge before, you’re only giving them 60% original knowledge now.”