“The general policy of the Gabon government is not to export raw materials” but to seek to transform them locally, Mbadinga Madiya says on the sidelines of the Africa Investments Forum & Awards in Paris on 7 February. “The model of supplying raw materials does not create jobs.”

The West’s need for African commodities has been increased by the Russia-Ukraine war and the need for minerals to support energy transition. African governments see an opportunity to stop supplying raw materials and move up the value chain. Zimbabwe in December banned the export of unprocessed lithium, needed for batteries in electric cars, mobile phones and energy-storage applications.

“What Zimbabwe wants to do, we have done already,” Mbadinga Madiya says. Mining, agriculture and fishing are areas where Gabon wants to transform more raw materials, Mbadinga Madiya says, without indicating which commodities might be considered for export bans. The government would prefer to move up the value chain by educating investors and trading partners, and further bans on raw material exports would be a last resort, he adds.

Gabon, according to the World Bank, is one of the world’s most highly commodity-dependent economies and so sharply exposed to volatile global prices. Oil, manganese and other extractives, which include gold and iron ore, accounted for 98% of the country’s 2021 merchandise exports, the bank says.

The country’s small-scale refining of manganese mined by France’s Eramet is just the start, Mbadinga Madiya says. He points to the example of the ban on the export of logs from Gabon introduced in January 2010. Uncontrolled logging meant that 60% of the wood cut down used to be wasted, but now 90% is transformed, and the amount of refined wood exported from Gabon has tripled since 2010, he says.

The ban was accompanied by the creation of the Nkok Special Economic Zone near Libreville to encourage investment. Mbadinga Madiya says that 8,500 jobs have been created there since 2010. The zone was initially tax free and has now succeeded in increasing timber industry government revenue, he adds.

Deforestation impact

President Ali Bongo Ondimba in January inaugurated a factory in the zone to recycle wood waste into particleboard, which is used  for making furniture. Gabon now plans to open a furniture showroom in Dubai in coming months to complement the one which already exists in Miami.

Gabon has 2,551 km of borders with neighbouring countries. Zerbo’s study argues that forest borders can constitute leakage channels for illegal logging for export from the port areas of neighbouring countries. Given the higher prices for logs in neighbouring countries, the effectiveness of the export ban on reducing deforestation, Zerbo writes, would be enhanced if neighbours followed suit.

Mbadinga Madiya says that countries in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) want to follow Gabon’s example. That process has not been smooth.  The six-member CEMAC grouping had agreed to ban raw timber exports from January 2022.

But as of January this year, only the Republic of Congo had joined Gabon in banning log exports, with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad and Equatorial Guinea still holding out. Cameroon’s finance minister Luis Paul Motaze has said the country needs the export tax revenue, which came to $127m in 2022.

Bottom line

CEMAC would benefit from a united stance on banning log exports.