“This is the last thing we need,” said my wife when I returned home with a fertility totem. It was one of the stranger things this father of three children—and no more, thank you very much—has received from an African politician. The small, impressively breasted figurine was one element of the marketing swag being offered by the Guinean delegation at a big mining conference in Cape Town earlier this month. 

The west African country was promoting what could soon become the world’s largest mining project: Simandou, named after the Simandou mountains in the south-east of the country, around which there are incredibly rich reserves of iron ore (the raw material used to make steel). After years of speculation, exploration—and scandals—the first production may take place later this year, according to Guinean officials. 

Simandou has perhaps 1.5bn tonnes of high-grade iron ore, enough to force the closure of lower-grade mines elsewhere in the world, provided all of it is extracted. It could increase the GDP of one of the world’s poorest countries by up to 55% by 2030, reckons the IMF. Simandou is important enough for Guinea’s economy that the fund dedicated a specific annex to it in its most recent country report. 

Whether ordinary Guineans will reap the benefits of Simandou is, as is often the case with African mining projects, unclear. Despite increases in bauxite exports over the past decade mining “has yet to improve the lives of millions of Guineans”, argues Malado Kaba, a former finance minister. She calls Simandou a “litmus test” for governance in the country, which had a coup in 2021 and is still run by a military junta. Last year the junta delayed elections it had previously said it would hold by December 2024. 

Guinea is not the only part of the coup belt where business is proceeding despite the recent putsches. This week Tom Gardner, our Nairobi-based Africa correspondent, and I have a piece on how Sahelian states are extracting more cash from the Western firms that mine their minerals. This is a sign of how, for all the talk about Russian influence in the region, the juntas know that it is often the Western miners that pay their bills. 

But Simandou is on a different scale. And it matters for reasons beyond the realities of doing business in the coup belt. Its complicated ownership, involving Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining giant, and various Chinese entities, is a reminder that there is often much more co-operation between Western and Eastern commerce in Africa than many outsiders assume. “It’s the best of both worlds,” argues Djiba Diakité, Guinea’s most senior civilian politician, in an interview with The Economist. 

Above all, the project shows that while Africa is an arena of global competition, it can also be a place for co-operation. Just as long as there is money to be made.