An economy cannot export more of a metal than it digs out of the ground — unless the accounting, the stockpiles or the supply chain are telling more than one story. Zambia appears to have done exactly that. Mines Minister Paul Kabuswe told Parliament the country produced 1,401 tonnes of cobalt between 2019 and 2024 while exporting roughly 1,876.7 tonnes over a comparable window. The gap of nearly 476 tonnes is small in absolute terms but large in what it implies.
Cobalt is a by-product metal, a passenger riding on copper. Zambia does not mine it directly; it recovers it from copper ore. That single fact explains both the country’s modest output and the puzzle of an export figure that runs ahead of production, and it is the lens through which the whole number should be read.
The By-Product Trap: Why Cobalt Tracks Copper
The minister’s own diagnosis points to the binding constraint: low copper output constrains cobalt supply. Because cobalt comes out of the ground alongside copper, the only reliable way to lift cobalt volumes is to lift copper volumes. When copper production stalls — as Zambia’s has through much of this period — cobalt recovery stalls with it, regardless of how strong global demand for battery metals becomes.
This is the structural difference between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo next door, where far larger copper output drags far larger cobalt volumes with it. Zambia sits on the same geological belt but recovers a fraction of the cobalt because it recovers a fraction of the copper. The lesson is uncomfortable for policymakers chasing the battery-metals narrative: there is no cobalt strategy that is not first a copper strategy.
Zambia will not become a cobalt power until it becomes a bigger copper one.
The Export Overhang: More Out Than Mined
The headline oddity — exports exceeding production — has prosaic explanations that matter for governance rather than geology. Exports can outrun production when accumulated stockpiles are drawn down, when material recovered in earlier years clears later, or when the figures for what is dug and what is shipped are captured by different systems on different timelines.
None of those explanations is sinister on its own. But each points to the same weakness: a reconciliation gap between production data and export data. For a country that depends on mineral receipts for revenue and foreign exchange, a gap of this kind is a measurement problem worth closing, because every tonne that is shipped but not properly recorded as produced is a tonne whose royalties and taxes are harder to track.
When the books don’t balance, the question is not only how much was mined, but how well it was counted.
The Value Question: Counting Tonnes, Losing Value
The deeper issue sits beneath both numbers. Whether Zambia produced 1,401 tonnes or shipped 1,876.7, almost all of it leaves the country as raw or semi-processed material. The battery-metal value — the refining, the precursor chemistry, the cell manufacturing — accrues elsewhere. Zambia’s cobalt debate is, at root, the same beneficiation debate that has shadowed its copper for half a century.
The regional context sharpens the point. As battery supply chains formalise across Southern Africa, the countries that capture value will be those that move past exporting tonnes. For Zambia, the cobalt gap is a reminder that the metric to fix is not only the volume mined but the value retained.
The tonnage tells you what left; it does not tell you what stayed.
What It Means for the Operator
For investors and policymakers, the parliamentary disclosure, reported in detail by Lusaka Times, is less a scandal than a signal. It confirms that Zambia’s cobalt future is hostage to its copper recovery, that its mineral accounting needs tightening, and that the prize lies in processing rather than extraction.
The operator’s read is straightforward. Cobalt opportunities in Zambia are downstream of copper investment and downstream of better data. Solve the copper constraint and the measurement gap, and the cobalt numbers will start to make sense — and start to pay.
