Asymmetric Interdependence in the Green Transition: Nigeria–European Union Critical Minerals Cooperation Compared with Morocco and South Africa

The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which entered into force in May 2024, has recast Europe’s search for battery metals, rare earths and platinum-group metals as a matter of industrial security rather than development cooperation. Nigeria, which holds commercially prospective deposits of lithium, tin, tantalum, niobium and rare earths yet contributes less than 0.5 per cent of GDP from mining, sits at the margin of this architecture. This article examines whether an emerging Nigeria–EU minerals dialogue can move beyond exploration diplomacy towards local value addition, and what Morocco’s Green Partnership and South Africa’s 2025 Clean Trade and Investment Partnership imply for Abuja. Drawing exclusively on secondary sources, EU legal texts and press releases, International Energy Agency and United States Geological Survey statistics, African Union strategy documents, and peer-reviewed and policy literature published mainly between 2021 and 2026, the study uses structured qualitative comparison across three dimensions: legal form of partnership, depth of processing and industrial linkage, and governance of artisanal and small-scale mining. Findings indicate that Nigeria has signed a minerals memorandum with France and is being considered for an EU Clean Trade and Investment Partnership, but it remains outside the Commission’s first list of extra-EU Strategic Projects and the five African countries with formal EU raw-materials partnerships. Morocco and South Africa illustrate two contrasting routes: trade-and-industrial integration into European automotive and hydrogen value chains versus resource-nationalist bargaining backed by an existing industrial base. The article argues that Nigeria’s 30 per cent local-value-added export rule and China’s approximately USD 1.3 billion lithium-processing footprint already constrain European entry. Policy implications include sequencing EU engagement around artisanal-mine formalisation, grid and rail infrastructure, and binding offtake-plus-processing clauses rather than geological surveys alone.