Conakry

Guinea holds 23% of the world's bauxite reserves and supplied 55% of global aluminium ore exports in 2020 — nearly all of it shipped to China — yet its capital Conakry has no reliable electricity grid, and political power has changed hands by coup three times in a country that has only had four presidents since independence. Conakry stretches along a narrow peninsula into the Atlantic, home to roughly 2 million people in the city proper and growing fast. Mining generates 92% of Guinea's exports, 20% of GDP, and over 17% of government revenue.

Bauxite and gold exports exceeded $10 billion in 2022. But the number that explains Conakry's future is buried 650 kilometres southeast in the Simandou Mountains: 4 billion tons of the world's highest-grade iron ore, untouched since its discovery in the 1990s. The $20 billion Simandou project — requiring a 650-kilometre railway, 235 bridges, 24 kilometres of tunnels, and a new deepwater port at Matakong — would increase Guinea's GDP by 26% if production begins.

Bauxite and gold exports exceeded $10 billion in 2022.

Rio Tinto, Chinalco, and China's Baowu Steel hold the rights. Essentially all the ore is expected to ship to China, which hopes Simandou will reduce its dependency on Australian iron. In its 27-year history, the project has survived four presidents, three elections, and two coups. The September 2021 coup by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya — which spiked aluminium to a 10-year high on the London Metal Exchange — barely interrupted mining operations.

This is the paradox: Guinea's mineral wealth attracts the investment that funds whichever regime controls Conakry, removing the economic incentive for democratic transition. China's $1 billion annual infrastructure-for-minerals framework agreement operates regardless of who signs it. The biological parallel is parasitic castration — where a parasite alters the host's reproductive capacity to redirect energy toward the parasite's benefit.

Guinea's mineral extraction redirects national economic energy toward export infrastructure while the host population's development (education, healthcare, governance) remains among the world's lowest. Conakry ranks 156th of 190 economies for ease of doing business.