Africa’s natural resources have long been central to the continent’s relationship with the rest of the world. Today, their significance is growing as geopolitical and economic power becomes more dispersed, placing African states in a stronger position to shape how their resources are used and how that wealth contributes to their futures. Yet the continent’s resource wealth continues to exist alongside poverty, inequality, and conflict.
Held under the theme ‘Globality, Extraction and Sustainable Constitutionalism: African Resource Governance in a Multipolar World’, the programme also aimed to strengthen students’ capacity to engage in research.
The event reflected the Faculty of Law’s broader commitment to exposing students to conversations that connect constitutional law with some of the continent’s most pressing challenges. “As a research-led and student-centred faculty, we have a responsibility to create spaces where our students can engage with the major questions facing Africa,” said Prof Serges Kamga, Dean of the Faculty of Law. “The rule of law is particularly important when we consider a continent with immense resource wealth, yet where many of its people continue to experience poverty and hunger.”
Making resource governance work for Africans
The discussions brought together different perspectives on what it means to govern resources in a way that serves African societies. While the Winter School focused particularly on engaging students and emerging researchers, the accompanying Winter Conference widened the conversation through research on climate, extraction, constitutional order, rights, equality, and governance. The programme therefore approached resource governance not as an isolated legal question but as one connected to the broader social, environmental and political realities facing African states.
Among the voices contributing to this discussion was
Prof Charles Manga Fombad, Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria, whose scholarship focuses on African constitutional law, constitutionalism, democracy, governance, and judicial independence. Prof Fombad delivered the keynote address, ‘Reimagining African constitutionalism in a multipolar world: Sustainable constitutionalism and the governance of resource wealth’.
He situated Africa’s resource wealth within the changing global order, arguing that the continent’s strategic importance gives African states an opportunity to exercise greater agency over their resources. Yet, he said, that opportunity is undermined when resource wealth does not translate into improved conditions for people living in resource-rich countries. “The people continue to be poor, and that is what is leading to all these conflicts – and they are not poor because the resources are not there. The resources are there.”
The challenge, therefore, extends beyond the existence of resources themselves, Prof Fombad said. It concerns the constitutional and institutional arrangements through which decisions about those resources are made.
Prof Fombad pointed to the concentration of resource-related decision-making within the executive branches of African governments, and the limited role often played by legislatures in scrutinising government negotiations. He also questioned whether existing constitutional arrangements are sufficiently equipped to deal with the challenges created by extraction, resource wealth, and a changing international environment.
His response was not simply a call for new constitutional provisions. Instead, he advanced the idea of sustainable constitutionalism, centred on the implementation of constitutional principles and the participation of citizens and civil society in holding institutions to account.
“For a constitution to be sustained, to be meaningful, there must be implementation,” he said.
That emphasis on implementation also connected with the wider discussions throughout the programme. Sessions examined extraction and international financial flows, environmental injustice, climate governance, rural justice, and the rights of future generations, while conference presentations considered issues including mining, community entitlement, extractive revenue, environmental law, and the right to development.
The Winter School also placed emphasis on developing the next generation of researchers. Alongside the substantive constitutional debates, students engaged with research projects, critical reading, discourse mapping, academic writing, research approaches and methods, mentorship, and working with communities.
This combination of scholarship and research development is significant for a faculty seeking to strengthen its contribution to African constitutional thought. It gives students an opportunity not only to encounter established scholarship but to develop the tools to interrogate the legal and institutional systems shaping resource governance on the continent.
The programme also brought together the UFS Faculty of Law with the Research Unit for Legal and Constitutional Interpretation at the University of the Western Cape, Good Governance Africa, and the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, extending the conversation beyond the faculty and drawing on different perspectives on constitutional interpretation, governance, development, and inequality.
Across the Winter School and conference, the discussions returned to a question that is particularly difficult for resource-rich African states: how can constitutional principles move beyond formal commitments and influence the way wealth, power, and resources are governed?
For the UFS, creating spaces for that question to be examined from different disciplines and perspectives is part of a broader effort to position legal scholarship in conversation with the realities facing African societies. It is also an investment in students and emerging researchers who will continue that conversation through their own research, legal practice, and engagement with the continent’s constitutional future.