On paper, the government’s selection criteria are rigorous. Bidders must possess extensive global experience in exploring and mining specialty minerals, verifiable financial resources, and a proven track record in complex rock engineering.

Yet, looking at the roster of contenders, an unsettling reality emerges. The bidder list appears light on the industry’s true giants and heavy with unfamiliar names.

I had expected serious interest from the major Chinese processors and Australian rare earth producers that dominate this industry globally.

Their absence should worry anyone who has followed how this sector works. The companies that control refining and separation technology are the ones that determine whether a resource becomes a strategic asset or simply remains rock in the ground. If they are sitting this one out, we need to ask why.

This is not a single tender but the opening chapter of a much larger story about how Kenya positions itself in the global minerals race. It may be our last real opportunity to transform this economy in a meaningful way.

Indeed, the ongoing licensing round for our strategic mineral concessions is not just another bureaucratic exercise. It is a life-and-death issue for our economic future. We must get everything right. We simply cannot afford to miss the boat this time around.

Mrima Hills is only the headline act. The Ministry of Mining has recently reserved and gazetted enormous tracts of land for large-scale exploration of strategic minerals across the country: coltan in Embu, copper in Tharaka-Nithi, niobium at Mrima Hills in Kilifi, manganese in the Lali Hills in Tana River, and chromite in Samburu.

Rare earths are the defining commodity of this geopolitical moment. Countries are no longer just buying rare earths; they are competing fiercely over who controls them. Kenya, almost by accident of geology, now has a seat at that table.

The question is whether we intend to sit at it as a sovereign player or hand over the chair to the highest bidder and settle for royalty cheques.

The tragedy is that our capacity to negotiate these concessions remains dangerously limited.

When it comes to the most sensitive work, such as cadastral surveys to determine the actual quantities and values of what lies beneath our soil, we still outsource the calculations to foreign consultants. Is it any wonder that independent estimates of the niobium and rare earth deposits at Mrima Hills vary so widely? A country that cannot independently verify what it owns cannot credibly negotiate for what it is worth.

Furthermore, our regulatory oversight is woefully inadequate. A damning Auditor-General’s report exposed a structural failure in the government’s capacity to monitor compliance. The state lacks the basic infrastructure to verify whether mining companies are paying their fair share of royalties, let alone whether they are extracting what they report.

Instead of a tightly regulated sovereign asset, we have administrative chaos. Some companies operate under vague special mining licences, while others pay arbitrary land rates to county governments or the Ministry of Lands, bypassing the mining framework altogether.

Add to this a failure to transfer skills, minimal collaboration with local universities, neglected corporate social responsibility commitments, and weak enforcement of environmental regulations, and the blueprint for disaster is complete.

If we repeat the mistakes of the past—allowing foreign companies to cart away raw ore while we chase unverified royalties—we will have squandered one of our greatest economic assets.

The Ministry of Mining must look beyond the fine print of these tender documents. We do not simply need companies that can dig holes; we need partners capable of building processing ecosystems on Kenyan soil, transferring meaningful technical skills, and treating compliance as more than a box-ticking exercise.

Every so often, a country gets one real opportunity to change its economic trajectory. For Kenya, that opportunity is rare earths—not oil.
Kenya does not get many chances to build a new pillar of its economy from the ground up. This is one of them.

Rare earth sovereignty—real ownership of the value chain, the capacity to verify what lies beneath our soil and what is owed to us, and agreements that serve Kenyans rather than merely licensing them to watch from the sidelines—must be the standard we hold ourselves to.

We have the geology. What we need now is the institutional will to match it. This is our last shot. We do not get to take it twice.

The writer is a former managing editor of The EastAfrican.