Chris Griffith was going to retire. He is instead part of a private equity team seeking to raise $1 billion to invest in African critical minerals, alongside Colin Coleman, formerly Goldman Sachs’s sub-Saharan Africa chief, and Sam Jonah, the Ghanaian mining executive and former Ashanti Goldfields chairman, with colleagues in Ghana and South Africa.
I was contacted by a private equity team that is starting up, he told Investec Minds. So I’m part of a private equity team now, seeking to raise a billion dollars to invest in African critical minerals. Fundraising is at an early stage, and he says he is spending a lot of time setting the business up.
The scope covers cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths. Africa holds the resources to match: cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium in Zimbabwe, copper across the Zambia-DRC copperbelt.
Griffith’s own history is what makes this interesting rather than merely notable.
He stepped down as chief executive of Gold Fields in December 2022 after its $6.7 billion all-share bid for Yamana Gold failed, beaten at the eleventh hour by a rival offer from Agnico Eagle and Pan American Silver. The deal was meant to lift Gold Fields into the top tier of global gold producers. He felt responsible and left. Before that he had run Kumba Iron Ore and Anglo American Platinum, now Valterra, and afterwards he spent two years running Vedanta’s base metals division, resigning in July 2025.
He is also, four years on, still prepared to defend the thesis. Gold was around $1,700 an ounce at the time and is now above $4,000. Gold Fields shares were about $8.85 in New York and are roughly $41.25 now. The underlying value of those assets combined with Gold Fields, he says, was substantially greater than the price including the premium. What he concedes is timing: it came too early in his tenure, and at that scale it unsettled shareholders.
That combination, right about the assets and wrong about the moment, is the most common shape of an expensive failure, and it is precisely what makes someone useful on the other side of the table.
Every trade has this transition and coffee has it plainly. The person who ran four shops, got the expansion wrong and closed two, ends up ten years later as the one other operators ring before signing a lease. They are not more cautious than they were. They have simply priced things that cannot be priced from a spreadsheet: how long a fit-out really takes, what a bad site smells like on a wet Tuesday, which supplier promises get kept.
The capital always exists. What is scarce is someone who has personally paid for the lesson being underwritten.
Coleman brings the banking, Jonah brings decades of African mining and the relationships that go with it, Griffith brings the operating record including its most expensive entry.
He was going to stop. The minerals rush came and got him.
Source: Mining.com, “Ex-Gold Fields CEO targets $1B Africa critical minerals fund”
