Yes, My Lady

This situation cannot be blamed solely on the ongoing conflicts in the country, which have been responsible for the death of over six million people since 1996.7 These conflicts, which involve a range of actors, are a consequence of significant wealth inequality. But beneath the violence and institutional attrition of the state apparatus lurks a more malign force, one that has been active in the region for almost two centuries and which we will describe in this dossier. This force has led to the pillaging of the land and its resources for profit at any cost. The DRC of today is haunted by the transatlantic trade of humans (from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century) and by King Leopold II’s colonisation (1884–1908) and its continuation by the Belgian state (1908–1960). It is haunted by the sabotage of the country’s sovereignty through the assassination of its first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961), and by the subordination of its elites to the agendas of major multinational mining companies. The wealth gap, in other words, is easily explained, but equally easily buried in the morass of centuries of racist propaganda and decades of resource mismanagement.

This dossier argues that the Congolese people have been fighting against the theft of their wealth not only since the 1958 formation of the Mouvement National Congolais (‘Congolese National Movement or MNC’) – which sought freedom from Belgium and control over the Congo’s extensive natural resources – but even earlier, through working-class resistance between the 1930s and 1950s. That fight has not been easy, nor has it succeeded. The DRC continues to be dominated by exploitation and oppression at the hands of a powerful Congolese oligarchy and multinational corporations that operate with the permission of the former. Furthermore, the country suffers, on one hand, from wars of aggression by its neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, aided by proxy militia groups, and, on the other, from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF that enforce neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans.8

The price of digital commodities is further cheapened by the low revenues earned by the Congolese state. To take the example of one multinational corporation that is key to the extraction of resources from the DRC, Glencore posted market-adjusted earnings of US$3.5 billion for 2023 (before interest and taxes).10 It is the ‘subsidy’ of suppressed wages (partly facilitated by coerced and forced labour) and lowered state revenue that provide this company with such high earnings. Without the blood, sweat, and misery of the Congolese portion of the ‘bottom billion’ and the raw materials they produce, companies in the Global North would not be able to extract such high profits.

...[O]ver the past decade Glencore has encouraged artisanal miners to work on its leased concessions in order to increase its cobalt production. During this period, the price paid to miners collapsed from $40 a pound to $13.50 a pound.40 The real wage for all cobalt miners, whether they work independently or are on a company’s payroll, is not much more than the bottom billion wage of US$1 or US$2 a day.

Less than a decade after the Congolese government nationalised all mining and mineral rights (in 1966) and then Union Minière (in 1967), countries across the Global South came under pressure from international finance to privatise their nationalised mining sectors as neoliberalism spread across the globe during the 1970s. In the DRC, pressure from the IMF and World Bank led to the beginnings of privatisation in the 1980s, though it was not until later, with the mining code of 2002, that this trend began to devastate the economy, largely because of the political turmoil and period of war that defined the country from 1996 to 2003. The weakness of the state due to this war, the callousness of the new political leadership in Kinshasa, and the advice of the World Bank pushed the DRC to offer deals that were advantageous to multinational mining companies at the expense of their population.

In 2002, a new mining code in the DRC provided foreign companies – all from the US and Europe – with favourable taxation, incentives for exploration, an open door to expatriate profits, and the right to circumvent labour and environmental regulations. The code forbade amendments for ten years and contained a clause that any changes to the fiscal regime could not come into effect until 2022. The Lutundula Commission of 2005 later revealed that then President Joseph Kabila and other officials secretly colluded with corporations to receive small personal gains, which paled in comparison to the massive advantages given to foreign companies.45

At an African Development Bank meeting in December 2008, then President of Botswana Festus Mogae said that tax and royalty exemptions given to multinational mining companies prevented African states from retaining a fair share of profits from the extraction of resources, which is why, he continued, ‘it is necessary to renegotiate some of them’.46 In 2011, the DRC tried to revise the mining code, but that attempt only provided more benefits for foreign firms.

The entry of the Chinese state and private Chinese companies into Africa over the past two decades has provided competition against the Global North countries and their mining companies. This was the first time that these multinational corporations faced direct competition, a shift that provided the space for the Congolese government to amend the mining code in 2018 on more beneficial terms. This new code stripped the ‘stability clause’ that guaranteed mining companies ten-year protection, and it increased the Congolese state’s royalty rates for non-ferrous and base metals (such as cobalt and copper) from 2% to 3.5% and allowed royalty rates to be raised to 10% for ‘strategic substances’ such as coltan and lithium.47 Furthermore, the Chinese state entered the African market with a development agenda that was very different from the pressure campaigns waged by Global North governments, as we shall see.

Chinese companies, helped by lines of credit from Chinese banks, began to buy major cobalt operations, eventually taking control of fifteen of the DRC’s seventeen mining complexes. In the extractivism debate, the Global North, its eyes set on furthering its own agenda, has fixated on China’s role in the region as the world’s leading consumer of cobalt, nearly 80% of which it uses in its rechargeable battery industry.48 What is often left out of the discussion, however, is that, as the largest manufacturing country in the world, China uses Congolese minerals and metals to produce goods that are consumed across the globe, including in the DRC and the Global North.

Chinese interests therefore lie in keeping mineral and metal processing within the DRC and building an industrial base for the country. This is a policy that diverges from the IMF-driven agenda for the DRC. Angered by the deepening ties between the DRC and China, the United States government used its influence over the IMF to sabotage the DRC’s attempt to renegotiate a deal with Sicomines, which is a joint venture between the China Railway Group and Power Construction Corporation of China, (PowerChina) as the principal shareholders as well as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (with a 1% stake) and the DRC’s state mining company Gécamines (with a 32% stake).49

Shortly after the DRC’s President Félix Tshisekedi took office in January 2019, he indicated the need to renegotiate an agreement between the DRC and China in 2008 that designated $6 billion from Sicomines to fund local infrastructure projects. Why would Tshisekedi attempt to jeopardise $6 billion in infrastructure funding? Because Western donors and the US government were using it as a reason to deepen their sabotage of the DRC’s economy in order to punish the country for its growing proximity to China. Right after the 2008 agreement was signed, Western donors, who held the lion’s share of the DRC’s external debt, withheld $11 billion in debt relief for the DRC.50 The Chinese ambassador to the DRC at the time, Wu Zexian, criticised this call for renegotiation as ‘blackmail’.51 When the DRC refused to accept the donors’ demand, the IMF – backing the donors – said that the agreement with Sicomines had to be renegotiated before there could be a discussion about further debt relief. The US Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton, travelled to Kinshasa to discuss the situation with the government of President Joseph Kabila, and soon thereafter, the deal was amended to accept only half of the Sicomines funding.52 China’s Exim Bank, the primary financier of the deal, withdrew over disagreements with the IMF conditionalities, which left Sicomines with no stable financing arrangement at a stage when no mining operations had commenced and, therefore, no revenue was being generated. This is partly why the projects stalled. Since the amendment, less than a third of the revised $3 billion allocation for infrastructure, influenced by the 2009 IMF agreement, has been disbursed.

Knowing that the deal remained on the table, President Tshisekedi reopened the conversation with China in 2019. On 20 January 2024, the DRC finalised the renegotiation of their minerals-for-infrastructure contract with China, which provided $7 billion in financing. The agreement is rooted in a joint venture for copper and cobalt mining between Gécamines (the DRC’s state mining company) and Sicomines. According to Bloomberg, as part of the deal, Gécamines will receive a 1.2% royalty on Sicomines’ proceeds and the right to market 32% of its production.53 In addition, the 2024 renegotiated agreement updated the financing to focus primarily on the construction of national roads. This is key not only for the mining sector to function, but also for the well-being of the Congolese people, as the DRC has fewer all-weather paved roads than any other country of its size in Africa (for comparison, Saudi Arabia, whose land area is roughly the same size but is inhabited by less than half the DRC’s population, has twenty times more paved roads). The agreement also secured the DRC a 40% stake in the Busanga hydropower plant, a joint project between the two countries that was built by Chinese companies.54

Threatened by the renegotiations, the United States government intervened to undermine them. According to Africa Intelligence, the US initiated a programme that allegedly aimed to bolster anti-corruption efforts and reform mining law in the DRC by deploying a team of experts to the office of the DRC’s president and relevant ministries in early 2020.55 In addition, as part of a wider endeavour to secure access to debt relief from Western donors by ‘enhancing’ governance, the Tshisekedi administration contracted the US law firm Baker McKenzie in late 2019 and made plans to hire US legal experts to perform anti-corruption audits, which would be financially supported by the US State and US Treasury departments (this was not transparently declared, with the only public statement being that these audits would be funded by ‘third parties’).56 The consultants focused on Sicomines and ignored the wider problems in the mining industry.

When the completion of the DRC’s renegotiation was announced in 2024, the US – displeased with the outcome – hastened the discussions around the Lobito Corridor project, an infrastructure initiative driven by the US and the European Union that spans the DRC, Angola, and Zambia and aims to facilitate the transportation of minerals from the region to global trade markets through Angola’s Lobito Port.57 This project, too, is designed not to benefit the people of the DRC but to contest the role of Chinese capital in the DRC and to ensure the longevity of the Global North’s corporations in the country’s mining sector. None of the Global North’s recent ‘concerns’ about the well-being of the Congolese people have addressed its own role in fuelling violence over resources in the African Great Lakes region. As Amos Hochstein, Biden’s senior adviser for energy and investment, put it, ‘An electric vehicle is essentially a battery, and what’s in the battery is Africa’. ‘There is no time to waste’, Hochstein added; ‘We have been absent from the scene for far too long’.58 In other words, the corridor, along with other projects such as the US-initiated Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (an attempt to challenge the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative), are part of the US geopolitical strategy to counter China. With the push away from fossil fuels towards wind, solar, and electric energy, the Congo will continue to be at the centre of the discussion.

Interestingly, it was just as Chinese firms began to supplant Global North mining firms and just as Chinese investment began to build new infrastructure that a wave of interest grew in the Global North about the exploitation of the DRC’s workers – an interest that both ignores the grave violations committed by Global North companies and feigns concern for the well-being of the Congolese people in order to further geopolitical interests. When the private Chinese company CMOC (China Molybdenum Company Limited), which produces minerals key to green technology, bought the Tenke Fungurume mine from the US mining company Freeport-McMoRan in 2016, fear grew within the US state apparatus that the Chinese would control all the key elements of ‘green technology’.59

Given its powerlessness to contest China’s purchase, the US moved in two directions: to delegitimise China’s interventions in Africa through complaints about Chinese exploitation of child labour and to put political pressure on African governments to break links with China.60 This demonstrates the focus of the US and its allies on securing their economic and geopolitical interests by reviving Cold War tactics.

He didn't fear anybody. He had those people so scared they had to kill him. They couldn't buy him, they couldn't frighten him, they couldn't reach him.

Michel Kuka Mboladinga, nicknamed 'Lumumba Vea', stands silent and motionless through DR Congo football matches in tribute to Patrice Lumumba (1925 - 1961), revolutionary, independence leader and first Prime Minister of the First Congolese Republic (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), who was crucial in transforming DR Congo from a Belgian colony into an independent state. Lumumba believed strongly in both national and pan-African unity, in full decolonisation and in freeing his country's resources, politics and economy from foreign ownership, interference and domination. He was kidnapped, tortured and murdered only seven months after election by Katangan seperatists and Belgian mercenaries, with US, UK and UN involvement. His body was dissolved in acid, and it took until 2022 - and a court ruling - for all that remained of Patrice Lumumba, a single tooth, to be returned to his family.

In tonight's World Cup match between Congo and Colombia, a Congolese man remained motionless for the full 90 minutes, imitating the salute of the Congolese anticolonial leader, Patrice Lumumba.

Lumumba was dismembered and dissolved in acid by the US and Belgium in 1961 for securing Congo's independence from colonialism and refusing to let imperialists continue plundering his country's resources.

Though the imperialists dissolved his body, they could not erase him from history; 65 years later, Lumumba remains present for millions of people.

Finished. One prototype in black soft oiltan leather and two hardened veg-tan leather sets, one in iron and the other in bronze.

This finishes out the bulk of the leatherwork I'm doing for @greenstageseattle on the armor for Coriolanus. Now to just get all my lines down solidly.

Similar work for most theater companies it priced around 350 per set as a minimum, but there can be negotiating over these kind of things.