Washing copper ore in Katanga. Photo by Bas Van Abel | Waag Society. Used under CC license 2.0.

Green imperialism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to some of the world’s largest critical mineral reserves, but control and profits are in the hands of transnational mining corporations. Ben Radley analyses the political and industrial history and considers how Congolese people can fight the imperialists.

Over five years ago now, in January 2019, Felix Tshisekedi – son of veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi – was inaugurated as the fifth President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Later that same year, the United States and the European Union unveiled their Green New Deals, looking to reinvigorate stagnating capitalist economies by catalysing massive growth in the manufacturing of renewable energy and other green technologies, creating millions of high-skilled and well-remunerated jobs in the process.

Critical to the realisation of these green capitalist futures is the steady supply of low-cost, low-carbon metals and minerals from across the Global South. This is evidenced by the near continual updating of so-called ‘critical minerals’ strategy documents outlining how Global North powers will access the required resources, and the resulting spate of critical minerals agreements signed with Southern countries to secure this access.

Green New Deals emanating from the global centres of wealth and power represent, in other words, imperialist projects dependent upon the transfer of value from South to North through processes of unequal economic and ecological exchange, producing uneven development and cementing Southern subordination within the global capitalist economy. The DRC provides a modern exemplar of green imperialist dynamics in action.

Copper, cobalt, and lithium are three critical low-carbon metals due to their use in a range of green technologies in the energy and transport sectors, including for cobalt as a core element in electric batteries. The DRC is home to one of the world’s largest lithium deposits and around half of known world cobalt reserves. In 2022, the country accounted for 10 percent of world copper production and 68 percent of world cobalt production.

Yet control of and profiteering from this production is firmly in the hands of transnational mining corporations. While the origins of imperialist penetration in the DRC can be traced back to the Congo Free State (1885-1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908-1960), the process for maintaining open economic access to the country as a means to further green imperialist agendas in the 21^st century has more recent origins.

Shortly after the official end of the Congo Wars (1996-2002), in July 2002, the DRC’s first new Mining Code since 1981 was passed. This was introduced as one of a raft of reforms drafted with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank’s close supervision as part of an overall effort to instil a neoliberal regime at the heart of the DRC post-war polity, with Northern donors playing a supporting role. Even the IMF’s DRC Head of Mission would eventually comment, in 2015, that ‘the 2002 Mining Code is too generous, so much so that the state captures very little in the end.’  

A brief look at who controls the DRC’s cobalt production – the most critical of the country’s transition metals – makes clear the near complete ceding of Congolese resource sovereignty to foreign mining corporates. In 2021, six transnational mining corporations held majority ownership of cobalt projects that accounted for 90 percent of production in the DRC, equating to more than half of world supply for that year. As electric battery and other manufacturers scramble to secure access to this production, these six mining corporates are in a powerful, oligopolistic position.

Table 1 Cobalt production in the DRC, 2021

Sources: DRC Ministry of Mines Statistics, company reports.

Over the last several years, state officials in the DRC have undertaken a number of efforts to resist imperial encroachment and reassert a greater degree of sovereign ownership and control over the country’s mineral wealth. This included, under the Kabila administration, the adoption of a new Mining Code in 2018. This marked the end of a six-year battle between the Congolese government and foreign mining corporates, the latter of whom had bitterly resisted any effort to increase taxes and royalty rates, including through a series of public statements alongside arbitration and mine closure threats. Congolese state officials held their ground, however, and the desired changes went through. Most prominent among these were the designation of cobalt as a strategic mineral, subjecting it to a 10 percent royalty rate (up from two percent), the increase of state ownership in all licensed mining firms from five percent to 10 percent, and the introduction of a 50 percent windfalls profit tax. 

More recently, in November 2021, a group of Congolese ministers unveiled plans to move up the estimated $8.8 trillion electric vehicle battery value chain from mineral exploitation to transformation and eventually to the domestic manufacture and export of batteries. These plans were further solidified in May 2022, when the Congolese and Zambian governments committed to create a regional African value chain for the production of electric vehicle batteries.

In January 2023, the US signed a memorandum of understanding with the DRC and Zambia, signalling its support to their industrialisation efforts. Actions speak louder than words, however. Several months later, in October 2023, the Biden administration unveiled its joint plans with the EU to raise an estimated $1.6 billion to finance the construction of an 800-kilometre rail transport corridor connecting the DRC’s cobalt and other mineral exports with the Atlantic Ocean via the Port of Lobito in Angola.

This is part of a push to regain strategic control over the DRC’s mineral wealth from China, where the role assigned to the DRC by imperialist Northern powers is clear: Not to industrialise itself, but to serve as a provider of low-cost, unprocessed cobalt and other ‘critical transition metals’ in support of green industrialisation and job creation strategies elsewhere.

How then to step outside of a model of mining-led national development that historically has delivered little by way of material improvements for most Congolese? Samir Amin’s strategy of ‘delinking’ provides valuable guidance here. Amin proposed delinking not as a blueprint, but as a means to conceptualise how national sovereign development projects in the global periphery might best be promoted. The strategy centres around breaking from the demands imposed by the external global economy and reorienting strategy and policy towards serving domestic demand and promoting popular development, grounded in an understanding of the needs and interests of workers and peasants.

Serious efforts to construct a sovereign national development project in the DRC have, however, historically been met with interference and obstruction by imperial powers with vested interests in maintaining open access to the Congolese economy on favourable terms. This history runs from the US- and Belgian-backed assassination of nationalist leader and former Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961, through to the immediate support and backing provided by the US, UK, Belgium, France and others for the official presidential elections results in 2011 and 2018, despite well-documented irregularities and electoral fraud.

Despite all of this, it must not be forgotten that the removal of President Joseph Kabila in 2019 was the culmination of a long battle fought and won by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Congolese who took to the streets at various moments in the years leading up to the election – both in Kinshasa and elsewhere across the country – to protest against Kabila’s many attempts to maintain his grip on power, too many of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice through loss of life. If the pursuit of an alternative, anti-imperialist national development project is to emerge in the DRC, it will only be through the route of such continued struggle and the popular demands it imposes upon the country’s political leadership.