The scramble for the Democratic Republic of Congo

The Congo Basin is the location of the world’s second-largest rainforest and holds its most extensive peatlands, a carbon sink that sequesters billions of tonnes of carbon. It is also a key supplier of vital minerals needed to build a low-carbon global economy, including most of the world’s cobalt production (an essential element in batteries for electric vehicles), copper, tungsten, tantalite and lithium.

Long regarded as dysfunctional and unstable, confidence in the DRC has been strengthened by signs that President Felix Tshisekedi is committed to reform, cracking down on corruption and bringing peace to the troubled east of the country, where there are more than 100 militia groups operating. This year he has succeeded against the odds in marginalising his predecessor Joseph Kabila.

When he was elected in 2019, Tshisekedi was dogged by questions about the dubious nature of his election “victory” and whether he had the temperament or smarts to stand up to the Kabila machine which, while ceding formal control, maintained the levers of power.

But Tshisekedi has surprised many by fundamentally reconfiguring Congolese politics. In just the last few months he has gained control of the two chambers of Parliament, which voted to oust Kabila’s Prime Minister Sylvestre Ilunga Ilunkamba. The new Prime Minister, Sama Lukonde Kyenge, from Katanga, a Tshisekedi loyalist, is regarded as a reformer, and a new “sacred union” Cabinet comprising a new generation of leadership was announced on Monday with an average age of 47, a statistic that is revolutionary in itself.

The new mines minister, Antoinette N’Samba Kalambayi, is 38 and another key position, that of finance minister, has gone to Tshisekedi adviser Nicolas Kazadi. The new Cabinet locks in appointees from the political movements of Congo’s other key leaders, Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moïse Katumbi, who are allies in the sacred union.

Given the DRC’s history of diverting rent into the elite pockets of leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko and the Kabila family, one of the challenges is to ensure that the benefits that come from the country’s unique resource endowment reach ordinary Congolese, who rank among the poorest people in the world.

The instruments of the corruption that has impoverished the DRC are tax evasion, transfer pricing and industrial scale bribery – payments that are moved through accounts in offshore tax havens, via white-collar traffickers such as accountants, lawyers and bankers.

Dan Gertler, the Israeli businessman who, according to the US Treasury, used his close friendship with Kabila to act as a middleman for a number of corrupt mining deals, has failed in his attempts to wriggle out from under US sanctions and is now said to be persona non grata in the DRC.

A big question mark still hangs over the mining companies that benefited from corrupt deals with Kabila. These include the gigantic Swiss resources company Glencore, which operates Mutanda, the world’s largest producing cobalt mine. The company has been under investigation in the US for more than three years for well-documented allegations of corruption in the DRC and multiple other jurisdictions. Glencore partnered with Gertler in the acquisition of Mutanda and Katanga Mining.

Investigative journalists and groups such as Global Witness have publicised this corruption for more than a decade, but there has been very little accountability.

Tshisekedi, who is also chair of the African Union, is emerging as an unlikely but pivotal player at a critical moment as the world thinks about moving beyond the pandemic to build back a greener global economy. He was a leading voice at last week’s virtual leaders’ dialogue convened by the African Development Bank which developed a plan to accelerate climate change adaptation actions across Africa, and he is one of the five African leaders invited to President Joe Biden’s climate assembly next week, which marks the US’s post-Trump reintegration into global climate politics.

Though Africa is destroying its forests at a much slower rate than the run-away destruction of the Amazon in Brazil, there is pressure through logging, and plans to prospect for oil and palm oil farming which could destroy forests and disturb the peatlands.

As Africa emerges economically battered from the pandemic there is a growing understanding that the continent’s people can no longer pick up the tab for the rest of the world’s excesses. Vera Songwe, executive secretary of the UN Commission for Africa, recently back from the Congo Basin, said: “If Africa is to save the planet, we need to be compensated for that.”

There is much to be gained from preserving the forests and their incredible biodiversity, including saving endangered residents such as the lowland gorilla and the African forest elephant.

Following the pandemic, there is also an awareness that leaving the forests undisturbed decreases the risk of the emergence of zoonotic diseases – the future Ebolas and novel coronaviruses that will be transmitted from animals to people.

The peat forests are estimated to contain 30 billion tonnes of carbon. If these forests were disturbed they would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as a full year of global carbon dioxide emissions.

However, the global system is not yet able to deliver a carbon trade for countries like the DRC, Gabon and the Republic of Congo that would enable them to substantially benefit from leaving the forests intact. The movement to a global protocol for carbon trading is one of the hoped-for outcomes of the climate conference, known as COP26, in Glasgow in November. Once the new system is in operation, emitters will be able to buy credits from nations that remove CO2 or prevent the destruction of habitats that release CO2. This could be worth billions of dollars for countries such as the DRC.

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), urged collective multilateral action for the world to meet its objective of net zero carbon emission by 2050. She told last week’s virtual spring meeting of the IMF: “What we do this decade would define whether we can reach this target.”

Africa in general and the DRC in particular are critical to that goal. The UN’s Songwe said: “For a very long time the conversation around climate change has been Africa didn’t cause it, so someone should pay us. But we are saying Africa is protecting the world and there is a price for that protection, and we deserve it.