The elements of power, p.26
The Elements of Power, page 26
Muyej told me that he hoped to diversify the local economy through tourism and agriculture. Mining, he said, exacerbated inequalities—“enormous mineral wealth beside a population that lives in enormous precarity.” A back issue of Grands Lacs magazine that someone had left in the waiting room at Muyej’s office in the governorate underlined the point well, with a cover story titled “Lualaba, New El Dorado of the Mining World.”
In 2018, Forbes praised Muyej’s governorship as “a model for bringing together economic prosperity, political transparency and social impact.” Yet agriculture was scarce in the province; as for tourism, it was hard for me to imagine Kolwezi becoming a travel destination. In 2019, I tried to visit Katebi Beach Lodge, a new lakeside resort. At the entrance, a metal gate topped with barbed wire, I was shooed away by a police officer toting a Kalashnikov. Apparently, the lake was too polluted to allow visitors.
Muyej often cited the construction of a new governorate building—a gaudy structure rising above a sea of ramshackle cinder-block houses—to show how he had modernized Kolwezi. Renovations of the local soccer stadium and the town’s central roundabout, which features a statue of mine workers, were financed by mining companies.
Muyej told me that he hoped to reform the mining sector by, in part, reducing child labor and centralizing the market where traders buy cobalt, thus instilling transparency into the supply chain. Critics in Congolese civil-society organizations and among the Congolese political opposition called such reforms cynical bids to control and tax artisanal production for personal gain. Muyej, his family, and officials close to him profited from the mining boom. The governor’s son Yves was the CEO of a logistics company in Kolwezi that had helped manage the Kasulo mine. Muyej’s cabinet chief, Joseph Yav Katshung, was a lawyer whose firm did work for Congo Dongfang. (Yav and Yves both declined to speak to me.)
Muyej said that as many as 170,000 creuseurs work informally in his province. The Congo Dongfang mine in Kasulo is among the forty or so sites where artisanal miners are employed as day laborers. At the time, only 800 or so creuseurs worked there, down from the 15,000 who had worked there before Muyej intervened. Resentment ran high. “Kasulo is a village that is built on mineral deposits, but not enough creuseurs can legally work on official artisanal deposits,” Jean-Jacques Kayembe, the president of an artisanal mining collective, told me. “And that’s a problem.”
Whenever Muyej tried to reason with creuseurs who had snuck onto industrial concessions, he was attacked with stones, and in 2019, there was so much unrest in Kolwezi that the military was sent in. By the end of the 2010s, it had become common to see soldiers toting machine guns and rocket launchers around the city. When I first visited the area, in 2019, a tollbooth outside town was riddled with bullet holes. A policeman at the booth had recently been murdered by bandits.
In 2020, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa announced that two Congolese citizens had leaked documents exposing numerous improprieties at Afriland First Bank, a Cameroon-based institution where Muyej had at least one account. Muyej, it was revealed, had been moving hundreds of thousands of dollars through the bank. He was forced out of government. According to Radio France Internationale, the Congolese authorities have accused Muyej of not being able to justify 40 percent of his cabinet’s expenses. (A representative for Muyej said that the governor had done nothing wrong and welcomed an audit of his finances.) For a while, it looked like ethnic tensions might flare up: Muyej rallied his base, and an organization of Ruund activists, the Dynamique de la Jeunesse Ruund (Ruund Youth Dynamic), began agitating for his return to power, threatening that “a good cohabitation between the people of Lualaba” was impossible without Muyej’s return.
His replacement was his deputy, Fifi Masuka Saini, also known as Madame Fifi. She was accused of running artisanal mines for her own profit, much like Muyej had done. Masuka made money through the cooperative structure. Antoine Mutumba confirmed to me that the cooperative he ran for Kalala was connected to Madame Fifi. She was also more directly connected to another cooperative called the Coopérative Minière pour le Bien-Être des Exploitants Artisanaux du Katanga (Mining Collective for the Well-Being of Katanga Artisanals), or Comibakat for short. In a legal document, Masuka was listed as the president of the cooperative’s leadership council. In 2021, the cooperative was accused of fraudulently mining at ten sites, including at one for which the Kazakh firm Eurasian Resources Group had a mining permit, and ganging up with Lebanese miners to use industrial machinery.
Masuka’s work with the businessman-turned-politician Dany Banza Maloba also raised eyebrows across the South of Congo. Banza, a Katangese Kasaian, had been tasked by Tshisekedi with running the president’s Katangese affairs. He became known as the “right arm” of Tshisekedi in Katanga, according to the Katangese political analyst Serge Noël Ngoy Mwanabute. Banza was, as various reports had it, involved in collecting revenue for the presidency from the mining provinces. One morning in mid-2022, I met Martin Fayulu, the presidential candidate whom Tshisekedi beat in 2018’s election. We had breakfast at a hotel he owns in Kinshasa. Over fruit and coffee, I asked him about corruption in the president’s inner circle. “That’s all Tshisekedi’s government does,” Fayulu replied. “He only thinks about tribalism. He only thinks about himself. He only thinks about getting rich for himself, his family, and his friends.”
In 2024, the digital newspaper Africa Intelligence published a report that connected Banza and Masuka to artisanal mining cooperatives that were operating illegally on industrial concessions around Kolwezi. “She’s just a front for Dany,” Bradley Barnett, the president of a U.S. firm called Critical Minerals International, said of Masuka. “And Dany’s the bridge between the president’s family and the road to riches.”
By early 2025, Banza had reportedly fallen out with Tshisekedi and left the country, but he seemed to still be living well. In a video posted to TikTok that March, naming him a “billionaire capo,” the footage showed him leaving the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo and getting into a pristine vintage Mercedes-Benz. “One of the Felix T guys who has been managing Chinese money,” the Congolese analyst who sent it to me wrote on WhatsApp. “Banza is at the heart / center of Chinese money in the DRC.”
Chapter 34
The Steve Jobs of Metals
Sadip’s life changed in 2015. That was the year IMIP, the giant Chinese-backed nickel complex in Indonesia, began operations at Morowali. “People here just farm cassava now; cassava is the only thing that you can sell easily. Rice won’t grow,” Sadip, the Indonesian farmer, said. When we spoke, IMIP had been open for seven years. “The rice grew until the mining came. It was impacted by the mining, and the water was polluted and killed the plants. We tried to fertilize the rice, but the crop is really, really bad.”
IMIP, which Sadip referred to as “the company,” was destroying the livelihoods of the people in Bahodopi, he said, even as a huge influx of workers came to take jobs in the mining sector. He said that there had been an almost punitive approach toward the people who had inhabited the area before the industrial park arrived. “A group of farmers, we made a dam on the river, but the company destroyed it,” he told me. “The company destroyed our tunnel and our dam, so we don’t have any irrigation. The consequence is that we used to grow rice, but now we have to buy rice from elsewhere.”
IMIP’s development came as Chinese companies ramped up investment in new Indonesian nickel mines during the 2010s. But although nickel has seen an uptick in demand because of its use in NMC cathodes, the metal had become a complex proposition on world markets by the late 2010s and early 2020s. Prices rose and fell dramatically. Much of this stemmed from Indonesia’s 2020 decision to ban exports of raw nickel ore. The idea was that Indonesia could capture more value from the metal if it processed it at home. The ban was challenged by the European Union, which successfully sued the Indonesian government to end it, alleging harm to the steel industry.
In response, Indonesia’s president at the time, Joko Widodo, who is known as “Jokowi” and ruled as a “polite populist” between 2014 and 2024, claimed that the Europeans were trying to cudgel his country into underdevelopment. “It’s okay to lose. I told the minister to file an appeal,” Jokowi said. “We want to become a developed country. We want to open more jobs. If we are afraid of the lawsuit and give up, we will never become a developed country.” The value of nickel exported from Indonesia had skyrocketed from twenty trillion rupiah to three hundred trillion rupiah (or from $1.3 billion to around $20 billion in U.S. dollars). “Our trade balance, for twenty-nine consecutive months, is positive, after [it] had been showing negative results for decades. We have been receiving [a] positive balance since twenty-nine months ago. This is our goal.”
* * *
the swings in the nickel price had also been occasioned by other forces. One of these was a single magnate: Xiang Guangda, a Chinese businessman known as “Big Shot” and “the Steve Jobs of metals.” Outside China, Xiang is most famous for trying to short the nickel market in late 2021 and early 2022. As it turned out, he mistimed his trade. Prices moved higher, partly on the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By the early afternoon of March 8, 2022, Xiang had lost $10 billion. The London Metal Exchange, the place where the highest volumes of nickel are bought and sold on any given day, suspended trading, and Xiang recorded $1 billion in losses. But he didn’t seem put out. “The loss has been roughly offset by the profits of his nickel operations over the same period,” a Bloomberg article explained.
As it transpired, Xiang was substantially involved in Indonesian mining. His company, Tsingshan, was a Chinese success story on par with Chen Xuehua’s Huayou, Robin Zeng’s CATL, and Wang Chuanfu’s BYD. In fact, he and Chen were close, and they invested in the Huayue nickel plant together. Xiang was from the southeastern province of Zhejiang and had started his career as a mechanic at a state-run fishing operation before founding a company that made car doors and windows.
The early 1990s were as pivotal for Xiang as for the other Chinese entrepreneurs in the field of new-energy materials. In 1992, Xiang turned to stainless steel after a visit to Germany convinced him that Chinese automakers would bring car-parts manufacturing in-house. In the early 2000s, Tsingshan patented a new, energy-intensive way to create stainless steel, and the firm went from a small Chinese steel manufacturer to a major player in a booming industry. In the words of a Chinese article praising Xiang, Tsingshan became “a stainless steel aircraft carrier,” suggesting it was through soft power, not conventional military might, that China was projecting itself into the world. In 2008, after the global financial crisis hit, Xiang realized that China produced no nickel, a metal that was vital to his industry, so he turned to Indonesia.
China and Indonesia had checkered relations in the decades after Indonesian independence, the strain stemming mostly from Jakarta’s rabidly anti-Communist policies under Suharto and by the persecution of the country’s ethnic Chinese. After a treaty called the Indonesia-China Strategic Partnership was signed in 2005, however, China began to dominate Indonesian business, and China’s Xi Jinping forged a close personal relationship with Jokowi. Chinese companies invested heavily in Indonesia’s mining sector and built more coal power plants there than in any other country. “I do think Jokowi is someone who wants to build the domestic nickel industry,” William Yuen Yee, a U.S. researcher who focuses on Indonesia-China relations, told me in 2023. He noted that there is probably a limit to how comfortable nationalists like Jokowi will be with China. “If he sees too much of China’s Belt and Road Initiative playbook of bringing in Chinese companies, bringing in Chinese workers, if it’s not working for Indonesians, I don’t think he’s going to be completely open to continuing inflows of Chinese investment. That said, China’s also the only game in town. It’s like the U.S. talks about that a lot, but we haven’t really offered up an alternative.”
* * *
Xiang knew how to appeal to Jokowi partly because they shared a similar philosophy on development. Many of Xiang’s speeches came from a similar ideological framework as that of the Indonesian premier, who has prioritized the development of his country, sometimes at the cost of cordial relations with foreign countries. Xiang told an audience in Ningde that he often speaks with foreigners who are critical of China’s growth, telling them:
We can’t compare with you now. China has only been developing reform and opening up for forty years, and Europe has developed for more than one hundred years now. In fact, we are the first generation, and you are more than ten generations of wealth. Your ancestors were very hardworking and not afraid of death. If you want to compare our modern China with your grandfather’s grandfather, then you will understand our current hard work. The struggle now is also for the future, so that our descendants can live the same life as you.
The message that Xiang wanted to impart—“let foreigners slowly understand our diligence in development and reduce the resistance they give in cooperation”—could have been lifted directly from one of Jokowi’s own orations.
Chapter 35
Dirty Nickel
Xiang Guangda backed up his rhetoric with investment in Indonesia. His first moves in the country came in 2009, but it was in 2013 that he signed a contract for the project that would most define him: the Morowali Industrial Park, or IMIP, the plant that Sadip blamed for destroying his livelihood. Over time, a whole range of large Chinese firms—including firms working in Congo, such as CATL, Huayou, and China Molybdenum—created processing facilities in the park using low-interest financing from the China Development Bank and the Bank of China, as well as other large Chinese banks.
Almost overnight, a new city began to emerge. The only difference was that this city, which boasted a four-star hotel, a private airfield, and a series of coal-fired power plants, was focused on one thing alone: mining. Primarily for nickel but also for cobalt. The jungle around Bahodopi was hacked away, and deep pits were sunk into the red earth so that its laterite ore could be extracted. According to Indonesia’s Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investment Affairs, a total of $29 billion had been invested in Morowali by 2022.
As IMIP grew, locals like Sadip began to complain about rampant pollution. Because nickel is found in laterite deposits in Indonesia, a great deal of energy is needed to separate it from the iron in the soil. Companies like Xiang’s built dirty coal power plants to mine and refine the metals and began to displace families and farmers who had worked the land for generations. By 2021, IMIP was burning nine million metric tons of coal a year. Exhaust may have no longer been poisoning the air in Chinese cities. But instead, it was spewing out across the Indonesian rainforest.
Initially, IMIP focused on producing nickel for stainless steel, but with the rise of the lithium-ion battery, the park began to create nickel for firms that sat in the supply chain of large EV manufacturers like Tesla, Volkswagen, and BMW. In 2018, Tsingshan announced that it would build an HPAL facility on Sulawesi, which would allow it to process cobalt and nickel from the ore mined at Morowali.
IMIP officials insisted that the toxic waste from the HPAL process was being disposed of in the right way. But in 2022, when I visited Jakarta’s environmental watchdog network, Jaringan Advokasi Tambang, or JATAM, activists there told me that IMIP’s activities were far from clean. In August of that year, JATAM had released a report criticizing Tesla’s decision to source around $5 billion worth of nickel from Indonesia, stressing how the project had caused “prolonged suffering of the people and environmental damages” and had “also triggered seawater pollution.” The report concluded on a depressing note: “The practice of nickel extraction in Indonesia has triggered the loss of access for most people to food and water, as well as the escalation of conflict which is getting higher and wider due to land grabbing and repressive security approaches to people who defend their living space.”
* * *
On a sunny morning in November 2022, I took a canoe that had been fitted with a puttering two-stroke engine to the IMIP mine site. The canoe’s captain cautioned me to keep my head down. IMIP’s guards didn’t like people prying, and even though we were technically in a public area, he warned us that we could be detained by security for snooping around.
As we motored past piles of coal stacked on barges—raw material to be burned in IMIP’s furnaces—and watched IMIP’s smokestacks puff out fumes, I noticed a handful of canoes like ours making their way to the front of the site. In one, a lady named Neni told us that she used to fish but now just collected scrap with her daughter from the edge of the mine site, as the water had become too befouled for fishing. “Our livelihood has been taken away from us,” she said.
Another problem was the toxic slurry that resulted from the HPAL. Initially, IMIP had planned to get rid of tailings at sea, which would have been harmful to wildlife. After environmental groups kicked up a stink, the application for aquatic dispersal was withdrawn. Still, as Winwin, an activist with JATAM, told me, “When we talk about mining, you have people who will have to be displaced from their homeland.” She went on to explain the downstream effects: “People are displaced to the shore, and it is not the answer, because when mining operates, waste runs into the river, and that ends up in the sea. And those people who live at the seashore, they have to struggle. And it means their income, everything that comes from the sea, is also affected. The ecosystem is destroyed.”
A statement from a coalition of three environmental groups around Morowali complained of “a trail of destruction of marine and land biodiversity in remote areas, marginalizing the lives of local residents and workers,” and it highlighted the irony of the battery industry in Indonesia and “the initial goal of electrifying global vehicles with the use of coal-fired power plants.”
