The elements of power, p.31
The Elements of Power, page 31
He began telling me about how children did not mine in Kafwaya: They washed and carried sacks of minerals. At night, these bags would be smuggled to Likasi, where buyers awaited.
“Where do they sell the ore?” I asked Marcel.
“We sell it in Likasi, to the Chinese,” he said. “The Chinese of CDM.” Marcel was telling me something extraordinary: CDM, which was owned by Huayou, one of China’s largest cobalt-mining and -processing concerns, was stealing from China Moly, also one of China’s largest mining firms, in broad daylight. In Indonesia, on the island of Sulawesi, the two firms even worked together on the Huayue Nickel Cobalt Project. But in Congo, it wasn’t unusual for Chinese operators to steal from one another. “The Chinese, they hate each other most of all,” Marcel said.
* * *
China Moly’s seizing of the road—through an opaque deal with a local governor—was a powerful metaphor for Chinese investment in the region and in the cobalt supply chain. The control of public space by private enterprise was nowhere more obvious in Congo than here. In fact, China Moly could conceivably hold up all the copper and cobalt shipped out of Kolwezi, at least for as long as the company controlled the highway.
Little of the wealth being generated a few miles away appeared to have trickled down to the people living in Fungurume, a town of dirt roads on the verges of the Cobalt Highway.
When I visited, in 2019, Fiston, a motorcycle driver, told me he had worked in the mines at one point but had left when he realized that “it was another form of bondage.” He showed me his home—a hot, cramped four-room house made of cinder block—which he shares with his wife and two children.
Kazadi and I walked through Fungurume with Fiston and visited a medical clinic that had barely any equipment or medicine. Suddenly, a man appeared, claiming to be with the Congolese secret police. He tried to arrest us but had no vehicle. He had to hail a moto-taxi, which couldn’t catch our pickup. We were soon clear of him.
I asked Kazadi whether all intelligence agents in Congo were so poorly equipped. They had no funding, he explained. Even though the country is wildly rich in natural resources, it cannot afford to spend money on public services. Public funds are plundered by corrupt politicians, and large companies pay off politicians to take control of the country’s mines. Big industrial miners liked to draw a clear dividing line between their practices and those of the “illegal” artisanal miners, but in many ways, they were two sides of the same rusty coin, depending on each other to exist.
* * *
Years after the TFM sale, beginning under the first Trump administration and continuing into Biden’s term of office, there would be some soul-searching as to how the U.S. let China, its main adversary in an increasingly complex world, take control of the world’s largest copper mine. Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for being asleep at the wheel. The GOP pointed to Hunter Biden’s connection to the second sale of TFM shares, and in 2020, as Joe Biden ran for president, Trump’s campaign took to calling him “China’s puppet.” In 2021, The New York Times ran an article headlined How Hunter Biden’s Firm Helped Secure Cobalt for the Chinese. Therein, Lundin and Freeport executives expressed puzzlement at BHR’s participation in the deal, but naturally, they did not go into detail about how they had helped secure cobalt for China Moly.
Chinese companies like China Moly, Huayou, and Sicomines had expanded in Congo under administrations from both parties. China Moly had bought assets under Obama and Trump, and Biden was in power when CATL bought its share in Kisanfu. Perhaps culprits could be found among the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the State Department, which had underinvested in Africa; diplomats would often say that Africa was playing sixth string in Washington’s continental orchestra. But the general antipathy of most U.S. companies toward working in Africa was also another important reason for the decline. Far better, executives stateside had theorized, to let China do the dirty work and then reap the profits further down the chain.
The 2020s were turning out to be a mirror of the late 1970s, back when Congress had wised up to Soviet stockpiling of critical minerals. “There seemed to be a real desire to suggest there was some way the Obama administration had screwed this up and let their eye off the ball,” Tom Perriello, the former African Great Lakes envoy, told me. “The real story was that the U.S. government just doesn’t have that many tools to address this.” He went on: “The great strength in our system is that our companies are independent of our government. But it also creates a weakness, whereas there is a fairly tight relationship, or at least a dynamic relationship, between Chinese corporations and the Chinese government.” U.S. corporations in the 2010s and ’20s did not operate like they had during the twentieth century. “During the Cold War, U.S. corporate interests typically aligned with expansion of the American middle class at home and with governments not going pro-Soviet abroad.” Their focus these days was shareholder interest, not patriotic duty. “U.S. companies not only don’t have an obligation,” he said, “but often see it as, well, it’s not their obligation to advance U.S. foreign policy.”
Part 5
Waking Up
“High speed is the critical factor which makes transportation socially destructive. A true choice among political systems and of desirable social relations is possible only where speed is restrained.”
—Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity
Chapter 42
God Is Smiling on Congo
You know what, God is smiling on Congo, the thought went. He hasn’t smiled on Congo in a long time, but now he has begun to. The sentiment belonged to Amos Hochstein, an energetic forty-nine-year-old. It was September 12, 2022, and for just over a year, he had been the senior adviser for energy security at the U.S. State Department, as well as a special presidential coordinator for global infrastructure and energy security under President Biden. Hochstein, who had a mop of dark hair that he combed across his head when on official business, looked slightly out of place among the stuffed suits of Congolese officialdom. As he sped through the streets of Kinshasa, past gray tower blocks whose only development since the days of Belgian colonialism had been in the realm of rot, past heaving slums filled with those who had fled the country’s lawlessness and violence, he hoped he could convey this message—that God had indeed smiled on the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In return, he hoped Congo would have the good sense to smile back. And, come to think of it, he hoped Congo would especially smile on the United States.
Hochstein’s life had been dominated by questions surrounding the world’s energy supply: He was born in Israel, in 1973, just as the Arab-Israeli crisis was working its way to a bloody nadir, and in his adult life, he had worked on energy issues for three Democratic administrations, starting in the 1990s. In Kinshasa, a Congolese newscaster hailed the arrival of Biden’s “Mister Energy.”
In 2022, the world’s energy map was looking more uncertain than it had for years. In Ukraine, Russian forces were retreating against an onslaught of Ukrainian troops. Vladimir Putin was becoming more and more aggressive in his threats to use natural gas as a weapon. Pipelines had been bombed, coal mines reopened, climate goals ignored. European politicians braced for a long, cold winter ahead. In Paris, the mayor had just announced that the Eiffel Tower would go dark after 11:45 p.m. to emphasize the need to save energy. Russia, along with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, was just about to announce a cut in production of one hundred thousand barrels that October. Oil prices would go up. Inflation in a post-pandemic world was spiraling out of control.
Hochstein had wanted to visited Congo ever since he’d been appointed to his position. An earlier trip had been canceled when he contracted COVID. He had become particularly concerned with the fate of the Central African nation, even in the midst of rolling Middle East crises and revanchist mayhem in Ukraine. He was worried that the country was falling into Beijing’s increasingly totalitarian orbit. The U.S. had for years neglected a swath of countries that had become integral to the battery supply chain, even as Xi Jinping’s China continued to break ground at construction sites and woo leaders around the developing world. Now the U.S. was reviewing its critical minerals and where they came from in the wake of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, as well as Executive Order 14017, which directed the Department of Defense to scrutinize its supply chains.
Hochstein wanted the Congolese to say to themselves, We have a natural resource that is as critical in the twenty-first century as oil was in the twentieth century. Batteries and renewable energy more broadly were, to him, “a national security imperative. It is a national, a global, economic imperative.” A supply-chain review by the DOD predicted that, with electrification, “reliance on China will grow and China’s relative cell dominance is projected to remain stable.” The review also urged the U.S. to work toward making sure that “reliance on China’s cells and material does not inadvertently grow.”
Hochstein feared that the U.S. had ignored these issues for too long, and that they would very soon come back to haunt the country. His trip to Congo was an attempt to stanch the bleeding before it was too late. He wanted to get one thing across: The U.S. was getting serious about critical minerals.
* * *
One of the initiatives that Hochstein was trying to pioneer was haunted by the ghosts of the 1970s. The Biden administration wanted to use the Benguela Railway, which had been destroyed by Simba rebels during Angola’s civil war, to ship Congolese ore across a tract of central Angola and western Congo that it was calling the “Lobito Corridor.”
In 2023, the U.S., Angolan, and Congolese governments signed a seven-way memorandum of understanding “to accelerate growth in domestic and cross-border trade along the Lobito Corridor.” The prime way that they would do this would be by reopening the Benguela Railway, which had originally been built in 1903, during the colonization of Katanga. The Americans and the Europeans now thought they could extend the Lobito Corridor to Zambia, further connecting the region.
Envoys from Washington spoke about investment, but little came. Michael R. Hollomon II, the commercial director of a mining firm called U.S. Strategic Metals, told me that he had tried to convince the Biden administration to allow his firm to invest in Congo. “There were payments that had to be made in Congo,” he said, not specifying exactly what payments these were. “The State Department said no.” A State Department official lamented to me that the U.S. government was “playing catch-up” in African countries, because the perception is that it is difficult to do business with Washington. There are no U.S. businesses in Congo, the official said, “apart from a Coca-Cola bottling plant,” because U.S. firms are scared to invest. A Washington lobbyist told me that the U.S. government does not help investors who want to buy stakes in Congolese mines, despite overtures from the government about “critical minerals.”
What little U.S. investment there was barely seemed serious. In 2021, The New York Times ran a piece titled “Who Are Congo’s Cobalt Entrepreneurs?,” naming figures who were famous in the U.S. business and celebrity arena: everyone from Akon, the Senegalese American R&B singer, to Jide Zeitlin, a disgraced fashion-industry CEO, whom the report claimed had a “laser focus” on Congo’s mining sector, to Dikembe Mutombo, a Congolese American basketball player. Mutombo told the Times that “his investment plan could give him and his partners access to one of the country’s largest cobalt and copper mines by pressing the Swiss-based mining giant Glencore to sell it.” He even showed the paper a letter, signed by seven Democratic senators, saying that Glencore was thinking about selling its mines in Congo. But anyone who knew anything about Congolese mining had never heard of Mutombo as a mining investor. Glencore certainly hadn’t, and since the Times had published their piece his name had not surfaced again.
People involved in the Congolese mining world found the names more than a little unbelievable. By 2024, of the “entrepreneurs” mentioned by the Times, only Erik Prince, the mercenary CEO of Blackwater infamy, had anything that appeared to be a sustainable business in Congo, and that was to train guards at Chinese mines and support the government in its fight against rebels in the East.
Akon had invested in a mine alongside Red Rock Resources, Andrew Bell’s firm, which Glencore had already squeezed out in Kolwezi. Akon’s project looked to turn a little-known site previously exploited by a George Forrest–linked company into a full-fledged industrial cobalt mine. After more geological work was done, the mine turned out to be “exhausted,” and Congo’s finance directorate announced that it was opening an investigation into the company’s finances.
The Lobito Atlantic Railway was an attempt to get serious. The development had the potential, as a report by the Cobalt Institute (an industry body that tracks the cobalt market) put it, to “counter Chinese involvement in the African Copperbelt.” It was popular in Washington.
But it ignored one key detail: It was China, not the United States, that had spent $1.83 billion rebuilding the railway in Angola. By 2019, twenty Chinese workers had died building the line. The first shipment of copper and cobalt had taken place under Chinese auspices. Government officials in Luanda were keen to work with the Chinese again; by 2024, Angola was the second-largest country for Chinese overseas investment, and Chinese firms were discussing the possibilities of investing in Angola’s huge offshore oil reserves.
* * *
The Lobito Atlantic Railway would certainly be a good thing for Congolese people who lived on the Cobalt Highway out of the country. Exporting cobalt by road had been an improvised measure, devised in the 1970s to get around the problems in Angola. Since the time of the rebels and the Angolan Civil War, however, politicians and powerful local interests in Congo had come to control trucking routes. Why would they destroy their lucrative business moving material south?
In 2019, I visited Kasumbalesa, the border through which most of Congo’s copper and cobalt is shipped. The lines of trucks running their engines stretched for miles, and the towns around the border posts were thick with acrid fumes. The road is also dangerous. Trucks careen off it and kill people with alarming frequency. Adelle Hollmer, a student who wrote about artisanal mining in Congo in 2024, saw a man crushed in an accident: “There were no ambulances, no police, and most shockingly no one seemed alarmed or even unnerved.” A representative of Ivanhoe, a firm that has developed the huge Kamoa-Kakula mine, told me that the mine prohibits foreign employees from driving on the road, as it is deemed unsafe.
Congolese on the Cobalt Highway complain that the drivers of the cobalt trucks, who stack long-distance round trips of forty to fifty days one on top of the other, are not in full control of their faculties. One evening in 2022, a truck smashed into the side of my vehicle at a checkpoint outside Likasi, about midway between Kolwezi and Lubumbashi.
The driver of the truck, which was laden with sacks of cobalt hydroxide on their way from a Chinese-owned mine near Mutanda to the port of Durban in South Africa, was Zambian. His firm had been subcontracted by the French logistics giant Bolloré, which ships much of the copper and cobalt out of Congo’s mines. He was stoned. After the crash, he stumbled from the cab of his truck. I pointed to the mangled fender and door of my rental car. Slurring his words, he asked if I wanted to go and smoke a joint.
Would the Lobito Corridor end up like so many other well-intentioned plans for Congo and Central Africa, confined to memory and a series of documents gathering dust in an archive? In the summer of 2024, the Financial Times heralded the project as a soft power blow against China, calling it “the U.S. railway that could set off a copper war.”
Later that year, President Biden visited Benguela, the terminus of the corridor, with Angola’s president and Congo’s president, Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo. (U.S. officials had privately expressed frustration that Congolese officials working on the project had constantly asked them for money as a precondition to meetings.) At a meeting, Hochstein pointed out that Biden had “set the vision” for the corridor at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in 2022. “Critical minerals our world needs for electric vehicles and semiconductors can be found here,” the president would say in December 2024, on the only trip to Africa of his presidency. “Clean energy we need to power artificial-intelligence data centers and economic growth can be built here.” He continued: “Nations across the Lobito Corridor have solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.” Tshisekedi hailed the project as “a driving force for economic and social transformation for millions of our people.”
All this didn’t change the fact that the project hailed by Washington still didn’t really exist, not beyond a few printed pages, memoranda of understanding, signed by diplomats and politicians. A new, vastly more unpredictable president was coming to Washington: When Trump took power again in 2025, the new government said it was focusing on more concrete dealmaking with Kinshasa. In policies that hearkened back to a former era of U.S. policy, Trump wanted the extraction of critical minerals, not just their means of export. He was agitating for them in Ukraine and Greenland as well as Congo.
Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, was appointed senior adviser for Africa. In his first trip to Kinshasa in his new role in April 2025, Boulos said he envisioned “fostering U.S. private sector investment in the DRC, particularly in the mining sector.” The railroad wasn’t mentioned, and some thought Trump would move away from a project around which Biden had centered his critical minerals policy in Africa. (“I mean, the Lobito Corridor, what was that?” mused one businessman connected to Congolese mining early in Trump’s term.) Boulos was more focused on dealmaking. He shuttled to Central Africa in order to broker peace between Kinshasa and Kigali, after Rwanda had supported rebels in snatching a chunk of Congo’s mineral-rich east. After an agreement to end hostilities was signed, in mid-2025, Bloomberg reported that a U.S. consortium that included several former intelligence and special forces officials was looking at buying Chemaf, a firm that owned several mining permits in Congo and three projects with processing plants. When a Chinese company had tried to buy Chemaf earlier in the year, the Congolese government had held back necessary approvals for the deal, presumably in a show of good faith toward the China-phobic Trump administration.
