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It was to be the “contract of the century”. The perfect demonstration of this “win-win” partnership that China promises Africa. In 2008, Joseph Kabila had validated with Beijing a gigantic barter operation: cobalt and copper from his country against the construction of infrastructure. For the then president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the stated ambition was to exploit what is commonly called the Congolese “geological scandal” to put an end to another scandal, much more authentic, that of the shortage of roads, railways, hospitals, schools, universities …
For China, negotiating preferential access to these mineral resources proved to be strategic for the pursuit of its industrial development. The DRC is the largest African producer of copper and – by far – the world’s largest cobalt, essential for the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles and smartphones. Amount of the agreement: 9 billion dollars (about 6.4 billion euros at the time), reduced the following year to 6.2 billion dollars under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), worried about the over-indebtedness that this agreement could impose on the Congolese economy.
The nature of the relationship evolved over the next decade, shifting from a barter logic to the commercial one of the “silk roads” imagined by Beijing. To maintain its imports of Congolese minerals, China has therefore concentrated most of its projects in the hydroelectric field, in order to produce the energy necessary for industrial extraction.
American support
But now a new wind has started to blow on Sino-Congolese relations since the arrival of Félix Tshisekedi to the presidency in January 2019. Like Joseph Kabila, who had first benefited from significant Western support before to get closer to Beijing, the new head of state, whose electoral legitimacy has been seriously questioned, received from his first days in power the support of American diplomacy, including his very visible and communicative ambassador in Kinshasa, Mike “Nzita” Hammer.
Did the latter encourage him to question the cooperation established by his predecessor with Beijing, in an international context of heightened rivalry between China and the United States? “I can’t say the United States pushed it, but they probably didn’t do anything to stop it. In the long term, the DRC’s mineral reserves are strategic for everyone ”, responds, with the prudence of a diplomat, another ambassador stationed in Kinshasa.
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