A Country Sitting on Billions Unable to Feed Its People: the Case of Katanga

For much of its history, the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was called Katanga. The region was annexed to the Congo Free State by King Leopold in 1891, before its mineral wealth was fully apparent. Katanga has always been an anomaly within the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, people feel Katangan first and Congolese second. And it is crucial to consider that its leaders have never fully subscribed to the premise that their resources should be shared with the rest of the nation.

Before Congolese independence, the Belgians launched extensive mining operations in the region and sought by every means to retain control after independence by orchestrating the secession of the province following the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba. With so much money at stake, the government of Katanga has always been a bloody affair.

Although the region's abundant resources could easily finance numerous programs to improve education, reduce infant mortality, modernize sewerage systems and public health, and expand electrification, most of the wealth derived from minerals flows out of the country.

Despite hosting trillions of dollars in raw minerals that have yet to be extracted, the entire national budget of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2021 amounted to the paltry sum of about seven billion euros, similar to that of the state of Idaho, which has one fiftieth of its population.

In the UN ranking based on the Human Development Index, the Democratic Republic of the Congo stands at 175 out of 189. More than three quarters of the population live below the poverty line; one third suffer from malnutrition; life expectancy is only 60.7 years; infant mortality is the eleventh worst in the world; only 26% of inhabitants have access to drinking water and only 9% to electricity.

Education should be guaranteed by the state up to the age of eighteen, but schools lack funds and teachers are underpaid: they are therefore forced to charge fees of five or six dollars a month to cover expenses, a sum that millions of Congolese cannot afford.

As a result, countless children are forced to work to support their families, especially in the mining provinces. Although they help generate incalculable wealth for technology and automotive multinationals, most artisanal cobalt miners earn meager wages of about one or two dollars a day.

The global cobalt supply chain is the mechanism that transforms the one-dollar-a-day wages of artisanal miners in the Congo into multi-billion-dollar quarterly profits at the top of the chain. Although the two ends of the chain could not be more disconnected in human and economic terms, they are nonetheless linked by a complex array of formal and informal relationships.

The core of these links lies in a shadow economy at the bottom of the mining industry that inevitably flows into the institutional supply chain.