Cobalt: DR Congo restricts, China restocks, prices collapse

According to RFI, cobalt prices, in their various forms, have fallen sharply since this summer, after soaring in 2025 under the effect of restrictions imposed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world's leading producer. According to the same source, this decline indicates that China is once again supplied and is about to receive further cargoes.

So much for the facts. What the dispatch does not say is what this fall means for Congolese people: export earnings, state revenues, the situation of miners, artisanal or otherwise. We do not know at this stage, and we will not pretend to put a figure on it. What remains is the structural question, which strikes us as more telling than any price curve.

What we are reading here is a three-act lesson in dependency. Act one: a country holding the key resource of the energy transition tightens the tap, and prices take off. One might think the balance of power had finally swung. Act two: China, which evidently has other means of sourcing or of waiting, regains its cargoes, and the market takes back what it had conceded. Act three: prices fall again. The DRC has shown that it can move the market, but not that it can write its rules.

This is exactly what dependency theory describes: economies shaped to supply raw materials to the centre, which suffer prices set elsewhere. The producing country bears the risk, while the industrial buyer captures the value of processing. An export restriction, however legitimate, does not change this architecture if the refinery, the financing and the outlets remain in other hands. Kwame Nkrumah already described consortiums "staking out claims" on African resources, backed by financial institutions that dominate the monetary and fiscal sphere: the facade has changed, the logic has not.

One notes, without excessive malice, the irony of the vocabulary: cobalt is presented as "critical" for batteries worldwide, yet it appears to be critical only for those who buy it. For those who dig it out of the ground, it remains a commodity whose value is settled in London, in Shanghai, in rooms where nobody speaks Lingala.

The real question, then, is not whether the DRC has "lost" its trial of strength. It is who owns the mines, who finances the downstream end of the chain, and who can afford to wait. As long as the answer stays what it was, every spike will be a respite and every fall an invoice. We will follow what Kinshasa does with its restrictions, and what the workers of Katanga have to say about them, they who never appear in the price quotations.