Kolwezi, capital of cobalt: Washington and Beijing fight over Congolese subsoil

According to Le Figaro, which publishes a report from Kolwezi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies around 75% of the world's cobalt and nearly 14% of its copper. The mining town, nicknamed "the world capital of cobalt", is where the rival ambitions of China and the United States converge. The headline of the report picks up a phrase gathered on the ground: "These people are profiting from the weakness of our state". The dispatch we have is a summary: we do not know who is speaking, which contracts are being discussed, or what volumes or sums are at stake. We will not invent them.

What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

The phrase quoted by Le Figaro is already an analysis, and a rather sharp one. It says that the wealth of a subsoil is not enough to make a country strong. Cobalt is indispensable to batteries, and therefore to the energy transition and to the defence industry, which is precisely why two powers are rushing for it. Each speaks of partnership, investment and security of supply. Both speak first of themselves.

Dependency theories have long described this mechanism: economies shaped to supply raw materials to the centre, while processing, technology and margins are generated elsewhere. The Congo extracts; the value accumulates further down the chain. Whether Beijing's rival is Washington or the reverse changes the address of the buyer, not the place assigned to the seller. The report does not yet say, and this is the real question, how much of that value stays in Kolwezi: in public coffers, in wages and in infrastructure.

We should also look at the "investment opportunities" with a long memory. Mining concessions convert a common resource into private capital. Marxists call this accumulation by dispossession, and it never stopped with colonisation. The Congo knows something about this, whose rubber and copper enriched others rather than its own people. Today the ore has changed, but the pattern looks strikingly like the old one.

Then there is the weakness of the state, which the quoted phrase identifies as the breach through which profiteers slip. Let us be careful not to see it as either fate or a Congolese failing. A state weakened by decades of war, debt and imposed adjustment negotiates poorly against groups and powers that have battalions of lawyers at their disposal. Amílcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissau independence leader, argued that liberation movements suffered from a lack of ideology, the fruit of an ignorance of the historical reality they claimed to transform. The lesson holds today: without a clear plan for what to do with its rents, sovereignty remains a flag.

What we are waiting to learn: the terms of the agreements, the effective taxation, the working conditions of miners, including artisanal ones, and what the residents of Kolwezi gain from it. As long as these answers are missing, the Sino-American rivalry reads like an auction in which the party most concerned is too often the spectator.