The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) produces around 70% of the global supply of cobalt and it is also Africa’s leading producer of copper. Despite the billions of dollars in cobalt transactions that occur each year in the country, very little of this revenue improves the lives of Congolese citizens, podcast guest Christian-Géraud Neema Byamungu, the Francophone editor of the China Global South Project, says. Neema speaks with the Mongabay Explores podcast about the global energy transition and the stress the demand for cobalt and other critical minerals has had on the people of the DRC and also explains why he doesn’t think oil development will be much different.

Our second guest is Joseph Itongwa Mukumo, executive director of ANAPAC-DRC, the Network of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystems (REPALEF), who details the negative health and environmental impacts of mining in his community.

While experts and Indigenous leaders acknowledge the importance of the global transition to renewable energy, getting to these minerals has come with severe human rights abuses and lack of protections for Indigenous communities. In Africa, more than 75% of extraction projects for these minerals are on or near Indigenous land, according to an analysis in Nature. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that 35,000 children work in artisanal mines in the DRC alone.

“For sure, there’s not one single ton [of cobalt] that doesn’t have a child-labor presence in it,” says Neema.

Tax on the revenues from mining and royalties in the DRC are supposed to go to local impact projects or reforestation, but decades on, questions remain about where exactly that money is going. It’s not to the people in the DRC, Neema says: “The mining industry is so opaque in its governance, we don’t see the benefit of it.”

While the mining sector has brought employment to the giant nation, according to Itongwa, jobs for Indigenous communities are marginal and are often outsourced internationally. Furthermore, he says, promises for development often go unmet.

“You’ll see that most of the places where these companies exist, there’s no development. There are no roads, there are no infrastructure resources or services,” says Itongwa.

Last year, the DRC government put 27 blocks of land up for auction for oil exploration, justifying the move as a means to lift the nation out of poverty. “[W]e cannot sacrifice the economy for the sake of the environment,” Didier Budimbu Ntubuanga, the DRC’s hydrocarbons minister, told the Washington Post.

However, Neema expresses skepticism, given the poor track record for governance around mining, that a better outcome from oil and gas revenues would occur without serious governance reform.

“There’s no way I’m thinking that ‘yes, with those oil auction[s], with those oil projects, we’re gonna [see] better things,’” he says.

Subscribe to or follow Mongabay Explores wherever you get podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website, or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all our previous ones.

Sounds heard during the intro and outro: The call of a putty-nosed monkey (Cercopithecus nictitans). This soundscape was recorded in Ivindo National Park in Gabon by Zuzana Burivalova, Walter Mbamy, Tatiana Satchivi and Serge Ekazama.

Banner Image: Children working at a cobalt mine in Kailo Territory, DRC. Thousands of children between the ages of 7 and 14 miss school to work in the mines in the DRC. Image by Julien Harneis via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Mike DiGirolamo is Mongabay’s audience engagement associate. Find him on Twitter @MikeDiGirolamo, Instagram, TikTok and Mastodon.

Citation:

Owen, J. R., Kemp, D., Lechner, A. M., Harris, J., Zhang, R., & Lèbre, É. (2023). Energy transition minerals and their intersection with land-connected peoples. Nature Sustainability, 6(2), 203-211. doi:10.1038/s41893-022-00994-6