'The DRC’s $24 Trillion Betrayal of Africa' By Moshumee Dewoo

Published 08 July 2025 in News

Politiikasta - Article

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s $24 Trillion Betrayal of Africa By Moshumee Dewoo

Politiikasta - Article

Published 18 June 2025

A mining quarry in Mambanga in the Djugu territory, DRC. Alfani Franck / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

While many African countries are scaling back ties with foreign powers to safeguard their resources, the Democratic Republic of Congo is pursuing a deal that would hand over $24 trillion worth of minerals to the USA.

For centuries, Africa’s vast wealth fuelled the ambitions of foreign empires. Colonial powers plundered gold, diamonds, cocoa, and minerals, enslaving millions and impoverishing entire populations. In the post-independence era, exploitative contracts and lopsided trade deals perpetuated this plunder, enriching foreign corporations while leaving hundreds of millions in poverty. Today, a monumental shift is sweeping the continent. African leaders are rewriting the rules of global trade, scaling back ties with foreign powers and embracing resource sovereignty.

Ghana, for instance, has rejected Western aid tied to political conditions that historically forced development paths serving foreign interests over national priorities, instead asserting its right to chart an independent development path. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled French troops, ending decades of military presence that served Paris’s geopolitical goals while undermining the stability and welfare of local communities. Zambia is cracking down on foreign mining companies, enforcing stricter regulations to curb worker exploitation and environmental degradation, Senegal is pushing back against trade agreements with Europe, that favour foreign producers and suppress the growth of local businesses and farmers, advocating for policies that enable homegrown economic resilience.

Adding to these efforts, Algeria is focusing on African-led security and economic initiatives, such as mediating Sahel conflicts and boosting intra-African energy trade, while limiting engagement with NATO to the Mediterranean Dialogue to safeguard its non-aligned stance and promote Global South solidarity. Zimbabwe is moving to ban the export of lithium concentrates from 2027, Kenya is reviewing infrastructure and energy contracts with Chinese and Western companies suspected of imposing unsustainable debt burdens and compromising national control. Similarly, Nigeria is tightening oversight of foreign oil and gas companies revising production-sharing contracts to increase local revenue and ensure greater equity in partnerships with multinationals like Shell and ExxonMobil.

Their project is as urgent as it is ambitious, grounded in self-determination, regional integration, and the development of homegrown institutions capable of managing and defending Africa’s wealth on its own terms: Africa’s wealth must serve Africa first.

At its centre lie Africa’s premier strategic frameworks: the African Union (AU), which champions solidarity-driven economic cooperation; the African Mining Vision (AMV), which promotes value addition, regional beneficiation, and sovereign control over mineral wealth; and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), envisioned as the world’s largest single market. The AfCFTA is particularly important as it aims to radically transform intra-African trade by dismantling tariff barriers and harmonising regulatory frameworks, thereby reducing the continent’s dependence on foreign powers. In the process, it lays the foundation for a continental economic front defined by unity and strategic coherence, strengthening collective bargaining power and allowing African nations to engage the global economy not as disjointed, dependent clients, but as coordinated actors – a single bloc – capable of asserting their interests as equals on the world stage.

The DRC Makes a Different Deal

Meanwhile the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is going in a strikingly different direction. Its government is currently negotiating a high-stakes bilateral agreement to hand over operational control of an estimated $24 trillion worth of critical minerals to the USA in exchange for military equipment, tactical training, and on-the-ground security assistance against the March 23 (M23) insurgency that has destabilised its eastern provinces for over a decade.

The DRC holds over 70% of the world’s known cobalt reserves, in addition to vast deposits of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, essential to the functioning of electric vehicles, high-capacity batteries, solar and wind infrastructure, semiconductors, drones, precision-guided weapons, and emerging artificial intelligence hardware systems. Whoever commands access to these materials will have control over the direction of global civilisation, wielding decisive economic and strategic power especially in the global clean energy future. Global powers are acutely aware of this, and, as expected, have been aggressively courting the DRC for years.

The DRC holds over 70% of the world’s known cobalt reserves, in addition to vast deposits of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements.

China has already entrenched itself in the DRC’s mineral economy through a dense network of state-owned enterprises and infrastructure-for-minerals swap deals, controlling nearly 40% of Congo’s cobalt output by 2024. The European Union (EU) is playing catch-up through its Global Gateway initiative, offering infrastructure funding and “strategic partnerships” to avoid total dependence on Chinese and Russian inputs.

Now, it appears, the USA is set to overtake both, not through a competitive bidding process or multilateral consensus, but because the DRC itself is voluntarily advancing a deal granting Big Tech giants Apple, Tesla, and Google, alongside major defence contractors, direct and guaranteed access to its critical minerals. The proposed terms include below-market extraction rates, long-term supply guarantees, and state-backed logistics coordination. If finalised, the deal will hardwire American dominance into both the global clean energy economy and the next-generation military-industrial complex.

In return, the government of the DRC anticipates an American arsenal. This includes advanced military equipment, elite tactical training, and real-time counterinsurgency support to significantly degrade or dismantle the M23 insurgency.

M23’s Devastating Hold on the DRC

M23, emerging from the collapse of the 2009 Goma Peace Agreement, ranks among Central Africa’s most lethal and resilient non-state armed groups: transnationally networked, financially fortified through illicit mineral revenues, and sophisticated. The group currently controls vast swathes of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, which hold some of the world’s most lucrative coltan and gold mines, effectively hijacking the region’s critical resource flows. This has led to instability in the region, fuelling a cascading humanitarian disaster.

M23’s offensives displaced nearly 2.8 million in 2024 alone, accounting for 73% of all internal displacements in the DRC that year. In North Kivu,  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated nearly 40,000 survivors of sexual violence attributed to M23 operations, marking the highest figure recorded in a single year. In rebel-held territories, food insecurity has surged, leaving millions at risk of starvation.

The environmental toll has also been catastrophic, with nearly half of the animal life in these same territories reportedly wiped out. Since January 2025, the group has killed an estimated 7,000 civilians. And its forced recruitment of child soldiers has become a chilling fixture of its operational strategy, entrenching trauma across generations. There is no mistaking the scale of the crisis.

DRC’s pursuit of a minerals-for-security deal with the USA reads, at least on the surface, as a desperate but straightforwardly pragmatic, technocratic, commercial exchange.

The government is not equipped to respond. The national army is structurally incapable of mounting an effective counter to M23 as a result of decades of structural adjustment and austerity programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the DRC. These programmes prioritised debt repayment, fiscal restraint, and market liberalisation over the essential tasks of state-building and national security. Military infrastructure has crumbled, procurement systems are plagued by corruption and mismanagement, and troop morale remains dangerously low due to inconsistent salaries, inadequate training, and insufficient equipment.

Efforts to fill this security vacuum through regional cooperation have largely failed. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC) have offered inconsistent and undercoordinated interventions. Meanwhile, the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission has lost credibility, widely viewed by the Congolese as either ineffectual, unable to protect civilians or repel rebel advances, or complicit in maintaining the violent status quo in which instability and resource extraction coexist as tolerated norms. The cost of continued inaction grows heavier by the day, threatening to tip the crisis into irreversible collapse.

Against this backdrop, the DRC’s pursuit of a minerals-for-security deal with the USA reads, at least on the surface, as a desperate but straightforwardly pragmatic, technocratic, commercial exchange – a necessary, if radical, attempt to reclaim sovereign control over its eastern provinces, safeguard its critical mineral wealth, and restore a semblance of order in a region held hostage by M23. In this light, it is difficult to dispute the legitimacy of its demand for support from a superpower with overwhelming military capacity.

A Betrayal of Africa’s Future

At its core, however, this deal is a geopolitical earthquake in the emerging architecture of African political economy – a betrayal not of intent or incompetence, but of principle. For, as it prioritises immediate transactional benefit, it also severs the moral and strategic thread that binds Africa’s wealth to Africa’s people, cutting to the very heart of the collective aspiration that Africa’s wealth must serve Africa first. This is not just a Congolese issue – at stake is nothing less than the entire trajectory of African resource politics and, by extension, the continent’s future.

While the deal is presented as a solution to the M23 insurgency, it does not address its root causes, making it no more than a superficial fix on a wounded nation – a sedative rather than a cure, like a temporary quelling of symptoms while the disease festers beneath. Equally troubling is that the deal offers militarisation without any meaningful diplomatic framework or peacebuilding vision. There are no provisions for local reconciliation, no community-led demobilisation, no engagement with civil society and regional actors who might sustain peace – just more weapons in an already volatile landscape.

At stake is nothing less than the entire trajectory of African resource politics and, by extension, the continent’s future.

Worse still, the deal sidesteps state-building entirely. It does not repair institutions, strengthen governance, or develop long-term administrative capacity, leaving the DRC politically fragile and dependent on foreign intervention – a broken leg hobbling Africa’s collective ascent.

More grievously, the deal openly bypasses African-led security frameworks and sidelines regional bodies like the SADC and the AU, outsourcing the DRC’s crisis response to a global superpower. Arguably, this choice is a quiet admission that the DRC lacks confidence in Africa’s ability to manage its own challenges; that African nations cannot depend on African help. They must look outward.

This reconditions the political imagination of current and future African leaders, normalising dangerous ideas: the future belongs to those who sell it; survival, not sovereignty, is the highest aspiration; dependency is inevitable and perhaps even desirable; Africa’s salvation lies not in its own collective strength but in the whims and favours of foreign patrons. This mentality sets a precedent of external arbitration in intra-African affairs, rendering regional diplomacy obsolete and weakening the continent’s security architecture from within.

To transfer critical minerals without public consent or transparent debate is to rob the Congolese of their most powerful leverage. It is to deny them the power to influence how their wealth is used – and who benefits from it.

Perhaps most tragically, the Congolese people, the very communities battered by M23’s violence, are spoken for, negotiated over, and excluded from the decisions being made about their land and future. Their exclusion is deepened by the injustice of the deal. The minerals at stake are not mere economic assets but generational capital in a world increasingly driven by green technologies and the geopolitics of critical minerals. To transfer them without public consent or transparent debate is to rob the Congolese of their most powerful leverage. It is to deny them the power to influence how their wealth is used – and who benefits from it.

This denial extends beyond the borders of the DRC. By proceeding without meaningful consultation or coordination with neighbouring African countries, the deal risks fracturing continental unity and undermining Africa’s collective claim to its wealth and future. It opens the door for external powers to exploit Africa’s resources unilaterally, threatening to revitalise a dangerous dynamic akin to the Scramble for Africa. This is where strategic mineral wealth becomes a contested prize in superpower rivalries, and ordinary Africans bear the human and political costs.

The deal sends a clear and unsettling message, devastatingly out of step with the continent’s ambitions: Africa’s resources remain up for grabs.

The question looms large from here: will the DRC’s choice end Africa’s long march toward resource sovereignty, or will it serve as a cautionary tale that stimulates the continent to forge stronger, more united paths forward free from the shackles of foreign domination?

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