The higher demand for critical minerals is expected to cause a significant expansion in the extraction and production of an array of mineral resources. For example, the World Economic Forum projects that the production of minerals including graphite, cobalt, and lithium could increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050 to meet the growing demand for clean-energy technologies. Estimated to hold approximately 30 percent of the volume of critical-mineral reserves, the African continent is situated at the very center of the energy transition.

A considerable amount of minerals—for example, 25 percent of tin and 26 percent of tantalum production—is sourced by artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM): low-tech, labor-intensive mining operations in which workers (largely unskilled labor) use rudimentary tools and techniques to access mineral ore. ASM is an important source of rural employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated ten million people in the region working as artisanal and small-scale miners—sourcing critical minerals but also other minerals such as gold. These workers are often driven to the sector by poverty. At least sixty million other individuals facilitate these informal supply chains.

However, many of these artisanal and small-scale miners work informally and face harsh conditions. Before critical-mineral production ramps up even further, African communities, stakeholders, and governments must take steps to formalize these workers—and the international community, including the United States, should help.

What is the problem?

In contrast with ASM, large-scale mining (LSM) is industrial and long-term, utilizing heavy machinery to extract resources. Furthermore, LSM has more geological information available to it and better access to capital and finance. Most importantly, LSM generally operates within the rules of law and adheres to international standards and regulations. It is accompanied by many challenges, however, including causing ecological and habitat damage; polluting the water, air, and soil; and threatening human health. Even where mining operations are conducted legally and formally, they still pose significant environmental and socioeconomic problems.

Although vastly different types of mining, ASM and LSM often take place in overlapping spaces, with ASM operations appearing on the periphery of larger industrial sites. Artisanal miners frequently live and work in areas earmarked for large-scale mining projects, blurring the line between the two. This is exemplified by the presence of illicit or licit networks of middlemen who transport ore from ASM sites to LSM companies and processing facilities. Middlemen often aggregate minerals from various sources, including both ASM and LSM operations, making it especially difficult to trace the origin of the minerals. The fragmented and opaque nature of the mineral supply chain complicates the traceability of products from upstream suppliers to downstream companies.  

There are many challenges associated with artisanal mining. At least 90 percent of artisanal miners work informally, without the necessary licenses or permits required by law. Securing permits improves miners’ access to services they are unable to access in the informal economy—such as microfinance credit, grants, and government loan facilities, which, in turn, place the miners in a better position to accumulate wealth. In many cases, ASM activities are found in regions that are out of reach of regulators, where the institutional presence of the government is weak. By operating outside of state recognition, it becomes impossible for the government to establish and enforce health and safety standards and regulations.

With informal mining operations flying under the radar of the government, either by the design of mining site owners or willful ignorance on the part of the government, workers are routinely exposed to poor labor conditions and dangerous situations. Artisanal miners often work without proper tools and protective gear in unsupported and poorly ventilated underground shafts where, as Amnesty International points out, temperatures can be extremely high. Exposure to the dust and mineral waste generated from these mines can lead to potentially fatal diseases and health conditions, and the dust and waste also contributes to pollution and environmental degradation in the area surrounding the mine.

Across the African continent, artisanal mining has been linked to human-rights violations, forced labor, crime, and conflict. These issues, compounded with artisanal miners’ lack of legal rights, exacerbates their vulnerability and the cycles of poverty and exploitation they face.

More at stake

The problems in ASM often present a significant barrier to sustainable foreign investment in African critical minerals. The aforementioned problems in the artisanal sector have made Western business interests hesitant to invest in Africa’s critical minerals. Poor labor practices and human rights violations associated with ASM could expose global companies to reputational and regulatory risks. These concerns—combined with pressure from non-governmental and human-rights organizations—make investment in ASM a complicated and risky proposition.

This barrier is present in artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Cobalt is a critical component of many lithium-ion batteries, including ones used to power electric vehicles, produce components for wind and solar energy technologies, and power portable electronic devices such as smartphones. The DRC accounts for more than 74 percent of global cobalt mining, and 20 to 30 percent of that is via ASM.

In some regions of the DRC, artisanal miners are exploited by armed groups that seek to control mining areas and siphon revenue to finance their operations, purchase weapons, and sustain conflicts. Militias have abducted and trafficked children to extract cobalt as well as copper, in a bid to fund their groups. In addition, some ASM cobalt operations employ children. It was once estimated that forty thousand children were mining for cobalt, working in life-threatening conditions and exposed to violence, extortion, and intimidation.

Such problems associated with informality, including the absence of regulatory standards and the occurrence of human-rights violations, make it difficult for potential investors to justify long-term investments. Without clear, enforceable laws, investors face a high-risk business environment and unpredictable changes in mining policies, which undermine investor confidence.

In addition to posing these immediate risks to artisanal miners and their communities, informal mining exacerbates economic and market instability on a macroeconomic level. Informal miners typically earn a meager and unstable income, which is subject to fluctuation based on the market prices and demand for cobalt. Miners’ economic instability translates into broader economic uncertainty for the sector and limits opportunities for community development. The presence of such substantial unregulated economic activity leads to significant tax revenue losses for the government, because these transactions primarily occur outside of official channels. This undermines the state’s capacity to invest money in necessary social programs, build infrastructure, and quell violence in other regions of the DRC. In spite of these challenging economic implications, African governments might resist formalization efforts, unwilling to disrupt the vital role ASM plays in the livelihoods of many individuals and communities across Africa.

While artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC provides a case study, some of these issues associated with informality are also prevalent in the mining of critical minerals in other African nations, such as lithium production in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Across the continent, the volatility of ASM creates a less attractive investment environment, given that investors seek dependable production to ensure stable supply chains and therefore profitability.

What might formalization look like?

Despite the complications associated with the informal production of many critical minerals, the solution is not to disengage from ASM; it employs 90 percent of the mining workforce. Rather, the solution lies in formalizing and legalizing ASM, which will help mitigate the risks inherent to these mining operations while fostering a more regulated and stable environment for international investment in Africa’s critical minerals.

Integrating the ASM sector into the formal economy would help improve local security, stabilize incomes, and ensure that safer and more environmentally sustainable practices are implemented. It would also help create national regulations and international standards, pressuring the ASM sector to improve practices to become compliant.

Formalization means that miners are registered with proper mining titles. Even in some countries where ASM is recognized by law, governments have not made it possible for miners to obtain the necessary permits and licenses. But in addition to these permits and licenses, formalization also includes—according to the Washington-based nonprofit Pact—efforts by the mining industry to enact chain of custody and supply chain transparency measures; health, safety, and environmental protections; security and human-rights protections; measures that improve access to finance; and requirements to use proper mining techniques. In addition, formalization includes sound industry policies, procedures, and due diligence systems, which should be in place throughout the life cycle of a mine. These components of formalization create a framework within which artisanal miners can operate safely and legally, contributing positively to community-wide and country-wide development goals and global supply chains.

Given the complexity of the informal economy, there is no simple, one-size-fits-all approach to formalization. We can, however, look for strategies that have been effective in other countries or industries and use them to guide the approach towards formalizing ASM. For example, Rwanda’s 2010 Land Tenure Reform Programme initiated a systematic registration effort to promote land access and address tenure insecurity. This program registered over ten million land parcels in less than five years and enabled landowners to use their property as collateral for loans, facilitating access to credit. The program has been widely regarded as successful in integrating the informal economy, particularly due to its simple registration process and involvement of community members and stakeholders in the reform. Transitioning ASM to the formal economy must also use an integrated whole-of-society approach, centering African communities, stakeholders, and governments. This might mean starting small at a grassroots level by engaging local communities in social dialogue, allowing informal miners to express their views and defend their interests. Their inclusion at an early stage of the formalization process will ensure that policies address informality efficiently and enhance the effectiveness of such measures.

There have been some efforts in recent years to support the formalization of ASM workers and improve social and environmental practices in the sector. For example, as the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) explains, international Fairtrade and Fairmined standards set minimum standards for responsible mining, which support formalization. Furthermore, chain of custody initiatives trace supply chains from mine to market to ensure that supply chains are not associated with any conflicts or human rights abuses and that they meet international regulations. These are certainly steps in the right direction but, as the IGF explains, there are concerns about the long-term sustainability of these initiatives and whether they are reaching the most marginalized communities.

Formalization is a very complex but necessary process that can improve the lives of miners and address issues in the critical-mineral supply chain—and therefore attract more sustainable investment to the sector, contributing to the broader development goals of African countries.

How the international community can help

As mineral extraction in Africa is only expected to increase in the foreseeable future, it would be strategically unwise for the international community, and in particular the United States, to sit idly by on the issue of formalizing artisanal mining.

Going forward, the United States can focus on capacity building and simplifying trade processes and market access to help formalize artisanal mining in Africa, which could lead to increased global investment in critical minerals. To build the foundation for policies and programs that provide legal protection for ASM miners, the United States could fund and support training programs for artisanal miners, local authorities, and government officials on sustainable mining practices, health and safety standards, regulatory compliance, and business skills. By strengthening local and national institutions responsible for overseeing the ASM sector, governments would be better able to enforce regulations, protect the rights of artisanal miners, and formalize the sector.

The United States could also work with African governments and international organizations—such as the African Union and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development—to simplify trade procedures, enabling miners to participate legally and more fully in global supply chains. In December 2022, the United States signed a memorandum of understanding with the DRC and Zambia to develop a productive electric-battery supply chain—from the extraction of minerals to the assembly line. The agreement also serves as a commitment to respect international standards and to prevent, detect, and fight corruption and build a sustainable industry in Africa that benefits workers and local communities, as well as the US private sector. At this time, it is more political than actionable, although it creates a framework for future negotiations and strengthened partnerships. Deepening ties with African nations and collaborating with international organizations can help leverage the resources, expertise, and global networks to ensure a more conducive environment for investment and sustainable growth. Increasing institutional capacity would also allow governments to strengthen tenure security and clarify property rights for ASM, particularly reducing the incidence of ASM-LSM conflict.

The creation of more legal channels for miners to sell their products could enhance supply chain transparency and promote more sustainable market practices. Implementing an international certification mechanism, similar to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), offers the ASM sector an opportunity for empowerment and a pathway towards legitimacy. Originally established to remove conflict diamonds from the global supply chain, the KPCS mandates that member countries adhere to strict certification requirements, import and export controls, regular audits, and controlled trade. The principles of the Kimberly Process might be adapted to the extraction of critical minerals so as to increase the security of artisanal miners and their access to legal markets.

Not only would these policy actions benefit African countries in the context of the critical-minerals boom and improve the livelihoods of miners, but they would allow the United States to strengthen its economic and strategic partnerships with African countries. As critical minerals will continue to advance the clean-energy transition, decisive action is essential to make the future of mining a pathway for inclusive, sustainable development for the countries that supply minerals to the world.

Sarah Way is a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder’s International Affairs Program with a specialization in Africa and the Middle East. Her research centers on the intersection of natural resources and development, with a specific focus on extractive minerals in Africa.

The post Integrating artisanal mining into the formal economy would benefit African miners and economies alike appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In 2017, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Gertler, accusing him of “opaque and corrupt mining and oil deals” that cost the DRC more than $1.36 billion in revenues from 2010 to 2012 alone. Gertler has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and, through a representative, said that he would abide by sanctions. The news that the Biden administration may ease these sanctions should be viewed positively, as an indication that US sanctions can achieve both economic and geopolitical goals.

Eased sanctions, whether a formal delisting or the issuing of a general license to Gertler, would allow for the sale of currently sanctioned entities. Following the easing of sanctions in this case, US firms could gain access to new investment opportunities by investing in mining projects that currently have links to Gertler, leading to economic growth in the United States and the DRC. In addition, the DRC has an opportunity to showcase the improvements that the country is making in the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing. While some senior officials, human-rights defenders, and anticorruption fighters have valid concerns about easing sanctions on Gertler, the decision could be a win for the DRC and the United States.

The choice—and the history behind it

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have gone back and forth over the tightening and easing of sanctions on Gertler. That has drawn much attention, but what hasn’t is the fact that the United States has quietly used sanctions effectively in this case to get its way.

In 2019, The Sentry—an investigative organization that aims to hold to account predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy—conducted a six-month-long study on the effectiveness of sanctions in Africa in the twenty-first century. The study found that better strategies for achieving identified goals in each sanctions program must be developed if sanctions effectiveness was to improve. The Sentry study set the stage for the Treasury 2021 Sanctions Review, which drew conclusions on how to modernize US sanctions and make them more effective. Treasury recommended a “structured policy framework” that “links sanctions to a clear policy objective.” The Biden administration has made no secret of its desire to improve access to critical minerals, diversify its supply chains, and work with US partners to achieve those goals. Since 80 percent of the DRC’s cobalt output is owned by Chinese companies, US policymakers should be seeking ways to reduce barriers to entry in the DRC’s mining sector and to actively promote investment there. 

As the United States seeks to gain greater access to critical minerals and diversify its supply chains away from Chinese influence, Biden administration officials hope that granting Gertler a general license to sell his holdings in the DRC would increase US or Western firms’ willingness to invest in the country. That’s because those firms have been largely boxed out as Gertler, according to the US Treasury, used his closeness with government officials to secure below-market rates for mining concessions for his companies. Beyond Gertler, the business environment of the DRC ranks 183 out of 190 on the World Bank’s Doing Business indicators. Easing sanctions, through a coordinated US government effort that seeks to maximize this move, could send an important signal to Western investors that the DRC is open for business. Western firms could lift their bottom lines while stimulating the DRC economy by paying market rates.

The potential delisting of Gertler and his companies is a good example of an instance in which sanctions—or, in this case, the easing of sanctions—are being used in support of a specific policy objective.

Delisting would be good—but more must be done

Building on a potential delisting, the Biden administration should work with Congress to expeditiously pass the bipartisan BRIDGE to DRC Act—which helps the United States secure access to critical-mineral supply chains and sets human-rights and democracy benchmarks for strengthening the US-DRC relationship. These moves could be further timed or calculated to magnify the impact of ongoing foreign assistance programs led by the United States Agency for International Development or other US government agencies.

The United States should coordinate additional moves to support the DRC. In October 2022, the Financial Action Task Force, the standard-setting international organization that seeks to strengthen the global financial system, placed the DRC on its list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring—also known as the “grey list”—for the country’s dismal record in fighting money laundering and terrorist financing. While many African countries are on the grey list, the impact is considerable, as it limits capital inflows, makes investors wary of doing business, and leads to reputational damage and a reduction of correspondent banking relationships, among other consequences. The US Treasury should look to bolster the DRC government’s approach to anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) by equipping the country with the knowledge, know-how, and capacity that it needs.  

Regardless of whether the delisting happens or whether the BRIDGE Act becomes law, the DRC must do more to help itself. News of a failed coup attempt in Kinshasa on May 19 certainly does not help, especially since—according to local reports—the assailants were linked to exiled DRC politician and US citizen Christian Malanga, who was killed by the country’s security forces in a firefight. Three US nationals were allegedly also involved in the attempt to overthrow the government of President Felix Tshisekedi.

The DRC must continue to take concrete steps to improve the business environment and reduce its political and economic risk factors. Since 2022, the DRC built on its high-level political commitments to improve its AML/CFT regime, finalize its three-year national AML/CFT strategy, and improve its macroeconomic performance—boosting its credit rating. The DRC has an opportunity to continue to make progress in its fight against corruption, money laundering, and terrorist financing that threaten the stability of the country from Matadi on the Atlantic seaboard to Goma in the Great Rift Valley.

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A win in the heart of Africa

Delisting Gertler would not only help the United States get its way, but it would show that its sanctions policy in Africa can be effective; its industrial and national security policies can be successfully implemented; and that all of this can be done in a manner that can help an African partner generate greater economic growth, jobs, and the foreign investment it seeks.

The United States can’t do it alone. It must also partner with the DRC in a serious manner to help strengthen the DRC’s framework to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, improve Kinshasa’s image, and reduce barriers to investment such as perceived political and economic risk.

The DRC occupies a central role on the African continent and with its economic potential could serve as a future hub for transportation, logistics, mineral processing, and more. If the DRC wins, all of Africa benefits—as do the United States and the West.

Benjamin Mossberg is the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. He previously served in the US Treasury Department and US State Department with a focus on Africa policy.

The post In a Congolese mining case, Biden can secure a win for US sanctions policy in Africa appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Instead, over decades, an abysmal series of obstacles have repeatedly hindered the country’s development. A poorly managed decolonization process by Belgium, multiple rebellions, and the failure to promote good governance—combined with living in a state of war since 1996, particularly in the east—have resulted in profound setbacks in health, education, the economy, society, and governance.

Those obstacles led to deep and pervasive effects on Congolese society, and they make a good case for massive assistance. There is a model already in place for the United States and other friends of the DRC around the world to follow: the 1948­–1951 European Recovery Program, otherwise known as the Marshall Plan. Advanced by then US Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the plan gave countries that were devastated by World War II mostly donations to restore industry, support agriculture, and increase international trade. The United States appropriated $13.3 billion over four years. In the end, the plan helped Western and Southern European countries boost industrial production by 55 percent and average gross national product by 33 percent, laying the foundations for a prosperous Europe. Since then, the expression “Marshall Plan” has been used to refer to massive assistance or economic stimulus programs worldwide, the latest case being the European Recovery Plan.

Comparable assistance focused on improving governance could help the DRC develop while laying a similar foundation for a prosperous African Great Lakes region—and even African continent. Yet, achieving this goal will require focusing the plan more on building strong institutions and less on building infrastructure, the beloved child of many development partners. Then US President Barack Obama emphasized a need for updated partnership programs with Africa in a July 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, declaring: “The true sign of success is not whether we are a source of perpetual aid that helps people scrape by… It’s whether we are partners in building the capacity for transformational change.”

Decades of development lost

A bit like in the 1960s and 1970s, military conflicts and violence are entrenched in  the DRC. The death toll of near-weekly attacks by the allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an insurgent group with ties to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), practically tripled between 2020 and 2022. Furthermore, the militant March 23 Movement, after a deceptive slumber, has occupied the strategic town of Bunagana since June.

After former President Mobutu Sese Seko’s three-decade single-party rule and former President Joseph Kabila’s tumultuous terms from 2001 to 2019, Congolese people hoped that their political class would mobilize in favor of development. This has not yet fully happened; and far from rallying the much-needed unity required to end the conflict in the east, political parties seem preoccupied with the 2023 presidential election.

Despite recent social and economic progress—notably a solid annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate that has averaged above 5 percent over the last ten years—many long-term per capita indicators have worsened since the 1970s, according to the World Bank: Electricity consumption per capita (159 kilowatt hours in 1972 and 109 kilowatt hours in 2015) and the number of hospital beds per thousand people (3.2 in 1975 against 0.8 in 2006) have dropped. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita remains less than half of values in the 1970s ​​($1,372 in 1974 versus $518 in 2021, in constant 2015 US dollars).

There are several other indicators that raise concerns about the country’s economic and social progress: As of the beginning of this year, twenty-one diseases under surveillance in the DRC had the potential to become epidemics—and in the year before, six had done so, including measles, cholera, and COVID-19. According to the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 4.2 million people, including 2.4 million children under five years old, suffer from acute severe malnutrition. Roughly six million people are internally displaced, and 74,000 cases of sexual and gender-based violence were reported over the period, with the majority occurring in the eastern conflict-torn part of the country.

These economic and social indicators are a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem that cannot support development. Contributing factors include political instability, wars, a lack of economic diversification, an overreliance on natural resources, and the consequences of a conflict economy—in which investment is dampened by the uncertainty caused by wartime disruptions to local and national activities, and Congolese don’t benefit from the revenues created by their natural resources. These factors make it difficult to uproot corruption, mismanagement, and state capture, even more than half a century after the DRC’s independence, despite recent efforts, such as reforms within the central bank and the publication of mining contracts.

Thus, the country’s lack of development, caused by its political, social, and economic conditions, is likely to be long-lasting.

The “big push” to prosperity

In his farewell letter, Lumumba was optimistic about the destiny of his country because he believed that the DRC could overcome its afflictions, just as other countries that have experienced war and political instability have done.

Germany experienced such a period of economic and social adversity after World War II: In 1947, industrial output was only one-third and food production was one-half of the country’s 1938 levels. Nearly one-fifth of the country’s housing had been destroyed over the course of the war. Inflation had resulted in a wave of poverty, while the country’s price controls fueled the expansion of the black market.

But today, Germany has become a formidable economic force. The reasons for the German economic miracle, or “Wirtschaftswunder,” are subject to debate among economists, but some credit the Marshall Plan.

The initial Marshall Plan and its variants worldwide are in line with economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan’s “big push” theory that massive reforms and investments are more helpful than gradual actions in overcoming obstacles that preclude development in underdeveloped economies. In other words, a “big push” is required to undo the inertia of a stagnant economy. Such a “big push” would help the DRC get out of its rut, given the country’s numerous and multifaceted economic, social, and security challenges. But the push must address the real issues that Congolese face.

Institutions over infrastructure

Investment plans for African countries often focus on spending in areas like infrastructure and equipment—and ultimately, some costly and not terribly useful “white elephants.” A Marshall Plan for the DRC should avoid falling into those two pitfalls by taking a completely different approach: focusing on institutions rather than infrastructure.

After all, infrastructure projects in the DRC easily mobilize resources from a variety of public and private stakeholders. The Emirati company DP World, for example, is investing hundreds of millions of dollars over decades in the construction and management of the DRC’s first deep-sea port in Banana due to the economic potential there. Beyond that case, the country’s infrastructure potential and needs are so immense that all that the government would have to do is to design bankable projects and abide to the conditions set by international private or public partners.

Conversely, commitment to lasting and in-depth institutional reform is far below what the DRC and other poor nations need because a reformed institution is less immediately visible than a bridge or a school. In addition, reforming or even creating an institution is more time-consuming, more complex, and dependent on combining success factors such as overcoming vested interests and tailoring institutions to sociological realities. It involves mapping and optimizing processes, investing in training, and paying civil servants better—but also limiting abuses vis-à-vis users of public services, who are often not considered as customers but rather as sheep that can be sheared mercilessly.

Overcoming the DRC’s development obstacles will require a substantial investment in the country’s institutions. Strong institutions are the key to turning the DRC’s immense potential into tangible results, enabling the country to fish for itself instead of being offered fish by other countries.

A DRC with strong institutions would see civil servants better paid, unbiased decisions from the courts, vulnerable groups protected by the police, natural resources and projects managed without corruption, better-equipped schools, and a social safety net that protects the most vulnerable.

Preparing for the push

Initial work in designing the Marshall Plan should start with an in-depth inclusive discussion among Congolese and between Congo and its partners about the governance mechanisms of such an initiative.

This initial discussion is essential because of the colossal sums at stake and also the controversies that have plagued Congolese infrastructure projects: In order to avoid problems associated with the DRC’s poor public finance management and to increase the likelihood that the plan succeeds, this discussion should be structured around strengthening its absorptive capacity—the amount of foreign aid that the DRC can use productively. The DRC has faced difficulties in quickly implementing quality investment projects and ensuring that every dollar invested reaches its intended beneficiary. Shaping a new normal will require improvements in three areas.

1. Preparations for the Marshall Plan should include the recruitment and training of motivated and skilled people who can effectively design and manage reform projects in the long term.
2. The DRC must establish a stronger and more efficient control mechanism to ensure good fiduciary management of the plan’s projects in order to avoid misappropriation, collusion, and corruption. Such practices have long bedeviled public contract tenders and public funds management.
3. It will be necessary to meticulously prepare the various projects and investment plans in order to avoid mistakes of the past, including some famous white elephants, and to guarantee adequate social impact. To do this, leaders taking part in the plan should adopt an experimental approach in which they run small-scale test projects to better understand and correct their shortcomings before deploying them throughout the country.

Institution building is a serious matter. It requires time and stability. Besides, institutional quality is sensitive to policy changes that follow shifts in political leadership. Hence the need, as a foundation to the Marshall Plan, to build a clear, accountable, and trans-partisan consensus around institutional reform. If a platform for reform has buy-in from political parties and stakeholders across Congolese society, it would be immune to the negative side effects of changes in government. With new elections slated for 2023, now is an opportune political moment to start that dialogue. Presidential candidates, in particular, should explain how their pledges will contribute to the much-needed institutional transformation. The country’s burgeoning civil society could seize the opportunity to mobilize Congolese across party lines and identify priority sectors for institution building in preparation for the plan.

Such a process would empower the Congolese people, who have often been marginalized in designing development policies even though they’re meant to be the beneficiaries. It would foster crucial local commitment to institutional transformation. Plus, the preparation effort could help establish an equal relationship between the DRC and its financial partners in their mission to propel the country into the twenty-first century.

Doing the Marshall Plan math

How much should an institutional Marshall Plan for the DRC cost? Let’s start with a linear method to evaluate the original.  

From 1948 to 1952, sixteen countries received a total of $13.3 billion, representing roughly $159 billion in 2022. Distributing that among the total 1948 population (approximately 270 million) of the countries that received this aid yields a per capita endowment of $588 in today’s dollars to match the original Marshall Plan.

That would add up to approximately $55 billion for the DRC and its estimated 95.2 million people. The amount is practically the size of the DRC’s GDP and more than ten times what it receives in annual Official Development Assistance. It may seem enormous—but that is not the case considering the scale of the DRC’s weak social indicators and immense needs. The sum is about one-third more than the $40 billion the US Congress committed this year to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and represents roughly three to four years of expenditures for Washington, DC, or Chicago.

The spillovers from the Marshall Plan would also be transformative; those resources would help provide the “big push” that the country needs to fight against the rise of the ADF in eastern DRC, meet its development challenge, rebuild, and, above all, consolidate its governance and move from a cyclical, natural-resource-led growth to a more balanced and sustainable momentum supported by strong institutions.

A Marshall Plan-style investment could quickly transform the DRC, which is projected to become the world’s eighth most populous country by 2050, into one of the globe’s most dynamic markets. The DRC, with its connections to world cobalt battery supply chains, could also become a home for green industries, with jobs available for youth in all sectors of a radically transformed economy.

Ultimately, an institution-centered Marshall Plan would dramatically transform the DRC over the next decades, helping new generations of Congolese achieve Lumumba’s vision of a bright future for the country, the region, and for Africa.

Jean-Paul Mvogo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Africa Center.

The post Here’s what a Marshall Plan for the DRC could look like appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What is the opportunity?

In 1956, jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie and his band were traveling across Europe and South Asia, playing concerts on a tour organized by the US Department of State (DoS). The band got a call from an official at DoS, who told them they were needed in Greece. Young Greeks had been protesting at the American Embassy against the decision by the United States to support continued British rule of Cyprus. DoS wanted to try to divert the protestors’ anger by showcasing America’s talented jazz musicians, whose mission was to promote US values.

The band played a sold-out show in Athens to a raucous crowd, which had a similar demographic composition as the crowd protesting outside the embassy. Quincy Jones, then the drummer for Gillespie’s band, recounts thinking that the crowd was going to attack the musicians. Instead, the thousands of young people packed into the venue were engrossed by the music and celebrated Gillespie after the show. The protests against the US Embassy quickly abated—and DoS viewed the use of the Jazz Ambassadors as a triumphant employment of US cultural diplomacy to end a crisis.

The show in Greece would not be the last time a Jazz Ambassador defused a situation. In 1960, during his extensive tour of Africa as a Jazz Ambassador, Louis Armstrong was sent to Leopoldville, Congo, to play a concert amidst the civil war taking place there. The tour had been organized by DoS, and sponsored by Pepsi, in order to leverage Armstrong’s popularity on the continent to promote the beverage. There was debate among DoS officials of whether to continue to brand the concert in Leopoldville with Pepsi, given the precarious political situation there. Ultimately, officials decided to continue to partner with the Pepsi brand in hopes it might not look as explicitly propagandic amidst a war where one side was backed by the United States and the other, the Soviet Union. The organizers hoped for 1,500 fans. More than 10,000 showed up, according to DoS cables. The result of the show, as Armstrong tells it, was a temporary truce between the warring sides as they came together to listen to this American musician from New Orleans.

Today, the United States has an opportunity to harness its globally popular musical superstars for diplomatic gains, building off the legacy of the successful Jazz Ambassadors program. A well-publicized concert series that brings US superstars to locales they would otherwise be unlikely to tour and are of diplomatic importance would be a useful tool for improving views of the United States abroad and spreading US values. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it,

America’s arts and culture are a major source of our national strength, our musicians captivate the world. Their work gets people to see each other’s humanity, build a sense of common purpose, change the minds of those who misunderstand us, and tell the American story in a way no policy or speech ever could.

Music—the universal language—can build bridges across cultures, and American music has been doing so for decades. The top of the Billboard Global 200 chart regularly features American artists—and this music has lasting power. As Ukrainians fled from the Russian invasion of their country, a video circulated of one refugee playing “What a Wonderful World” by Armstrong, more than six decades after the Jazz Ambassadors brought their music to European crowds.

The power of music should not be viewed by policymakers as some flimsy hobbyhorse of pacifists. The Eurovision Song Contest, which pits musicians representing countries from Europe (and some other select countries) against one another, has produced superstars like ABBA and Celine Dion, while providing visibility to issues like LGBTQ rights and the unique cultures and traditions of the competing countries. In 2021, 183 million viewers watched the competition, making it one of the most-viewed events globally. The ability to message to such a broad audience makes the competition a potent source of European cultural power.

“America’s arts and culture are a major source of our national strength, our musicians captivate the world.” —Secretary of State Antony Blinken

The United States does not presently have any program that features its superstar musical talent and promotes freedom of expression on a global scale. Although the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) continues to facilitate concerts abroad, they are far smaller than those of the Jazz Ambassador program. The Jazz Ambassador program was renamed the American Music Abroad program in 2005 and no longer features widely known and commercially successful musicians. Instead, they promote smaller groups that represent the rich musical landscape and history of the United States. Although these programs are valuable, they do not provide the visibility and commercial clout that major US artists like the original Jazz Ambassadors did. An independent evaluation of the Jazz Ambassadors program in 2006 assessed that the program was impressively effective. The report concluded:

The JA (Jazz Ambassadors) Program [was] a highly successful vehicle for conveying this uniquely American music—instilled with American cultural heritage and American values—to millions of people, worldwide. Virtually all those who participated in this evaluation, whether they were United States Ambassadors, Post Staff, accomplished American musicians, amateur and professional musicians in third world countries, managers of media outlets and cultural organizations, or young music students, agreed that this remarkable program accomplished far-ranging and important goals for US foreign policy.

Even though the Jazz Ambassadors program was deemed a success, no cultural diplomacy endeavor on the scale of the tours of the 1950s and 1960s has been replicated. Many foreign policy professionals recognize that the power of American culture has waned as a tool of diplomacy. The aphorism goes that politics is downstream of culture, and in the view of former diplomat John Brown, the citizens and leaders of many countries see culture as more important than politics. They perceive the United States to be lacking a rich culture because the US government does not aggressively promote its artists abroad. Brown writes of the paradox in the US approach to cultural diplomacy: “The neglect of arts diplomacy by the US government reflects certain long-term traits of the American national character: it is puritanical, democratic, void of a national culture, yet it influences the world through its mass entertainment.” Although the United States may not have a well-established and unified culture to promote abroad like China, Japan, or France, it does have an advantage in its cutting-edge art that is oriented toward a mass audience, best represented by its commercially popular musicians.

Why now?

While the United States faces increased competition for global influence, it has lost diplomatic clout during the past two decades. Failed wars and hubristic foreign policy have damaged the US image around the world and led many to doubt whether the United States should serve as a model. Although the image of the United States as a global leader is faltering, American artists and other cultural icons have enjoyed significant worldwide popularity. US musicians tour globally with great success, its designers are featured in top fashion shows, and its athletes are global brands.

In contrast with the Trump administration, which called for cuts to DoS, the Biden administration has signaled an interest in expanding nonmilitary forms of global engagement. These efforts mirror the desires of the American public to engage in the world without becoming involved in more conflicts. In recent polling by the Eurasia Group Foundation, almost three times as many Americans wanted to increase, rather than decrease diplomatic engagement with the world, with nonmilitary means of engagement ranked highest as their preferred means for global engagement.

With the American public desiring increased diplomacy, there is an opportunity to redefine how the United States engages with the world and change the perceptions foreign populations have of American values. One of the models of governance that the United States is competing against globally features restrictions on speech and expression; Washington has the ability to demonstrate the creativity and innovation that its more open and tolerant model allows. The Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy included a number of discussions on the importance of freedom of expression and speech; a popularized effort to spread these values would further the administration’s goals of promoting democracy globally.

How to make it happen

1. Create an America’s Best Concert series (ABCs). With relatively little funding appropriated by Congress, the State Department’s ECA could develop a concert series to bring some of the biggest stars from the United States to places where they would otherwise be unlikely to tour. This effort should be modeled on the original Jazz Ambassadors program, with coordination with local authorities managed through in-country embassy staff to ensure cultural sensitivity and an understanding of which artists would have the greatest appeal to local audiences. Rather than soliciting applications like the current American Musicians Abroad program, the ABCs should recruit top talent with competitive contracts, the opportunity to appeal to new audiences, and the chance to represent their country abroad. Costs of booking the artists and paying for the shows would be defrayed through partnerships with US companies, which would have the opportunity to advertise in growing markets where they may lack significant existing market saturation. 

2. Provide musicians full artistic discretion in what they perform and communicate to foreign audiences. Ultimately, artists would be representing the American value of freedom of expression; they should have the ability to criticize their own government and its policies even while representing their country. As Louis Armstrong said of his decision to be a Jazz Ambassador, “I sort of liked the idea of representing America, but I wasn’t going over there to apologize for the racist policies of America.” There is an inherent tension in a concert series meant to promote freedom of expression that also requires artists to avoid diplomatically sensitive subjects. This was an issue cited by Quincy Jones in his autobiography, where Jones said that an official from the American National Theater and Academy, an organization DoS had partnered with to administer the concerts, condescendingly told the musicians to “indulge in your various idiosyncrasies discreetly.” DoS should carefully consider which artists it promotes abroad and where, but ultimately it should emphasize the artists’ freedom to hold and express their own opinions as they engage with foreign audiences.

3. Develop better connections with the artistic community. DoS is limited in its ability to operate domestically, both because of its structure and US laws. This needs to change; the State Department must be deeply immersed in the country it serves. For US cultural power to be leveraged abroad, established relationships and an understanding of American culture need to be strong. Artists need to be able to trust that they are representing their own values and those of the country rather than being used for propaganda. Managers and promoters must trust that the concerts will be well managed and avoid hurting the reputations of artists.

One way to develop this capacity is to further build out the American Arts Incubator (AAI) program. Launched in 2014, AAI is an initiative of ECA that sends American artists abroad to collaborate with local communities. This is a small program that provides relatively modest grants to artists, but it is a proven model for DoS interfacing with the arts world. By scaling up AAI to allow it to develop broad relationships with artistic communities, and expanding into the commercial music industry, AAI could serve as a liaison with the State Department to help identify which artists would have the greatest appeal for ABCs.

4. Identify where diplomatic and commercial interests intersect. The State Department’s Office of Global Partnerships (OGP) aims to develop cross-sector collaboration to advance US foreign policy goals, but it has been limited in its ability to do so. As part of the ABCs, the OGP should be empowered to establish connections with major US companies that have an interest in sponsoring the ABCs. The promotion of American brands by US musicians performing in regions with low saturation of US companies could be an attractive opportunity for US businesses. Sponsorship for the ABCs provided by large US companies would both allow for superstar artists to be contracted, without having to charge money for the concerts to attendees, and would serve to promote US commercial interests abroad. OGP has partnered in the past with major companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, mobilizing $3.7 billion in public and private commitments since 2008. This figure could be far higher if OGP was expanded and its mandate widened to focus more on leveraging US commercial power for diplomatic purposes, without neglecting its current focus on directing private funding to international development.

Washington has an opportunity to advance US diplomatic goals and commercial interests by bringing music to the world. What it takes to do that is an empowered DoS that can step into the limelight alongside American superstar musicians.

Photo by Mario Anzuoni. 62nd Grammy Awards – Show – Los Angeles, California, US, January 26, 2020 – Ariana Grande performs. REUTERS

Assumptions Testing Series

The New American Engagement Initiative’s Assumptions Testing series explores some of the foundational beliefs that guide US foreign policy. By questioning the conventional wisdom, and exposing these assumptions to close scrutiny, the series aims to open a new seam in the policy debate and generate a more lively, fruitful, and effective strategic dialogue – one that is capable of producing a sustainable, nonpartisan strategy for US global engagement.

Reality Check Series

The New American Engagement Initiative’s Reality Checks are short briefs dedicated to exploring a particular policy or set of policies, assessing their efficacy, and, where appropriate, proposing alternatives. Reality Checks are published regularly and tied to the news of the day or derive from NAEI’s Assumptions Testing series. All are succinct and straight-to-the-point. The briefs are designed for busy professionals anxious for pragmatic and timely policy options.

Engagement Reframed Series

The New American Engagement Initiative’s Engagement Reframed policy briefs reimagine and reframe the US approach to the world beyond traditional, narrow notions of US military dominance to fashion an achievable and sustainable form of US leadership in a world of many capable actors.

The post Engagement Reframed #5: Deploy America’s secret diplomatic superstars appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In this seventy-sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly, Africans represent the largest group, with 28 percent of the votes, ahead of Asia with 27 percent, and well above the Americas at 17 percent, and Western Europe at 15 percent. Yet everyone knows that Africa does not decide anything. The real decision-making body is the Security Council, and its five permanent members are China, Russia, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

The founding of this prestigious council was based on the results of World War II, where global superpowers were defined based on hard power. What about the African people? Weren’t they involved in the victory over Hitler’s Germany? The French launched the Resistance from Brazzaville, and numerous African countries served in the war. They deserve their seat at the victory banquet. 

Besides, the United Nations Security Council still functions on a conventional framework, which was written back in 1945, before the majority of African countries had gained independence from their colonizers—which is another fault to correct.

This gap is all the less bearable because the African continent has dealt with issues threatening peace and security for centuries. Africa even was home to one of the world’s first human-rights charters: the Manden Charter, launched by the great Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, long before the English Bill of Rights (1689) and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and perhaps even before the Magna Carta (1215).

Capitalizing on culture

The composition of the UN Security Council—let’s call it aristocratic for this argument—does not reflect the current world at all. Today, the notion of power has evolved from hard power, which is forceful and coercive, to a subtle but more influential power. Soft power enables a nation to lead other countries through influence, which allows those countries to lead their own development without coercive interference, which is what the Security Council should note. Afghanistan and the Sahel are proof of the limits of hard power—and Black Panther, the 2018 movie based on a Marvel comic, is the consecration of soft power. That’s right, it’s Wakanda time.

Africa and its powerful creative industries—driven by connected youth amid the biggest digital revolution of the past two decades—shine beyond the borders of Nollywood to influence Hollywood. This growing market expands its influence everywhere: Nigeria’s entertainment and media market doubled from 2014 to 2019 to become the fastest-growing in the world, according to the audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). When Nigeria incorporated Nollywood in its gross domestic product in 2013 (in a rebasing of data), it became the largest economy in Africa. From Dior to Louis Vuitton, luxury fashion has been renewed with African inspirations. Ready-to-wear brands such as Sweden’s H&M and Spain’s Zara have joined in as well. African Fashion Weeks from Johannesburg to Lagos have inspired international celebrity entertainers like Beyoncé and Rihanna, who is a fashion designer herself.

Beyoncé’s Disney-produced musical, Black Is King, is a celebration of Africa, dreamed up in line with the global success of Black Panther, which featured award-winning African actors in Hollywood such as Lupita Nyong’o and Daniel Kaluuya. Moreover, Netflix has greatly enriched its platform of African series, targeting African audiences and not just English speakers. In the music industry, Nigerian artists such as Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid have signed with major US labels such as Sony and regularly win Grammy awards. Burna Boy’s songs were included on the playlist for US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Jay-Z, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett Smith backed a Broadway musical, Fela!, about a Nigerian singer that won three Tony Awards in 2010. Not so long ago, Nigerians were paying dearly for collaborations with American and European stars, but now the opposite is true. Soft power is now the predominant power.

At United Nations Plaza, these changes have not been taken into consideration. It is quite alarming that the ruling procedures for the security council have not been amended since 1982. The Security Council was built on the principle of sovereignty and equality of all nations; therefore, democratization and reformation of this organization are overdue and a reassessment must ensure fairness and justice for the African continent. Fairness should start with demography. Africa is predicted to become the largest population of the world in the next twenty years, and it already is the youngest: Almost one in four world inhabitants will be a sub-Saharan African in 2050.

Three options for the Security Council

Several African candidates merit consideration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. First, Nigeria is the continent’s most populous nation, at more than 210 million people. In 1963, after its independence in 1960, Nigeria was one of the founding members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now known as the African Union. From 1960 to 1995, Nigeria provided $61 billion in funding for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. This country also assisted prominent leaders of liberation movements in decision-making against the military government regimes of the time throughout the continent. Nigeria founded the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1975, when it utilized its soft power to address a civil war in Angola through OAU policy. By nationalizing Barclays Bank and British Petroleum in the late 1970s, Nigeria was able to pressure the British and contribute to Zimbabwe’s independence.

Another contender for a permanent seat is South Africa. Despite recent concerns about xenophobic violence against African migrants, South Africa has a universal audience because of its powerful story of transformation. The iconic struggle and leadership of the late Nelson Mandela, who went from jail to the presidency, is known the world over. After holding its first democratic elections in 1994, one of the most multiracial countries in Africa went on to have one of the most remarkable constitutions in the world through the Convention for a Democratic South Africa talks, where the current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, was chief negotiator for Mandela’s African National Congress party. Since then, South Africa has diversified its industry and now plays a role in the Southern African Development Community, is a member of the Group of Twenty (G20) nations, and is regarded as one of the “BRICS”—five major emerging economies, alongside Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Sports has played a role in South Africa’s appealing story. Shortly after its first free elections, South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Bafana Bafana, the South African soccer team, was allowed to play international soccer again, after being banned due to nation’s apartheid policy, and went on to win the 1996 African Cup of Nations. These achievements through sports showed that diversity is far more powerful than segregation, and provided a stepping-stone for the country’s influence in Africa and around the globe. In 2010, South Africa was the first African country to host the FIFA World Cup. This year, South Africa assumed the presidency of the Confederation of African Football, the leading voice on sports on the continent and a hub for creative industries.

“Oho! Congo, couched in your forest bed, queen over subdued Africa,

Let the phalli of the mountains bear your pavilion high…”

Right in the middle of Africa’s heart lies the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), heralded above through the words of poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal. The DRC is not only a queen—it is mythical Wakanda. It has always been and was so much so that, in a crazy move, the bloodthirsty Belgian King Leopold II decreed Congo as his personal possession. The richness of the resources surfaced in US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s recent remarks at the Atlantic Council. Speaking about Congolese minerals including cobalt, copper, zinc, silver, gold, platinum, and other resources that contribute to the world electronics industry, she said: “Every time I see the movie Wakanda, I think this is DRC. And I know it was an imaginary story, but imagine a DRC where the resources that are available there are being used to build the country, are being used to educate the people, are being used to provide health care and services for the people of DRC, and we would have a Wakanda in the making.” 

Not only is this country rich in terms of its soil, but also in history and culture. With two hundred ethnic groups and two hundred different languages, the DRC is the largest French-speaking country in the world, with more students in school than residents of France. Kinshasa, with its seventeen million inhabitants, is the largest French-speaking city in the world, before Paris. At the UN Security Council, Congo would know how to speak to the three hundred million French-speaking people in the world and the thirty million Lingala-speakers of Africa.

But the most important reason why the DRC should be a permanent member of the Security Council lies less in its strengths than its weaknesses: thirty years of civil wars, political coups, the impotence of the six thousand UN peacekeepers in the eastern DRC (present for two decades), and the distress of 4.5 million displaced people. These are the reasons why the DRC is never quoted among the pretendants to a UN permanent seat. Its tragedy does not even seem to upset the international community, even though a collapse of the DRC, under the pressure of dark forces, would have a tragic, deep, large, and long-term effect on the African continent and beyond.

The reasons why the DRC should join the Security Council are to gain a powerful lever to stop myriad manipulations by its neighbors and the international community, and to help this country’s voice to be heard. The DRC would bring to the Security Council something referred to as “weakness politics”: the effects of fragility causing processes that lead to achievements and the shaping of events. Such a change would be the best and most innovative way to reform and democratize this body. Bring out the new wineskins!

Rama Yade is senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a senior fellow at the Europe Center. 

Further reading

Fast Thinking Sep 21, 2021

FAST THINKING: Biden’s UN reality check

By Atlantic Council

President Biden spoke of “relentless diplomacy” at the UN on Tuesday. But can that relentlessness overcome transatlantic strains, not to mention a still-raging pandemic and climate crisis?

Africa Crisis Management

New Atlanticist Sep 10, 2021

Gregory Meeks: For counterterrorism and economic opportunity, turn toward Africa

By Katherine Walla

After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it has become clear that “terrorism now is global, and we’ve got to work in a multilateral way to combat and fight that,” said US Representative Gregory Meeks.

Afghanistan Africa

New Atlanticist May 25, 2021

Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Africa’s most overlooked crises and opportunities

By Katherine Walla

Thomas-Greenfield spoke about US President Joe Biden’s outlook on Africa with Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, at an event celebrating Africa Day and introducing the Africa Center’s new team and mission.

Africa Crisis Management

The post Make way for Wakanda: The UN Security Council needs an African seat appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Despite the presence of a UN peacekeeping mission since 1999 and billions of dollars in aid—with the United States contributing more than nine hundred million dollars in humanitarian assistance in the past two years alone—today the eastern Congo is reportedly home to more than 120 rebel groups. Those include numerous foreign-backed militias and a local offshoot of the Islamic State. 

They control roadways and access to resources, and they often engage in kidnapping schemes to generate ransom revenue. Securing their buy-in to any peace processes is key to ensuring lasting stability. 

In fact, the majority of the world’s conflicts feature armed non-state actors (ANSAs), with some sixty-six million people living on territory under their control. The Taliban’s recent takeover in Afghanistan is a fresh reminder of the power of these groups. But traditional attempts at post-conflict stabilization have sometimes failed to produce lasting peace—in large part because of their inability to engage ANSAs in a constructive manner within the peace-building process.

That’s why Congress in 2019 created the Global Fragility Act (GFA), which lays out an array of tools with which to stabilize post-conflict situations. These range from sanctions and intelligence collection to the Women, Peace, and Security initiative and the National Strategy for Counterterrorism. 

But the GFA features a major shortcoming: It assumes the state is the primary actor, meaning that the United States will continue to work with sometimes ineffective national governments while ignoring the influence and power ANSAs have in determining stability. 

To maximize the impact of the GFA, the US government will select five countries on which to focus its attention. As it considers those countries, it needs to properly accommodate ANSAs in its strategic calculations. Failing to do so means potentially repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan, where Washington continued supporting an ineffective national government.  

Mapping the next threat

There is no universal definition of an ANSA; it can be characterized as an organization that is not integrated into formalized institutions, operates with some sort of political autonomy, or is willing to use violence to pursue its political objectives. Either way, ANSAs are involved in the majority of the one hundred active armed conflicts around the world—including Afghanistan, where the Taliban is now in charge, and Syria, where a multitude of armed groups control various pieces of territory. 

Similar dynamics have existed in parts of northeastern Nigeria, where Boko Haram has effectively functioned as the government by levying taxes on the populations under its control or providing some semblance of a justice system to settle disputes. While it no longer controls the amount of territory it did in the early 2010s, the group remains a disruptive and destabilizing force. Now, as the much-criticized US strategy in the Sahel has seen limited success and the Nigerian state appears increasingly weak, the potential for increased conflict there is high. 

More than simply controlling territory, ANSAs also serve a critical regional governance function, providing services and either formal or informal governing structures. 

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, ANSAs around the world imposed travel restrictions and implemented health checks in the regions they control. This serves to portray them as legitimate in the eyes of local citizens, which in turn provides them greater political weight and influence over the structure of power-sharing agreements. ANSAs can also be potential spoilers by intentionally undermining the peace process if they believe it threatens their power. 

The foreign aid trap

The GFS calls for humanitarian, development, and security assistance to be provided as a tool to address state fragility, with a focus on working with the local government and civil society. But in regions where ANSAs perform governance functions, providing foreign aid sometimes directly clashes with American counterterrorism priorities. 

In Nigeria, for instance, USAID efforts were hampered by rules limiting engagement with people who had a previous affiliation with Boko Haram. But the definition of “affiliation” is broad and does not specify whether family members of militants are also excluded from aid—putting the onus on aid workers to investigate any potential linkages. That, in turn, stalls the rollout of humanitarian assistance. 

The Boko Haram rule is well-intentioned, as terrorist organizations should indeed be cut off from American aid, but the provision of foreign assistance is a key component in any effective stabilization operation. The United States is currently facing that very dilemma in a newly Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Washington has not announced whether it plans to officially recognize the Taliban, which is still under numerous sanctions, further complicating assistance plans.

But as in Nigeria, delivering aid is central to creating stability. That’s why the State Department and all other implementing agencies will need to find ways to ensure aid is sent to these conflict areas, and that it actually reaches vulnerable populations, without undermining its counterterrorism goals. This could include clarifying what an acceptable affiliation is, or by providing assistance in contested zones through NGOs or other third parties, such as the UN—therefore not undermining US counterterrorism goals.

Trading for stability

Like foreign assistance, commercial trade is another crucial factor in securing sustainable peace—at least when the state maintains control of its territory. The GFA recognizes this, which is why trade, investment, and commercial diplomacy is seen as another tool to ensure stability by investing in low-income states and building a robust free market. 

But when ANSAs are involved, they can limit this free market and thwart the stabilizing potential of these economic relationships.

For example, these groups often exploit natural resources for economic gain, own valuable land, or nurture ties to corrupt officials. They are rent-seekers aiming to maximize their economic profit. This is why stabilization efforts should provide incentives for them to engage in the peace-building process—ideally transforming their informal and illegal economic structures into legitimate economic activities. 

Consider the Philippines: A peace agreement between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in 2014 created the Bangasmoro, an autonomous political body for the majority Muslim areas in Mindanao. Despite the otherwise successful terms of the peace agreement, which created a power-sharing mechanism, fragile state institutions and corrupt officials meant a deep-seated informal economy took root, compromising the state’s capacity to ensure stability. 

Any tools relating to trade, investment, and commercial diplomacy must fully integrate ANSAs into the free market, preventing their rent-seeking activities while simultaneously squeezing out informal economies. To this end, the United States should develop poverty-reduction and anti-corruption programs that reduce incentives for joining the informal economy. Other actions could include legitimizing illicit sources of income, such as offering incentives for growing legal crops instead of narcotics.

The GFA provides a chance to redefine and reimagine post-conflict stabilization operations. But its tools must better consider the presence of ANSAs to ensure the best chance at success. In its current form, the GFA ignores vital actors in the stabilization process and has not learned from prior operations that failed to integrate and plan for ANSAs, such as in Afghanistan or the Sahel. 

Given the evolving nature of today’s conflicts, a strong ANSA strategy could mean the difference between lasting peace and metastasizing violence. 

Imran Bayoumi is a student at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a former young global professional at the Atlantic Council.

Further reading

New Atlanticist Jun 10, 2021

The best defense: Why NATO should invest in resilience

By Jaclyn Levy

Policies emphasizing resilience should minimize damage, restore stability quickly, and generate improved strategies. To this end, there are several steps NATO can take to build a preventive, resilience-based approach to emerging global challenges.

Europe & Eurasia NATO

New Atlanticist Jul 22, 2021

Why ‘human security’ matters for tomorrow’s conflicts

By Sarah Dawn Petrin

NATO leaders are finally focusing on human security, a major step toward a broader vision of crisis management.

Conflict Europe & Eurasia

New Atlanticist Aug 26, 2021

Before the Taliban took Afghanistan, it took the internet

By Emerson T. Brooking

This is how the Afghan Taliban waged—and won—a generation-long information war.

Afghanistan Conflict

The post To build lasting peace, you can’t ignore militant groups appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Africa Center Distinguished Fellow Ambassador J. Peter Pham, former US Special Envoy for the Sahel Region as well as former US Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, moderated the conversation, opening with a discussion on the evolution of Prof. Autesserre’s distinguished career from identifying flaws in international peacebuilding norms and practices to offering an alternative localized solution, noting that her often provocative work has influenced policy discussions at some of the highest levels in international organizations and governments.  

In Prof. Autesserre’s remarks, she highlighted the need to move peacebuilding away from the traditional practices of premature elections and a focus on elite-bargaining, towards a process that is locally led and prioritizes local definitions of peace, democracy, and justice. She also spoke of the growing support for localized peace processes but noted that international organizations often merely “talk the talk” when it comes to supporting genuinely locally driven peace processes.

Prof. Autesserre also engaged on the role of locally led peace processes in Idjwi (DRC), Somaliland, and lessons that can be brought from these contexts to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (​MINUSMA), whose annual mandate renews on June 30 and which Amb. Pham noted, has “found progress difficult to come by” despite the “billions of dollars spent since 2013 and the hundreds of lives lost, making MINUSMA the deadliest ‘peacekeeping’ mission in the world today.”

Further reading

Event Recap May 25, 2021

Mali coup: White House official calls for ‘unconditional and immediate’ release of president and prime minister

By Africa Center

Speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Day celebration, White House official Dana Banks responded to topical issues in African affairs, including the coup in Mali, calling for “the unconditional and immediate release of the president and the prime minister.”

Africa Democratic Transitions

Event Recap Apr 13, 2021

Reflecting on the Bring Back Our Girls movement

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, April 13, the Africa Center convened a private event with Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw for a discussion of their recently published investigative book Bring Back Our Girls, chronicling the infamous abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and the resultant social media-driven advocacy campaign and international response.

Africa Extremism

New Atlanticist May 25, 2021

Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Africa’s most overlooked crises and opportunities

By Katherine Walla

Thomas-Greenfield spoke about US President Joe Biden’s outlook on Africa with Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, at an event celebrating Africa Day and introducing the Africa Center’s new team and mission.

Africa Crisis Management

The post Prof. Séverine Autesserre says that it’s time for the peacekeeping community to ‘walk the walk’ when it comes to localized peacebuilding appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Getting greener will require a lot more of everything from solar panels to wind turbines to electric vehicles to large-scale batteries to hand-held devices. This, in turn, will drive demand for various minerals and metals, both commonly well-known and not-so-familiar, on which the clean-energy technologies depend.

African countries are already a major source for some of these elements. For example, cobalt is a key component in rechargeable batteries. Roughly half of the 7.1 million metric tons of total global reserves of cobalt are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which, moreover, accounts for 70 percent of overall production of the metal, according to the most recent statistics.

In other cases, certain African countries are key to a secure supply chain. Take the case of neodymium, a silvery rare-earth metal that plays an outsized role in renewable energy since there is currently no ready substitute for it in the manufacture of so-called permanent magnets used in both generators (where they convert mechanical energy into electricity) and electric vehicles (where they do the reverse, converting electricity into mechanical energy)—and this is in addition to its longstanding uses in a host of applications ranging from credit cards to speakers to medical equipment. Some 80 percent of the world’s neodymium is currently produced by China, a fact that suggests that the supply of this critical metal will come up in at least two of the reviews mandated by President Biden’s executive order on America’s supply chains, the study of high-capacity battery supplies led by the Secretary of Energy and the review of critical minerals led by the Secretary of Defense. While the reviews are currently underway, the possible alternative sources are already known: the Gakara Mine in Burundi operated by London-listed Rainbow Rare Earths and the Songwe Hill Mine in Malawi operated by Canada’s Mkango Resources. Of course, getting the ore is only part of the challenge; until alternative avenues for offtake are created, these producers will still have to turn to China for processing.

But seemingly esoteric minerals, whether technically rare-earth elements or not, are not the only material inputs needed for the transition to clean energy. A greener economy will also require even greater volumes of some metals that humankind has been exploiting for millennia.

The switch to cleaner, electrically-powered vehicles, for example, will require copper—lots of it. A conventional automobile operating with an internal-combustion engine contains on average about 48 pounds of copper, a hybrid electrical vehicle (HEV) about 88 pounds, and a battery electric vehicle (BEV) about 183 pounds, according to the Copper Development Association, an industry-supported nonprofit research and educational group. HEV and BEV public transportation require upwards of 1,000 pounds of the ductile native metal. Renewable energy infrastructure also requires large amounts of copper. According to the National Mining Association, 4.7 tons of copper go into each typical wind turbine. No wonder that, as enthusiasm for electric vehicles gained momentum, copper prices doubled over the last year to over $9,000 per metric ton in February, the highest level in almost ten years and pretty close to the all-time record price set in 2011, staying ever since at that level. The biggest trader of the metal reportedly expects the price to surge even further to $15,000 a ton this decade “as demand for global decarbonization produces a deep market deficit.”

While increased demand accounts for part of the commodity’s price, there is also a supply-side factor as many existing mines are in the declining phases of their life cycles. In fact, a peer-reviewed study a few years ago suggested that without new reserves being tapped, global copper production may be nearing peak just when demand is set to spike. Thus, projects under development are perhaps even more important than existing production. Moreover, with some potential major producers, like Alaska’s Pebble Mine, facing uncertain futures due to environmental concerns and regulatory issues, the pipeline for new sources is critical. Of the top ten projects currently under development, the biggest by far is Canadian mining company Ivanhoe’s Kamoa-Kakula project in the DRC, which contains 38 million tons of copper, more than twice the amount of the second-placed Pebble Mine—if the latter ever produces.

There is also increased demand anticipated for iron, a metal humankind has worked with for since the Middle Bronze Age. The same wind turbine that contains 4.7 tons of copper, requires 335 tons of steel which, of course, is an iron alloy. While three of the largest iron mines in the world are located in Brazil and, unsurprisingly, operated by the country’s flagship Vale, the Zanaga Mine in the Republic of the Congo is not far behind in scale. And the literal mother lode is in Guinea, where the world’s largest—and, by many estimates, the highest-quality—untapped iron ore deposits are to be found in the hills of the country’s east at Simandou and in nearby blocks. Bringing online this resource will not only transform the global supply chain for the critical ingredient in steel, but it carries the promise of dramatically jumpstarting the development of Guinea and its neighbor Liberia, respectively the 178^th and 175^th placed on the most recent UNDP Human Development Index of 189 countries and territories (exporting the ore through the nearby Liberian port of Buchanan makes far more economic sense than hauling it overland some 400 miles to the Guinean capital of Conakry on a not-yet-built railroad).

With government, industry (witness GM’s announcement of plans to become carbon neutral in its products and operations by 2040), and individuals widely embracing the various aspects of the green economy from major infrastructure to manufacturing to consumer products, the African continent will play an increasingly strategic role by providing critical material inputs to the supply chain. This reality will necessitate both a greater focus on Africa on the part of governments and companies as well as a better coordination between the public and private sectors, but it also provides African countries with an unprecedented opportunity to leverage this new attention to the benefit of their citizens and economies.

Ambassador J. Peter Pham, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, was the first-ever US Special Envoy for the Sahel Region. Previously he served as US Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Prior to serving in government, he was Atlantic Council vice president for research and regional initiatives and director of the Africa Center. Follow him on Twitter @DrJPPham.

Further reading

Event Recap Mar 23, 2021

InfraCorp set to attract global investors to Nigerian infrastructure

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, March 23, the Africa Center hosted, in partnership with the US-Nigeria Council, a panel on investing in infrastructure in Nigeria, featuring a launch of the new and innovative Infrastructure Corporation of Nigeria (InfraCorp).

Africa Economy & Business

AfricaSource Mar 24, 2021

Financing post-COVID recovery in Africa: Lessons from the AFC-DFC partnership

By Africa Center

How can African economies recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic? Sanjeev Gupta of the Africa Finance Corporation and Danielle Montgomery of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation join Senior Fellow Aubrey Hruby to discuss a recent partnership to address Africa’s infrastructure deficit and spur economic growth.

Africa Economy & Business

Event Recap Feb 23, 2021

Pan-African partnerships advance continental vaccine access

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, February 23, the Africa Center hosted a panel discussion on global vaccine inequality, featuring an esteemed panel of global health, finance, and advocacy leaders.

Africa Coronavirus

The post Africa’s real strategic import for the green economy appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Dell’Osso opened with a brief introduction of the report, outlining the specific findings and broader implications. He noted that North Korean businessmen set up a company in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), opened a US dollar banking account, and won public contracts, in apparent violation of US, European Union, and United Nations sanctions. While this principally implicates the DRC banking sector and the country’s institutional environment, Dell’Osso underscored that the insights from the report are relevant to a more general set of issues related to sanctions evasion, enforcement, and due diligence.

Following Dell’Osso’s overview, the expert panel aimed to contextualize the report’s findings. Dolzikova helpfully provided the viewing audience with an introduction to proliferation finance, explaining how analysts look to connect North Korean business activity to government proliferation efforts. In Africa, most of these efforts relate to revenue generation and given the evidence from the report, according to Dolzikova, it is exceedingly likely that the businessmen implicated were supporting North Korean government objectives.

Englebert added remarks on the political context in the DRC, in what he described as a corrupt institutional environment in which stakeholders rely on securing patronage in order to achieve their objectives. This applies to provincial governors, as well, helping to explain the statue-building activities implicated in the report as potential means to curry favor from Kinshasa. In this constrained political environment, Englebert highlighted that “following UN Sanctions is really a mild priority” when compared to political and financial survival.

For former banker and citizen activist Anzuluni, the report’s findings are unfortunately not surprising and reflect systemic issues of bad governance and corruption. He placed significant onus on the Congolese central bank in matters of financial regulation and suggested that it is a responsibility of civil society to ensure that the recommendations of this report and others are not only heard but acted on. In this way, he closed, the interests of Congolese citizens can be put first.

Missed the event? Watch the webcast, below, and engage us @ACAfricaCenter with any questions, comments, or feedback.

Event Recap May 25, 2021

Mali coup: White House official calls for ‘unconditional and immediate’ release of president and prime minister

By Africa Center

Speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Day celebration, White House official Dana Banks responded to topical issues in African affairs, including the coup in Mali, calling for “the unconditional and immediate release of the president and the prime minister.”

Africa Democratic Transitions

Event Recap Apr 13, 2021

Reflecting on the Bring Back Our Girls movement

By Africa Center

On Tuesday, April 13, the Africa Center convened a private event with Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw for a discussion of their recently published investigative book Bring Back Our Girls, chronicling the infamous abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and the resultant social media-driven advocacy campaign and international response.

Africa Extremism

New Atlanticist May 25, 2021

Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Africa’s most overlooked crises and opportunities

By Katherine Walla

Thomas-Greenfield spoke about US President Joe Biden’s outlook on Africa with Ambassador Rama Yade, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, at an event celebrating Africa Day and introducing the Africa Center’s new team and mission.

Africa Crisis Management

The post Expert panel responds to incidents of North Korean sanctions evasion in the DRC appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The post Englebert in Le Monde: Aujourd’hui comme sous Léopold II, le Congo reste la façade institutionnelle d’un voleur érigé en Etat appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The post Englebert quoted in Voice of America on the effects of COVID-19 on conflict-ridden regions appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In Lubumbashi, for example, a false alert about two potentially infected individuals who had flown in from Kinshasa led Governor Jacques Kyabula to declare a complete 48-hour lockdown on March 23 until all the plane’s passengers could be found and isolated. But large amounts of people could still be seen milling around in the streets, several neighborhood markets remained open, and the moto-taxis were doing their regular business.

In Kinshasa, too, the government has ordered bars, restaurants, schools, and universities closed, and has banned group gatherings. But many markets remain open and many people, seeking to eke out a living in a country with a 70 percent poverty rate, are out and about. With a population of more than ten million inhabitants and with communes of extreme population density, the very notion of avoiding gatherings is an empirical puzzle.

In the best of times, Congolese governance is chaotic, amateurish, and inefficient. The COVID-19 crisis has so far only heightened the display of these characteristics. There is particular confusion as to who is in charge. (To some extent, this is always the case in a country with an official president and a shadow one, but it matters more now.)

President Félix Tshisekedi announced the formation of a COVID-19 Task Force in his office on March 18, but there is also a coordination cell in the national government. There is some confusion as to whom—either the minister of health or an epidemiologist—is actually in charge of this cell. Moreover, Prime Minister Sylvestre Ilunga’s office has also claimed leadership in the crisis response.

To make matters worse, it’s unclear whether the central government or provincial ones are in charge. The constitution and the decentralization law of 2008 give Congo’s twenty-six provinces jurisdiction over public health, not the central authorities. Indeed, the governor of Haut-Katanga unilaterally put his province on lockdown on March 23. But his decision was challenged by the national minister of health, Eteni Longondo, who claimed his ministry alone has the management of such a health crisis in its prerogatives, based in part on the fact that there is only one epidemiology center and biological laboratory in Congo and it is in Kinshasa. The national minister’s authority appeared to be boosted when he declared on March 24 that the two positive tests identified by Haut-Katanga a few days earlier (based on rapid test kits apparently imported from China) had proven negative upon further analysis.

In the days and weeks ahead, two factors are likely to matter a lot: money and social tensions.

The Congolese government is broke, with a US$5 billion deficit in its 2020 budget, largely due to a so-far failed attempt at making primary education universally free and a bloated civil service. During the Ebola epidemics, the DRC has been able to rely on foreign funding to respond to the crises (and, largely, direct foreign substitution of the state in the delivery of health services). But during a universal catastrophe like the coronavirus pandemic, Congo is unlikely to receive any significant external funding. And the spreading world-wide recession is likely to further deflate the price of its mineral exports on which the budget largely depends.

Congolese politics functions through extensive patronage, much of which is predicated upon the informal redistribution of state resources. So a major question facing the Congo during the pandemic is, if state resources dry up and the necessities of actual public spending rise, how will the political system endure? Joseph Kabila’s Front Commun pour le Congo (FCC) coalition is particularly likely to fray if it cannot be sustained with the usual level of financial transfers and employment opportunities for clients.

If the crisis worsens, community conflicts might well rise too. “Tribalism,” or the reliance on ethnic identity in social, economic, and political relations, is widely prevalent in Congo, and many of the country’s regions have active or latent inter-community conflicts. So whether the health crisis will aggravate social tensions and spark violent conflict is a second big question mark. During the recent lockdown in Haut-Katanga, for example, tensions flared up in some neighborhoods between local “autochthonous” people and the Luba migrants from the Kasai provinces, many of whom are in the moto-taxi business and refused to stop working.

In some ways, the Congolese have lived daily for years with much worse health problems, including Ebola in North Kivu the last few years (which seemed to have finally come to an end earlier this month), recurrent bouts of cholera, widespread tuberculosis, and a resurgence in measles cases (the Congo had 180,000 cases in 2019 alone). Yet, as elsewhere, the potential for rapid contagion and high mortality of COVID-19 is likely to upend life as the Congolese know it.

Dr. Pierre Englebert is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. He is also the H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations at Pomona College.

The author is grateful for information shared by Eric Nonga from the University of Lubumbashi.

Questions? Tweet them to our experts @ACAfricaCenter.

For more content, go to our Coronavirus: Africa page.

AfricaSource Mar 24, 2020

What does the coronavirus mean for Africa?

By Bronwyn Bruton

Will the novel coronavirus prove even more deadly and disruptive in Africa? It depends on the country. Bronwyn Bruton identifies the key questions and sets the stage for the Africa’s Center’s ongoing commentary on the crisis.

Africa Coronavirus

AfricaSource Mar 30, 2020

Coronavirus comes to Sudan

Not yet one year into a historic political transition and in the midst of an economic collapse, Sudan’s future was already hanging in the balance. The addition of a national and global public health crisis now has the potential for a ‘make or break’ impact on the country.

Africa Coronavirus

AfricaSource Mar 26, 2020

A rough road ahead for Nigeria

By Aubrey Hruby

Africa’s giant, Nigeria, is awakening to a new economic and social reality as a result of the coronavirus crisis. The country of two hundred million has already recorded over fifty cases and its first COVID-related death. News of high-profile infectees is starting to drive social change and spur calls for stronger government action.

Africa Coronavirus

The post COVID-19 in the DR Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In his remarks, Englebert discussed the complexity of Congolese politics and outlined the state of the country’s political alliances, one year after disputed elections brought Félix Tshisekedi to power. Speaking on Tshisekedi’s record, Englebert noted delays on his initial policy promises, but admitted that the bar for progress remains low in Congo’s stagnated political environment. Englebert added that there remains a perception that the new administration lacks a sense of urgency, but that Tshisekedi has actively pursued efforts at legitimation including international travel, elite renewal, and addressing violence in the east.

Referencing other important actors, Englebert outlined how former president Joseph Kabila’s support remains strong in parliament, the security apparatus, and key ministries, but the transition has forced him to adapt to a smaller share of economic rents. Of all the post-election uncertainties, Englebert highlighted the state of the fractious opposition as central, underscoring rival Moïse Katumbi’s continued popularity in contrast to apparent electoral winner Martin Fayulu’s fading support.

Africa Center Director of Programs and Studies and Deputy Director Ms. Bronwyn Bruton moderated the ensuing discussion, during which participants engaged Englebert on the effectiveness of the various sanctions imposed on the Congo, the status of conflict in the east of the country, progress on internal reforms, and the influence of external actors such as Belgium and the United States. 

The post Dr. Pierre Englebert discusses the current political situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Many Congolese as well as Western chanceries chose to overlook this electoral fraud, arguing that the miscarriage of democratic justice was a worthwhile price to pay in exchange for finally ridding the Congo of the Kabila dynasty (Joseph’s father, Laurent, was president before him).  But, one year later, how much of a transition has there actually been?

Not much. By and large, Kabila appears to have remained in charge. His political coalition, the Front Commun pour le Congo (FCC), controls about 340 of 500 seats in the National Assembly, and about ninety of 109 seats in the Senate (though given the fraudulent results of the presidential election, there is no way of knowing whether these numbers represent the will of the voters). The FCC coalition also controls much of the government architecture under Prime Minister Sylvestre Ilunga, and has the loyalty of twenty-two of Congo’s twenty-six provincial executives. Moreover, the nearly ten thousand-strong Republican Guard remains firmly under Kabila’s thumb. The deposed leader continues to travel through Kinshasa with a security entourage that easily rivals that of the actual president. Adding insult to injury, Kabila is still living in the presidential compound on the banks of the Congo river (when he is not on his private Kingakati farm south of Kinshasa).

Yet, uncertainty is a dominant feature of Congolese politics, and while Kabila retains the upper hand for now, this is uncharted territory, and there are some early signs of engine trouble in the Kabila machine:

First, Tshisekedi has, to his very great credit, been successful in liberalizing Congo’s political climate. Opposition parties are back and organizing freely, political prisoners have been freed, and the dreaded Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR) has curtailed its repressive activities.

Second, the FCC coalition is less monolithic than it appears and some of its members have begun showing signs of indiscipline and independence. In particular, the corruption and rapaciousness of the leading coalition member, the Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie (PPRD), which has served as Kabila’s inner sanctum, has irked other coalition members.

If these intra-party tensions are allowed to fester, Kabila may find it challenging to keep his coalition in order for another four years. For example, in July 2019, Modeste Bahati Lukwebo, the leader of the second largest party of the coalition (the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques du Congo, AFDC) openly rebelled against Kabila when he was not given the Senate’s presidency. For standing against Kabila’s chosen candidate, he was expelled from the FCC. Most of Bahati’s colleagues sided with Kabila, and remained inside the FCC coalition. But with twenty-four different political groups representing 166 parties in the FCC, other fissures are inevitable. For now, Kabila will use his loyal enforcers—like John Numbi, Inspector General of the police—to intimidate would-be defectors. But with so many members, the spoils of party membership are spread thin, and many on the fringes of the FCC might be tempted to look for other alliances. 

It would take time to build a new majority. Tshisekedi’s coalition (called Cap pour le Changement, or CACH) has a mere forty-eight seats in the National Assembly, and Martin Fayulu’s coalition (called Lamuka), has only 103. More than a hundred people would need to fall out of the FCC to claim a majority of the Assembly’s five hundred seats – and an alliance between CACH and Lamuka seems unlikely, given lingering bad blood over the stolen election. Lamuka may, however, not survive the creation of a new party (Ensemble pour la République) by its most powerful member, Moïse Katumbi, in December 2019, probably in pursuit of his own presidential ambitions. Still, while a new majority may be unlikely, any erosion of the FCC’s majority in parliament could send a contagious signal.

Third, though Tshisekedi’s appointees in the government are outnumbered by Kabila’s (CACH has twenty-three ministerial posts while FCC has forty-two), a number of them have been able to carve out a degree of autonomy. Gilbert Kankonde, the Minister of Interior, has defied the FCC over provincial appointments, and Marie Tumba Nzeza, the Foreign Affairs Minister, has managed to dismiss diplomats who had been appointed by Kabila.

Fourth, after considerable earlier difficulties, Tshisekedi has begun to bring in some government revenue, which might help him emancipate Congo’s budget from Kabila’s financial stranglehold. The former president still controls the heads of most state enterprises that are Congo’s cash cows, but in December, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) agreed to a $368 million emergency line of credit for Congo, lifting a ban on aid in place since 2011, and agreed to work towards a multi-year program by mid-2020. Tshisekedi will need every penny of this money and more if he is to come through with his ambitious 2020 budget which, with about $10 billion in expenditure, is some $5 billion over expected revenue. But it is a start, and more aid to Congo will roll in if Tshisekedi is able to show some positive results.

Fifth, Tshisekedi has succeeded in warming relations with Brussels, Paris and Washington, giving him some useful international support, as well as aid potential, to boost his legitimacy in Congo. Like Kabila at the beginning of his own rule, Tshisekedi has consciously played the international card to strengthen his hand at home, taking no fewer than thirty-one trips out of the country in 2019. And although Tshisekedi has prudently distanced himself from the expanding raft of Western sanctions against the enablers of Kabila’s regime, he has certainly been helped by them.

Finally, while there has been little to no progress at all on the corruption front—with the presidential cabinet itself rocked by allegations of disappearing funds, and the Observatoire de la Dépense Publique (a watchdog NGO) accusing Tshisekedi’s administration of many corrupt practices that recall the former regime— Tshisekedi has begun to selectively enforce some laws against Kabila’s clan. In December, for example, the head of the mining parastatal and of the Federation of Congolese Enterprises, a Kabila loyalist named Albert Yuma, was accused of diverting $200 million in funds. Though it is unlikely that he will truly be held to account, Yuma was prevented from leaving the country and was forced to appear in person before the Court of Appeals in Kinshasa. If he persists with such prosecutions, Tshisekedi may eventually be able to diminish the spoils available to keep Kabila’s political coalition in line.

Least successful so far have been Tshisekedi’s attempts to curb violence in the east, one of his primary campaign promises. The armed forces are actively engaged in battles with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in Ituri and taking substantial losses, but so far with little visible progress. Across Ituri and North Kivu, and also in Tanganyika, violence remains widespread and the state largely helpless to protect its citizens.

Overall, while there has clearly not been any regime transition in Congo, there are faint stirrings of change. It is long shot, but it seems that the Western strategy of embracing Tshisekedi in exchange for Kabila’s removal from office may yet – possibly, hopefully – bear some fruit. It remains to be seen whether the West’s disregard for electoral outcomes will critically undermine the future role of elections in consolidating change.

Pierre Englebert is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and the H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and professor of Politics at Pomona College.

Further reading

Program Impact Story Apr 4, 2019

Congolese president discusses strategic partnership with the United States

By Atlantic Council

On April 4, the Africa Center hosted H.E. Félix Tshisekedi Tshilombo, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), during his first official visit to the United States. For an audience of senior US policy makers and non-profit representatives, President Tshisekedi discussed his country’s relationship with the United States. In particular, he hoped to […]

Democratic Republic of the Congo Security Partnerships

AfricaSource Dec 19, 2018

Congo’s election sham

By Pierre Englebert and Georges Kasongo Kalumba

The Congo government’s spurious disqualification of popular opposition candidates and the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to prevent those remaining from campaigning demonstrate that Kabila not only intends to turn Congo’s elections into a sham.

Africa Democratic Republic of the Congo

AfricaSource Jul 16, 2018

Below the surface, a game changer in Congolese politics

By Pierre Englebert

“Shikata,” or “remain seated” in Swahili, claim the posters on Congolese President Joseph Kabila’s effigy in the streets of Lubumbashi. But while everyone’s attention is focused on the regime’s contortions to stay in power, despite constitutional impediments to doing so and deep domestic discontent, the 2015 break-up of Congo’s existing provinces has upended politics below […]

Africa Corruption

The post Congo, one year later appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The post Englebert in the Journal of Democracy: Aspirations and realities in Africa: The DRC’s electoral sideshow appeared first on Atlantic Council.

This event was part of the Africa Center’s Congo on the Edge initiative.

The post Covert capital: Illicit finance in the DR Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On Wednesday, May 22, the Africa Center partnered with The Sentry at the Enough Project to host a discussion on illicit finance operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), occasioned by the release of the group’s new report: Covert Capital: The Kabila Family’s Secret Investment Bank.

Ms. Bronwyn Bruton, Africa Center director of programs and studies and deputy director, welcomed attendees, and Mr. John Dell’Osso, senior investigator at The Sentry, presented the report.

In his remarks, Dell’Osso detailed the report’s finding that family members and associates of former President Joseph Kabila used a little-known investment firm called Kwanza Capital to attempt to acquire Congolese banks. He described the firm as a vehicle the Kabila family apparently used to launder misappropriated public funds and gain greater leverage over the DRC’s $5 billion banking industry. Though Kwanza Capital’s multiple efforts to wrest control of Congolese banks ultimately failed, Dell’Osso detailed the firm’s systematic attempts to influence the financial sector on behalf of Kabila and his inner circle and offered numerous recommendations to the Congolese, US, and European governments.

After recognizing the report’s importance to combatting corruption in the DRC, Amb. Rama Yade, Africa Center senior fellow, moderated a discussion featuring Dell’Osso, Ms. Lakshmi Kumar, policy director at Global Financial Integrity, and Mr. Mvemba Dizolele, senior advisor at the International Republican Institute.

Kumar praised the report for demonstrating the increased risks when politically exposed persons—those individuals wielding the levers of state power—seek to  gain control over a country’s financial system. In line with The Sentry’s recommendations, she discussed numerous guidelines and enforcement mechanisms to weed out illicit finance and protect the international financial system against money-laundering, highlighting US leadership in these efforts.

Dizolele provided a wider context to the discussion, noting that corrupt activities in the banking sector extend into other industries such as mining. He expressed hope that the international community will assist President Félix Tshisekedi’s fight against corruption by supporting civil society and regulators to flush out bad actors. In particular, he highlighted the sanctioning of Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler for his corrupt mining and oil dealings in the DRC as a particularly effective measure that sent ripples through Congolese society.

In the ensuing discussion, members of the audience engaged the panel on the effectiveness of targeted sanctions on individuals and how to best support Congolese regulators, and civil society improve accountability in the DRC’s government and financial sector.

The post Covert capital: Illicit finance in the DR Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Africa Center Director of Programs and Studies and Deputy Director Ms. Bronwyn Bruton welcomed guests and highlighted the event’s timeliness given President Félix Tshisekedi’s recent visit to Washington, DC and the Atlantic Council.

In his remarks, Dr. Englebert presented his and Jené’s research on local Congolese politics and the implications of the 2015 découpage policy that split the DRC’s eleven provinces into twenty-six regions. He argued that instead of bolstering local power outside the nexus of corrupt elites in Kinshasa, découpage’s disingenuous implementation reinforced patronage networks, upset longstanding state-society relations, and institutionalized ethnic tensions and grievances in Congo’s provinces.

In the ensuing discussion moderated by Bruton, Englebert and Jené discussed the status of Congolese politics following a flawed election last December that saw Félix Tshisekedi attain the presidency. They noted that despite Tshisekedi’s victory, ex-President Joseph Kabila’s Common Front for Congo party maintains a strong hold on the National Assembly and recently won many of the new provincial governorships. They warned that as long as Kabila loyalists retained these institutional powers, the proposed coalition government between Tshisekedi and Kabila would be largely aspirational. Englebert predicted that Tshisekedi would be on a collision course with Kabila should he pursue an ambitious reform agenda.

Among those in attendance and participating in the discussion were Ambassador Herman Cohen, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs; Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn, former US ambassador to the Republic of Djibouti; and Dr. Vivian Lowery Derryck, former assistant administrator for Africa of the US Agency for International Development.

Please see Englebert and Jené’s research:

• Tangled! Congolese Provincial Elites in a Web of Patronage
• Where Does State Capacity Come From? Conjectures from DRC’s New Provinces
• Provincial Tribalization: The Transformation of Ethnic Representation Under Decentralization in the DR Congo

The post Tangled! The new politics of the Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“It is easy to see how the defeat of Daesh, the Islamic State, in Syria and Iraq could lead to a situation where these groups are now going to come into Africa and take advantage of the pervasive poverty and also the situation of chaos that we have, for example, in Beni and Butembo, to set up their caliphate,” Tshisekedi said, referring to cities in northeastern DRC which have been gripped by deadly violence.

He blamed the violence in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on “local and foreign” armed groups.

Tshisekedi cited recent military intelligence that he said points to an “Islamic threat” stemming from the ADF, a Ugandan-led militant group based in the DRC.

In November 2018, the US Embassy in Kinshasa closed after receiving intelligence that an ISIS-linked group could carry out attacks against US interests in the DRC. The embassy reopened in December.

In March, US-backed forces in Syria declared victory over ISIS. Days earlier, US President Donald J. Trump declared ISIS would be “gone by tonight.”

Tshisekedi committed the DRC to the global war on terrorism. He said that in his meetings in Washington he has sought military cooperation with the United States to help equip the Congolese army and improve its intelligence capabilities. Such support, he maintained, was also essential to facilitating regional cooperation to address the threat posed by terrorism.

In eastern DRC, deadly violence by militias and Congolese security forces has made it difficult for health workers to treat the worst outbreak of Ebola in the history of the country. Attacks on treatment centers have compelled some international groups to suspend operations.

Since the outbreak of Ebola was detected in August 2018 there have been 993 confirmed and probable cases and 621 deaths in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Tshisekedi said the prevalence of Ebola was “even more reason why we need the support of our partners, in particular the United States.”

J. Peter Pham, the US special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, said that in his meeting with Tshisekedi he had discussed the Congolese leader’s commitment to address the Ebola crisis, but also to fight corruption, advance human rights, ensure regional peace and security, and enhance the economic relationship between the United States and the DRC.

Tshisekedi has promised to fight corruption and open up the political space in the country. In March, he pardoned around 700 political prisoners jailed under his predecessor, Joseph Kabila.

Pham, who is also the vice president for research and regional initiatives and director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, said it was “very gratifying” to see the decree Tshisekedi signed on the release of prisoners. Pham also asked Tshisekedi about the return of exiles, acknowledging that the Congolese government had returned opposition figure Moïse Katumbi’s passport.

Tshisekedi, who spoke in French through a translator, said he is also seeking US assistance to “re-establish” the Congolese government, which he said would help ensure rule of law, a strong judicial system, and improve the business climate in the DRC.

“What we’re seeking is a new type of cooperation based on a win-win situation —  a partnership that will be beneficial for both of our countries,” Tshisekedi said.

Tshisekedi’s father, Étienne, was the founder of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, the oldest and largest opposition party of the DRC. Felix took over the party following his father’s death in 2017.

Tshisekedi was sworn in as the president of the DRC on January 24. His inauguration marked the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the DRC and the end of his predecessor Kabila’s term, which lasted eighteen years.

Tshisekedi and Kabila have since agreed to form a coalition government. Tshisekedi was unable to win enough seats in parliament, where Kabila’s Common Front for Congo (FCC), a coalition of several parties, holds an absolute majority.

The December 30, 2018, election, however, was mired in controversy. Martin Fayulu, the leader of the Engagement for Citizenship and Development party, was widely expected to win the election by a huge margin. An observer mission from the DRC’s highly respected Catholic Church’s bishops conference (CENCO) said its partial tallies showed Fayulu winning.

But the DRC’s Independent National Election Commission (CENI) was quick to announce Tshisekedi’s victory citing provisional results.

Following his surprise defeat, Fayulu launched a legal bid for a recount of the votes and proclaimed himself “the only legitimate president.” The Constitutional Court rejected his appeal because he presented no evidence to the tribunal to back his claims and declared Tshisekedi the winner.

After the decision by the Constitutional Court, the US State Department welcomed the first peaceful and democratic transfer of power in the DRC. While the elections represented the will of the Congolese people for a change of regime after eighteen years of rule by Kabila, concerns over the conduct and transparency of the electoral process remained.

On February 22, senior DRC officials, including CENI President Corneille Nangaa, were publicly designated by the State Department for engaging in corruption and undermining the democratic process, by conduct dating back to 2016. The officials, five of whom were identified while the names of others were withheld, were banned from receiving US visas. In a statement from Kinshasa, a senior State Department official indicated that the punitive measures were targeted against specific malign actors, and “supported President Tshisekedi’s commitment to root out corruption, advance human rights, and strengthen the DRC’s democracy.” These public designations were quickly followed by targeted financial sanctions against these individuals by the US Treasury Department on March 21.

Tshisekedi met US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the State Department on April 3. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said Pompeo “stressed that the United States will continue to promote accountability to advance reform in the DRC.”

Ashish Kumar Sen is deputy director of communications, editorial, at the Atlantic Council. Follow him on Twitter @AshishSen.

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For an audience of senior US policy makers and non-profit representatives, President Tshisekedi discussed his country’s relationship with the United States. In particular, he hoped to form a strategic partnership with the United States that would promote peace and security, the rule of law, and economic development in the DRC. He also sought US assistance to fight the emerging threat posed by ISIS in his country. Participants had the opportunity to engage the new president on the conditions of his election and his ability to enact his ambitious reform agenda.

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Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director Dr. J. Peter Pham, who concurrently serves as US special envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, introduced the President and welcomed participants.

In his remarks, President Tshisekedi outlined his hopes to establish a strategic partnership with the United States, building off the strong relationship the two countries have enjoyed for decades and focusing on peace and security, the rule of law, and economic development.

President Tshisekedi, who was inaugurated on January 24, 2019, in the first-ever peaceful transition of power in the history of the DRC, seemed optimistic that the United States would deepen its security cooperation with his country, providing training and equipment to Congolese security and intelligence services to combat the plethora of armed groups and bad actors operating in eastern and northern DRC, singling out Islamic State efforts to establish a cell in the heart of Africa and the growing threat posed by the armed militants of the Allied Democratic Forces, who have been linked to foreign Islamist elements.

The President further expressed hope that his government could count on continued US support as he works to bring stability to the DRC, build stable institutions, and ultimately establish the rule of law. He finally underscored his country’s economic potential and his intentions to create a business-friendly environment and appeal to US investors, particularly in the energy, mining, and agriculture sectors.

A discussion, moderated by Pham, followed the President’s remarks, during which participants engaged the President on his recent electoral victory, his proposed reform agenda, and his plans to combat corruption and human rights abuses.

Among those in attendance were Amb. Michael A. Hammer, US ambassador to the DRC; Ms. Elizabeth Fitzsimmons, deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Africa and public diplomacy; Amb. Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense and president of the World Bank; Amb. Johnnie Carson, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs; and Ms. Constance Berry Newman, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs and Atlantic Council Africa Center senior fellow; as well as representatives from think tanks as well as human rights and humanitarian organizations.

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Introducing the distinguished guest, Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham highlighted the magnitude of Mukwege’s work over the years, treating more than 85,000 women and girls since 1999 – 50,000 of whom have been survivors of sexualized violence – and doing so with a unique combination of medical treatment, psycho-social support, community reintegration, legal assistance to pursue justice, and advocacy.

In his remarks, Mukwege discussed the magnitude of gender-based violence in the DRC, touching on the two decades of work by the Panzi Hospital, a 450-bed facility in Bukavu, South Kivu, in the eastern part of the Congo, to combat the problem. He argued that wartime sexual violence should be banned under conventions similar to those regulating weapons of mass destruction and anti-personnel mines, with prescribed punitive measures against violators. He stated that pressure and action from the international community, including the imposition of targeted sanctions when appropriate, working in conjunction with those affected, was the only way to end the culture of impunity that facilitates gender-based violence in conflict areas and continues to destabilize the DRC.

Touching on the recent presidential, legislative, and provincial elections in the DRC, Mukwege expressed the hope that newly-inaugurated President Félix Tshisekedi would reverse the longstanding stance of denial that the previous regime took towards sexual violence and grant international aid workers necessary access to victims and clinics. He also called on the new president to combat corruption and prosecute the elites, corporations, and foreign powers whose predations have impoverished the Congolese people and stirred instability for too long.

A discussion followed his remarks in which participants engaged Mukwege on the recent elections, measures to combat impunity for sexual violence crimes, and the role of religious institutions and the international community as well as local stakeholders in the fight to end gender-based violence in conflict.

Among those in attendance and participating in the discussion were several high-level current and former US government officials as well as representatives of other think tanks as well as advocacy organizations.

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African presidents have too often extended their elected terms time and again through dubious means, and many of us have come to believe that an incumbent-free election is the key to securing democratic consolidation in Africa. When Kabila announced he would not run for a third (and unconstitutional) term last August, there were sighs of relief across the country and abroad. Although he made short shrift of internal party democracy by unilaterally designating his successor, Kabila’s stepping down was seen as an unmistakable sign of progress and his choice of Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, an unimpressive former Interior Minister, left many hopeful that the opposition might finally have a shot at the presidency. (No election has ever been won by the opposition in Congo).

But the Congo government’s spurious disqualification of popular opposition candidates and the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to prevent those remaining from campaigning – including by shooting at some of them – demonstrate that Kabila not only intends to retain as much power as possible, but that he intends to turn Congo’s elections into a sham. The fact that his regime’s anti-democratic exactions have received only mild condemnation from Western chanceries is further cause for concern. 

Shadary cuts a paltry figure, and it is undoubtedly this weakness, coupled with his proven loyalty, that endears him to Kabila. Although Shadary has been a sometimes-feared enforcer of the regime (for which the European Union put him under sanctions), he has no popular political base of his own, and is unlikely to wrestle free from Kabila’s shadow. An ethnic Bangubangu from Maniema province, he is junior in the tribal structure to Kabila (whose mother is Bangubangu), and is also less popular in his own province than another local son, former Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo. The Western sanctions on Shadary would also make it hard for him to play Kabila’s old game of pitting the international community against his benefactor once he comes to power.

Kabila also seems determined to stay in control of the ten thousand-strong presidential guard, most of whom are from his father’s Katanga region, and are more likely to keep Shadary hostage than to protect him. Kabila also recently consolidated his power by appointing allies to high-ranking military posts, and many in Congo suspect that his brother and sister, both of whom are members of parliament, might end up with strategic ministerial portfolios. All evidence indicates that Kabila wants to remain the ultimate arbiter of the political game, as suggested by his rather ironic official designation as “moral authority” of the majority. Recent declarations he has made to some Western media also point to his ambition to come back to the presidency before too long.

Kabila’s plan has only one huge drawback: Shadary is almost certain to lose a free and fair election. Not only does he barely draw 16 percent of support across the country in polls, but he is even unpopular among many members of the presidential majority – a largely transactional coalition of elites and parties that the regime maintains through massive patronage and corruption. Shadary’s campaign appearances draw smaller crowds than his opponents’, despite the state machinery at his disposal, his financial hand-outs to participants, and the near monopoly of state media in his favor. Recently he had to cancel an appearance in Tshikapa, Kasai province, as protests got out of control.

Two of Shadary’s most credible opponents, Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Equateur region and Moïse Katumbi of Katanga, have been banned from running by the regime-controlled electoral commission and superior court. But they have agreed with a few other luminaries to support the lesser-known candidacy of Martin Fayulu. A man of political integrity and courage, Fayulu hails from the swing province of Kwilu and had the support of only 8 percent of Congo’s voters before the opposition unified behind him. But he may now be able to add Bemba and Katumbi’s probable 40 percent of the electorate to his own.

In fact, the government seems to have greatly underestimated Fayulu, whose campaign has taken on unexpected momentum. Belatedly, Kabila’s regime seems to have realized its error, and is now doing all it can to sabotage his campaign and the integrity of the broader election process. Most recently, the government ordered the suspension of all political campaign events in Kinshasa on security grounds, just hours before a scheduled rally by Fayulu in Sainte-Therese Square. The government has also refused to authorize South African aircraft leased by Fayulu’s campaign to enter Congolese airspace, citing safety reasons (a newfound concern, given Congo’s dismal aviation safety record). The government has also repeatedly prevented Fayulu from landing in towns where he was scheduled to hold campaign meetings. Last week, security forces repeatedly fired to prevent Fayulu’s campaign procession from reaching a rally, forcing him to lie on the floor of his car for two hours and allegedly killing two of his supporters. The regime is also trying to pin blame on Fayulu for a warehouse fire in Kinshasa that destroyed a large number of voting machines. (It has not explained why Fayulu would wish to deflate the vote in the capital, which is a hotbed of the opposition.) Only Fayulu’s confusing message about electronic voting—which he first opposed and then acceded to this past week—could deflate his support on election day. 

The rivalry between Kabila and Bemba-Katumbi through their designated candidates has somewhat eclipsed the campaign of Felix Tshisekedi of Kasai. Tshisekedi had initially supported the united opposition front, but bailed from the agreement after discovering that he would not be its candidate. Tshisekedi has the backing of the formidable machinery of the UDPS opposition party founded by his father Etienne, but he does not have the late man’s popularity or his firm hand over the party itself. Tshisekedi might garner 20 percent of the vote on his own, and might pick up another 10 percent from the supporters of Vital Kamerhe of South Kivu, a former Kabila ally who switched to the opposition in 2009 and has now thrown his support to Tshisekedi. This splitting of the opposition vote has made an opposition victory less certain – but it does not appear to have stopped Fayulu’s momentum.

It now only remains to be seen whether the elections will actually take place on December 23. Despite the regime’s reassurances that the election will proceed, the electoral commission seems woefully unprepared and the voting equipment is still a long way from being fully deployed across Congo’s territory. Moreover, the alleged warehouse arson, which destroyed some 8,000 voting machines in Kinshasa last week, does not help, and raises the worrying possibility that the government may cancel the elections on technical grounds – a possibility that becomes more likely if Shadary were to slip further and further behind in the polls, making it less and less possible for the government to credibly rig the vote.

If the government does cancel the elections, or if it dares to declare an improbable victory by Shadary, mob violence is likely. The regime seems to be banking on its ability to repress this violence – but it could be wrong. Indeed, four days before the poll, widespread disorder appears to be the most-likely outcome of Congo’s election.

But what is the best-case scenario?

It is true that many (though not all) of Congo’s opposition politicians are no better than the incumbents, and most are liable to collaborate with the regime at any moment for jobs and resources. From the point of view of Congo’s voters, the opposition is unlikely to provide the break of corruption and patronage that they have longed to see. From the point of view of democratic consolidation, however, a peaceful transition of political power at the ballot box holds real value. It could set the precedent that will determine Congo’s future.

Kabila’s desperate efforts to stop the European Union from renewing its sanctions against Shadary, and his regime’s irate reaction to their passage, shows how hungrily Congo’s government craves legitimacy and approval, despite all its posturing about sovereignty. Even as the elections devolve into a charade, we believe there is room for further pressure. After exploiting Congo for so long, the international community owes the Congolese people a more fulsome demonstration of support.

Pierre Englebert is H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations at Pomona College and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. 

George Kasongo Kalumba is Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Lubumbashi. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The world’s most ubiquitous symbol of wealth is fueling the decades-long conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, policy experts said at the Atlantic Council in Washington on October 24. Militias and warlords are selling gold to fund their military activities and political control in eastern Congo and their illicit trade is not just flowing to the black market, but “may be coming here to the United States as well as Europe,” Sasha Lezhnev, deputy director of policy for the Enough Project, explained.

“Gold has always been a bit challenging” to protect against illicit trade, Hillary Amster, senior program manager for the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA), said. “Gold is easy to smuggle, easy to exchange, can be used as currency, and is really malleable—you can melt gold in your kitchen.” Importantly for smugglers, “it is very east to portray gold that might be mine gold (from militias) as just scrap gold” to smelters and refiners, according to Amster.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a vast country in south-central Africa with more than eighty million inhabitants, has been embroiled in conflict since the ouster of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. After a six-year civil war involving most of the DRC’s neighbors, the eastern regions of the country have remained in perpetual conflict.

According to Lezhnev, the DRC’s vast mineral and gold wealth “are not the reasons the conflict began, but they are a significant contributor to fueling the conflicts and allowing them to continue,” by providing sanctioned militia and government leaders with financing. Lezhnev cited data from the International Peace Information Service estimating that more than seventy percent of gold miners in eastern Congo “work in gold mines under the control of armed groups.”

Gold not only benefits rebel and militia leaders but is part of “a deliberate strategy on behalf of certain individuals in the government—we call this strategy the violent kleptocracy system—which allows military commanders to become wealthy and for corrupt officials to profit as part of that,” Lezhnev said.

Lezhnev, who spoke at an Atlantic Council event launching a report by Enough’s partner The Sentry, called “The Golden Laundromat,” claimed that hundreds of US companies could have possibly received Congolese gold mined in conflict areas within their supply chains in 2017.

The focus of The Sentry’s report is a “specific corporate network,” Lezhnev explained, which sources gold from eastern Congo to Uganda and then transfers it to a company in Dubai that is an apparent affiliate of a major refinery in Europe. The gold may then be sold to companies in Europe, the United States, and around the world, according to 2018 corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Amster argued that smelters and refiners are the crucial “linchpin” for addressing the illicit gold trade. There are only 330 smelters and refiners worldwide for tin, tantalum, and gold, Amster argued, making it easier to monitor these entities. Amster added that “this is where in the supply chain the materials become indistinguishable” from other source material, making it the last point in the production process where illicit gold can be accurately identified.

Amster’s Responsible Business Alliance is one of a collection of industry groups that helps businesses monitor due diligence compliance among smelters and refiners to ensure that their products do not contain illicit gold. Substantial progress has been made, Amster argued, as 101 of the world’s 156 identified gold refiners have undergone an assessment with RBA or another industry group. Growing awareness amongst industries, especially in the jewelry business, is also pushing these companies to better limit their exposure to conflict gold, Amster said, without passing on the cost to consumers.

Many of these companies, according to Amster, recognize that avoiding illicit gold “is the cost of doing business.”

Bronwyn Bruton, the Atlantic Council’s director of programs and studies and deputy director at the Africa Center who moderated the event, contrasted attempts to spread awareness of illicit gold smuggling to the high-profile campaign on Africa’s “blood diamonds” in the early 2000s, questioning the potential of illicit gold to garner the kind of awareness that conflict diamonds have generated.

Lezhnev nevertheless stated these positive steps represent a “total 180-degree difference from where we were ten years ago,” but cautioned that more must be done. “There need to be network sanctions against both the companies and the beneficial owners and directors of these companies” who knowingly accept and smelt or refine illicit gold, Lezhnev said.

On the bright side, “there are now sixty gold mines in eastern Congo that are certified as conflict-free,” Lezhnev said, and “that number is growing.” But these gold mines suffer from “one of the highest gold tax rates in the world,” and from a lack of legal title to the mines they operate in. These government policies severely hamper legitimate business as “you can just put [gold] in your pocket, cross the border, and you are going to pay zero tax,” Lezhnev said.

J. Peter Pham, vice president for research and regional initiatives and director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, noted that the DRC is “at a critical moment” with crucial elections two months away. Without stopping the support for the illicit gold trade, the incentives for various Congolese actors to support peace and stability will be few and far between.

The world must do more to stop its indirect support for the conflict in Congo, Enough’s Managing Director Brad Brooks-Rubin said, “so that the Congolese people will no longer be the losers for having such a robust amount of resources, especially gold, within their borders.”

David A. Wemer is assistant director, editorial at the Atlantic Council. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAWemer.

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Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director Dr. J. Peter Pham welcomed guests and stressed the event’s timeliness, just two months before the country’s long-overdue elections. Enough Project Managing Director Brad Brooks-Rubin outlined the scale and scope of the gold trade and the numerous approaches that have been developed to stem the flow of conflict gold. In particular, he underscored how the international community has changed its approach to conflict minerals in recent years, shifting from policies and regulations aimed at banning trade in goods financing conflict entirely to due diligence and risk-based approaches. Brooks-Rubin argued that information and political will are key to the success of these new approaches, and while a lot has been done to clean up the gold trade, far too many armed groups continue to profit from it.

A discussion, moderated by Africa Center Deputy Director Bronwyn Bruton, followed Brooks-Rubin’s remarks and featured Enough Project Deputy Director of Policy Sasha Lezhnev and Responsible Business Alliance Senior Program Manager Hillary W. Amster.

Lezhnev provided an overview of the report, highlighting a specific corporate network and the ways in which it appears to have refined illegally-smuggled conflict gold from eastern DRC at the African Gold Refinery in Uganda. He further outlined the many ways in which this corporate network appears to be noncompliant with international due diligence and anti-money laundering (AML) frameworks, raising several AML red flags outlined by the Financial Action Task Force, and offered recommendations to governments, companies, and consumers. In particular, Lezhnev recommended:

1.       Network sanctions against companies involved in the conflict gold trade, their corporate networks, and their beneficial owners. He noted that both the new trading network and the rival one that immediate proceeded is important, otherwise one may simply replace the other, and the important point is to build up the legitimate, conflict-free trade;

2.       Anti-money laundering measures, including advisories, to identify conflict gold from the Great Lakes region and/or from certain traders as a class of transactions that would be of primary money laundering concern;

3.       Enhanced scrutiny from banks and other gold purchasing companies when dealing with gold refining and trading companies.

Amster spoke about the Responsible Minerals Initiative within the Responsible Business Alliance and its work to provide tools and resources to companies that support due diligence and responsible sourcing of gold and other minerals from conflict areas. She noted that the processing, smelting, and refining process is often the pinch point in the gold supply chain as the materials become largely indistinguishable when purified gold is produced. Amster further acknowledged that the companies involved in the refining process are often the most difficult to audit and do not necessarily feel the same consumer pressure that a jewelry company might as they sit higher up in the supply chain.

In the discussion that followed, panelists discussed ways to incentivize responsible gold sourcing and the role of consumers in applying pressure on actors operating in the upstream and the downstream of the global gold trade.

Among those in attendance were H.E. Mull Sebujja Katende, Ambassador of the Republic of Uganda, Lieutenant General William Ward, former commander of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), and a number of US and non-US government officials, business leaders, and civil society representatives.

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One of the reasons for the increase from eleven to twenty-six provinces was to break up Katanga and deprive its governor, key Kabila opponent Moïse Katumbi, of his provincial base. Beyond such political expediency, however, this policy’s main effect has been to create ethnically homogeneous provinces. As Alma Bezares Calderon, Lisa Jené, and I write in a recent report for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, up to eleven of Congo’s provinces are made up primarily of a single ethnic group. This is an increase from three provinces with a single ethnic group prior to this policy.

According to our estimates, the Ngbandi (the ethnic group of late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko) are now 59 percent of Nord-Ubangi’s population; well-known opponent Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Ngbaka are 54 percent of Sud-Ubangi; the Tetela of independence hero Patrice Lumumba (and of current government spokesman Lambert Mendé) are 76 percent of Sankuru; the Yaka are 77 percent of Kwango; Kabila’s Lubakat (by his paternal grandfather) are 80 percent of Haut-Lomami, Felix Tshisekedi’s Luba are 82 percent of Kasai-Oriental, and the Mongo are 92 percent of Tshuapa.

None of these groups formed a majority in their previous provinces. For Congo as whole, the largest provincial groups now average 46 percent of their province’s population. This evolution has turned politics on its head. At the national level, heterogeneity dominates and no single group reaches 8 percent of the population.

Although “tribalism” has a bad name, this new trend is not necessarily a problem.  “Owning” a province might give local elites the incentive to develop it, and ethnic homogeneity can facilitate collective action. For many provinces, indeed, conditions cannot be worse than they have been.

A trip last month along 280 miles of “National Route #1” from Likasi to Kamina, in Haut-Lomami, took us twenty-two hours of continuous driving with a sturdy all-terrain vehicle, at an average of 13 miles an hour. Thank God it was the dry season! We saw more broken bridges and deep ditches than we could count, overturned and abandoned truck carcasses, and village after village of wretched poverty. Kabila’s “Revolution of Modernity,” a much vaunted development program that promised modern infrastructure, is but an empty slogan here. At the least, the Lubakat, who control 100 percent of the provincial government, have a shot at making things better for themselves.

Provincial tribalization also has its advantages for the regime. Inheriting power in their own province might make it more tolerable for some local elites not to have any in Kinshasa. And for citizens at the grassroots level, control of local institutions by their ethnic kin stands to legitimate the state. In a country where the voting instructions of local patrons carry weight, there will be electoral returns for the regime from the provincial break-up.

Yet, the new landscape also spells political danger. First, it creates significant instability in many provinces, as Kinshasa and provincial assemblies joust to control the selection of governors, who are crucial elements in Kinshasa’s strategy of local domination and resource extraction. Since 2015, there have been seventeen no-confidence votes against governors. These were sometimes orchestrated by Kinshasa to undermine exceedingly autonomous individuals, and sometimes by the provincial assemblies to push back against Kinshasa’s candidates. Either way, these motions consume local politics and leave little time for true governance. Most provinces have yet to pass any legislation.

The break-up of Congo’s provinces has also heightened the politics of exclusion. It has changed the nature of ethnic politics from a game of representation to a quest for monopoly. Historically, Congolese national and provincial governments have sought balance among ethnic groups. Even if your party was in the opposition, you could count on some ethnic kin being in a position of authority with access to resources. In a system where redistribution of resources along ethnic lines is a powerful norm, this system mattered.

Now, the elites of dominant ethnic groups are more likely to take over local institutions and keep others out. In every province that has an ethnic majority, the governor is now from that group. And in the former Katanga provinces where we did our field work, the representation of dominant groups in provincial institutions exceeds by far their demographic weight, implying that they squeezed others out of governance altogether. Thus, an increasing number of Congolese find themselves ethnically unrepresented in government, compounding their already deficient electoral representation.

Making things worse, the provincial reconfiguration has led to a rise in ethnic xenophobia. People who belong to ethnic groups that are deemed to be originally from a province (“sons of the soil”) increasingly claim that others do not have the same rights to local jobs and resources. Whatever the historical validity of such a determination, which derives from a mix of Belgian colonial practice and customary connection to the land, its practice tends to be highly arbitrary.

By our calculations, the provincial break-up has increased the number of Congolese who reside outside their province of “origin” by almost four million—for a total of about 20 percent of the population, who face increased vulnerability and exclusion from political representation and resource allocation. Similar autochthony demands have led to local conflict in Nigeria and caused full-fledged civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. Unless these preferences can be subdued by provincial authorities, they also threaten to have explosive consequences in Congo where violence already largely derives from exclusion and misery.

Pierre Englebert is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, and H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations at Pomona College.

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Katumbi, former governor of Katanga province and president of the coalition of former regime insiders Together for Change, would be the frontrunner if elections were held today (polling 24 percent as of March, according to a BERCI/Congo Research Group poll).  Tshisekedi (13 percent) recently took over the leadership of his late father’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). In contrast, only 6 percent of BERCI respondents said they would vote for Kabila, who has already exceeded the end of his term by eighteen months and is constitutionally banned from running for a third term, yet seems nonetheless gung-ho on finding a way to stay in power.

The two opponents, who participated in a May 23 roundtable at the Atlantic Council, made for an interesting study in contrast.  Asked about their programmatic goals, Katumbi generously evoked his record as governor of Katanga from 2007 to 2015, a time when the province’s economy surged and where his government made significant inroads in infrastructure development and resource mobilization. Devoid of any government experience, Tshisekedi astutely cloaked himself in the shroud of his late father and committed to working towards effective rule of law, democracy, administration, and justice. Tshisekedi’s father, Etienne, who died in 2017, had been the main opposition politician in Congo since his launch of UDPS in 1983 under the regime of former president Mobutu Sese Seko. Although he had a paltry record for his brief moments in office and can hardly be said to have practiced democracy within his own party, he is widely revered as a symbol of the Congolese struggle for democracy.

That the two politicians traveled and appeared together was already an achievement in the factious world of Congolese opposition.  They stressed at the Atlantic Council that their union was strong and stable and that their unity extended to Vital Kamerhe (9 percent in the BERCI poll) of the Congolese National Union (UNC) and Eve Bazaiba (3 percent) of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), the party of Jean-Pierre Bemba (10 percent), who is still in detention in The Hague following his condemnation by the International Criminal Court. Altogether, the opposition polls at a cumulative 59 percent.

However, while such a united front (the two opponents repeatedly referred to each other as “brothers”) would represent a formidable force were elections to be free and fair, there is no formal agreement as of now as to which one of them would run. And if past experience is any indication, any such agreement is unlikely to happen or to last.  In 2011, for example, the opposition had to share its 51 percent of votes among ten candidates, while Kabila won with a (likely inflated) 49 percent. Moreover, the merging of the two campaigns appears so far only limited to their respective electoral experts (who recently met jointly with the International Organisation of La Francophonie team that audited the voter registry).

The issue of who might run is compounded by Katumbi’s legal problems—including a verdict of real estate fraud and an indictment for recruitment of mercenaries—which most serious observers deem fabrications by the regime.  The Congolese Episcopal Conference, which had been officially tasked with investigating these charges as part of the December 2016 power-sharing Saint-Sylvestre agreement, has judged them to be without merit and demanded that they be dropped to allow for peaceful elections.

To maintain such pressure on the regime and be allowed to return to Congo is a significant motivation behind Katumbi’s lobbying in the United States and his insistence that the Saint-Sylvestre accord, which the government has repeatedly flaunted or corrupted, be implemented. Yet, until it is (and it might never be), Katumbi is unlikely to return. As Katumbi said himself at the Atlantic Council, for him to go home might open repressive opportunities for the regime against his supporters. Most observers would also probably agree that it would physically endanger Katumbi himself.

Despite their current alliance, Tshisekedi would objectively benefit from Katumbi’s absence and the question of a unity candidate for the opposition would suffer little plausible alternative to him. It is doubtful, however, that the alliance would survive such an outcome, which is likely part of the regime’s calculations.

However, whether Katumbi returns and runs or not, the two opponents’ willingness to go to the polls is worth a challenge.  Why agree to elections that are already marred by an opaque voter registry, a controversial electronic voting machine, an electoral commission whose chair attends meetings of the presidential majority, and a supreme court recently stacked with regime loyalists?  Even if, somehow, Kabila ended up not running, what are the odds of an opposition victory in such a skewed environment?

In light of past Congolese opposition practices, including by Tshisekedi’s father under Mobutu, one could wonder whether a full-fledged political crisis in the wake of a deeply flawed election might create the conditions for some sort of national-unity government, which someone like Tshisekedi could lead. Such an arrangement (not unlike the Kibaki-Odinga deal in Kenya in the wake of the violent 2008 elections) could contrast with the current collaboration of UDPS defectors like Prime Minister Bruno Tshibala, who garners negligible popular support, and offer a more legitimate avenue to power for the opponent than would a similar role in the pre-election period. 

The United States has repeatedly condemned the Kabila regime’s actions to stall and undermine peace and security in Congo and to delay the electoral process. A series of sanctions against designated individuals, most recently expanded in February, also exist. All indications point that the US administration may be willing to go further.

In the hopelessly muddled environment of Congolese politics, it can be hard for outsiders who care for the Congolese to know where to stand.  A strong commitment to enforcing the country’s own constitution, massively embraced by the Congolese in 2006 after five years of dialogue and thirty-two years of often nightmarish rule, should not be controversial, however.  Whether any successor can do better than Kabila is beside the point—it is, at bottom, the precedents of a genuinely fair election and alternation in the highest office that matter.

Dr. Pierre Englebert is the H. Russell Smith Professor of International Relations and Professor of Politics at Pomona College and is the author of “Congo Blues: Scoring Kabila’s Rule.”

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In their remarks, Katumbi and Tshisekedi announced that the Congolese opposition would field a unified candidate in the presidential election scheduled for December 23, 2018. Incumbent Joseph Kabila, whose constitutionally-mandated two-term limit expired over eighteen months ago, has twice delayed elections. Katumbi stressed that the Congolese opposition is united and working together for a brighter future, citing his joint visit to the United States with Tshisekedi as an example of their cooperation. Both candidates warned participants that Kabila was resurgent and reintroducing his stranglehold on the country, noting that it is “a very dark time for the electoral process [in DRC].” “We’re here to sound the alarm,” said Tshisekedi, “Tomorrow when the catastrophe arrives, you cannot say you didn’t know.”

The two also recounted how electoral experts from their respective political formations were working together, including a recent joint meet with the technical team from the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

A discussion, moderated by Dr. J. Peter Pham, Atlantic Council vice president and Africa Center director, followed Katumbi and Tshisekedi’s remarks, focusing on the role that the international community could play in ensuring that credible elections take place this December as well as how to ensure the country gets the humanitarian aid it urgently needs for the more than five million displaced persons and the estimated thirteen million facing starvation – crises both speakers blamed on the poor governance of the incumbent regime.

Also in attendance and participating in the discussion was Ambassador Larry Wohlers, senior coordinator for the Great Lakes region of Africa at the US Department of State; Ambassador William Garvelink, former US Ambassador to the DRC; and three former US assistant secretaries of state for African affairs: Ambassador Herman Cohen, Ambassador Jendayi Frazer, and the Honorable Constance Berry Newman (the latter two are also, respectively, an Atlantic Council board director and a senior fellow in the Africa Center). Also at the event were a large number of US and non-US government officials, business leaders, and civil society representatives.

Before the event, Africa Center director J. Peter Pham interviewed Katumbi and Tshisekedi on Facebook Live (in French):

The post Discussion with the Congolese opposition appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In his prepared remarks (official document attached), Mr. Yuma emphasized the importance of the mining industry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the overall wellbeing of the country, calling it the “lungs” of the Congolese economy. He highlighted the 2017 production figures of DRC’s most profitable minerals, including copper, cobalt, and coltan, but stressed that the industry was not benefitting the Congolese people as much as it should. According to the speaker, the new Congolese mining code seeks to change this, increasing taxes on profits from 30 to 35 percent and royalties from 2 to 3.5 percent for copper and cobalt, and expanding the government’s stake in new mining projects from 5 to 10 percent. Mr. Yuma acknowledged the concerns expressed by some of the world’s largest mining companies in response to the new mining code, but emphasized that profits should increase once the new code is introduced and the DRC reputation as an attractive mining destination should not be tarnished.

A discussion, moderated by Dr. J. Peter Pham, Atlantic Council vice president and Africa Center director, followed Yuma’s remarks, with participants focusing on the transparency of the mining industry’s supply chains and networks in the DRC and the various ways in which civil society concerns would or would not be incorporated in the country’s policies.

The delegation accompanying Mr. Yuma also included H.E. François Nkuna Balumuene, Ambassador of the DRC to the United States; Mr. Patrick Thierry André Kakwata, Member of the Congolese National Assembly and Chairman of the Natural Resources and Environmental Commission; Mr. Henri-Thomas Lokondo, Member of the Congolese National Assembly; and Amb. Barnabé Kikaya bin Karubi, Senior Diplomatic Advisor to DRC President Joseph Kabila. Also in attendance and participating in the roundtable were Atlantic Council Board Director Amb. Jendayi Frazer, Former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Ms. Florizelle Liser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Corporate Council on Africa; and a number of US and non-US government officials and mining industry experts.

The post Gécamines chairman discusses the DRC’s new mining code appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Such growth in the EV fleet will require a significant expansion of battery production, specifically of Lithium-ion batteries. Although several types of Lithium-ion batteries can be used in EVs, they all contain lithium, cobalt, and nickel, metals which can carry significant supply and price risks.

The nickel market will be affected by the EV boom, but far less so than lithium and cobalt, since the existing market is larger and EVs will claim a much smaller portion of the future market.

Lithium and cobalt supplies are more likely to pose problems for future EV demand. One reason is that, despite a greater margin for meeting demand, the price of lithium has more than doubled, rising from $6,000 to $15,000 per metric ton in the last two years. Similarly, cobalt has nearly quadrupled in price between 2016 and 2018, increasing from $22,000 to almost $80,000 per metric ton.

The risks of inadequate lithium and cobalt supplies also go beyond high prices. Reserves of both are geographically concentrated in countries that could pose problems for supply chains. This problem is less serious for lithium, since Chile and Argentina hold around two-thirds of world reserves. Lithium resources that nearly match Chile and Argentina’s reserves can also be found in Bolivia, although President Evo Morales has severely stunted lithium production by preventing the entry of technologically-advanced foreign companies.

Inadequate supplies of cobalt pose a much more serious risk because about half of the world’s current production and reserves are found in the conflict-prone Democratic Republic of Congo. Recently, the Congolese parliament even passed a bill that could raise royalties on cobalt from 2 percent to 10 percent and the state-owned mining company announced it would renegotiate all foreign contracts in the next year and consider nationalization.

Yet, measures can be taken to mitigate these risks. Advances have already been made to reduce the share of cobalt needed in Lithium-ion batteries, and with 95 percent of Lithium-ion batteries currently being dumped in landfills, recycling recovery could ease the risks of extraction and development. Finally, general advances in battery technology have and will continue to make Lithium-ion batteries longer-lasting, faster-charging, and safer to use.

Looking beyond EVs, the supply risks of metals related to energy generation and storage also apply to many other areas of advanced energy. Wind, solar, and smart grid technologies all require specialized metals, including bauxite, manganese, and neodymium. As the energy transformation continues, we must be cognizant that these supply risks may become a fact of life, just like current concerns about oil.

Reed Blakemore is an associate director and Jens Jessen is an intern at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. You can follow Reed on Twitter @reed_blakemore

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On Thursday, October 19, the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, in collaboration with The Sentry at the Enough Project, hosted a discussion on illicit financial flows in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), occasioned by the release of the group’s new report: The Terrorist’s Treasury.

Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director Dr. J. Peter Pham welcomed guests, highlighting the event’s timeliness following the announcement by the DRC’s Independent National Electoral Commission last week further delaying elections to 2019. Enough Project Founding Director Mr. John Prendergast outlined the organization’s new venture – The Sentry – that tracks the financial networks that fuel violent conflicts across Africa. An example of The Sentry’s work is the new report, which details the complicity of Congolese financial institutions in helping terror groups to dodge sanctions. 

A discussion, moderated by Pham, followed Prendergast’s remarks and featured Ms. Holly Dranginis, senior policy analyst for The Sentry at the Enough Project, Mr. J. R. Mailey, director of investigations for The Sentry at the Enough Project, and Mr. Yaya J. Fanusie, director of analysis at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.

Mailey detailed the central case study of the report, which focuses on a bank in the DRC that has reportedly processed financial transactions for businesses and individuals with ties to Hezbollah. He further underscored the danger of ungoverned spaces, in which lax regulations and weak enforcement not only breeds corruption, but also recruitment and financing potential for terrorist organizations.

Dranginis discussed the report’s recommendations, which include imposing “network sanctions” that target both individuals and their financial affiliates, increasing local and international anti-money laundering measures, and enhanced banking due diligence by financial institutions in the DRC. She acknowledged that conditions that allow illicit networks to flourish do not occur in a political vacuum and, as such, domestic considerations in the DRC—as well as other African countries where illicit networks are thriving—must be part of the solution.

Fanusie commented on terrorism financing around the world, noting that in nearly all cases there is corruption and complicity at some level, which creates a cover for terror groups to launder their money through otherwise licit channels. He suggested that the most comprehensive solution might be to demand financial integrity at all levels.

In the discussion that followed, panelists examined US sanctions policy in Sub-Saharan Africa, including a move away from comprehensive sanctions to more targeted “smart sanctions.” They also discussed the link between political stability and financial integrity amid the DRC’s ongoing political and electoral crisis.

Among those in attendance were H.E. François Balumuene, Ambassador of the DRC to the United States, and Mr. Deogratias Mutombo, Governor of the Congo Central Bank, who during the question-and-answer period of the program took issue with the report, although he did not offer any specific evidence refuting the findings but promised that an investigation was underway. Also in attendance were a number of US and non-US government officials, business leaders, and civil society representatives.

The post Disrupting illicit financial flows in Congo appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director Dr. J. Peter Pham welcomed guests and introduced Mr. Nangaa.

In his remarks, Mr. Nangaa briefed attendees on the DRC’s upcoming electoral timetable, structure, and procedures, which are due to be announced publicly in Kinshasa next week. He also spoke about the logistical difficulties the DRC faces, but expressed optimism for the future. Mr. Nangaa discussed the ongoing voter registration efforts, noting that approximately 42 million people have been registered country-wide, and claimed that the improved security situation in the Kasai region should allow authorities to complete the process by year’s end.

A discussion, moderated by Africa Center Director of Programs and Studies and Deputy Director Bronwyn Bruton, followed Mr. Nangaa’s prepared remarks. The conversation was an energetic exchange during which the majority of participants challenged the integrity of the process outlined by Mr. Nangaa.

Mr. Nangaa was accompanied by H.E. François Balumuene, Ambassador of the DRC to the United States. In attendance and participating in the roundtable were a number of US and non-US government officials, business leaders, and civil society actors.

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Vice President and Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham welcomed participants and introduced Katumbi.

In his remarks, Katumbi provided an update on his planned return to the DRC in the coming days, in the wake of a CENCO review of his conviction on fraud charges largely viewed as political inference in the justice system. Katumbi expressed that his work is best served with the Congolese people and stated that he will comply with CENCO’s decision regardless of the outcome. He laid out his hope for progress in the Congolese democratic process and looks forward to free and fair elections and the first peaceful, democratic transition of power in DRC. According to Katumbi, the CENCO agreement provides Kabila with legitimacy and any further breaches of the agreement would result in the loss of internal authority for the president. Finally, he stated that opposition has abided by the terms of the CENCO agreement by providing Kabila with a candidate for prime minister. Katumbi called for president Kabila and his government to do the same.

Read his remarks here: 

The discussion that followed focused on the choice of the timing of Governor Katumbi’s return, his security upon arrival in the country and the pending decision on his conviction, recent estimates on the inflated costs of the next election compared to those in years past, the role of the bishops and the international community in enforcing the CENCO agreement, and benchmarks for progress for the Kabila government on abiding by its terms.

Among those in attendance were Ambassador Herman Cohen, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Lieutenant General William Ward, former commander of AFRICOM; and Ambassador William Garvelink, former US Ambassador to the DRC. Other participations in the discussion included current and former US government officials, as well as representatives of US academic and civil society organizations.

Before the event, Africa Center Assistant Director Julian Wyss interviewed Katumbi on Facebook Live:

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On Wednesday, January 18, in partnership with the Enough Project, the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center hosted a discussion on the political situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the impact of the recent political deal brokered by the National Episcopal Conference of the Congo (CENCO). Discussants included Atlantic Council Vice President and Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham; Pierre Englebert, professor of international affairs and politics at Pomona College, and author of Congo Blues: Scoring Kabila’s Rule; and Sasha Lezhnev, associate director for policy at the Enough Project.

Africa Center Deputy Director and Director for Research and Programs Bronwyn Bruton welcomed the audience, introduced the discussants, and, following their brief remarks, moderated the discussion.

The discussion focused on the content of the CENCO agreement, the likelihood that the agreement would be lead to a political transition in the country, what the international community, and specifically the incoming US administration, should do to encourage implementation of the agreement, and what comes next for the country if the deal were to fall through.

Among those in attendance were Ambassador Herman Cohen, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs; Ambassador James Swan, former US Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Ambassador Laurence Wohlers, acting head of the Office of the Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Tony Gambino, former DRC mission director at the US Agency for International Development.

The post DRC’s CENCO agreement: a foundation for real political transition? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

As Aubrey Hruby and I documented in a report last year, those countries that rely heavily on the export of one or two resources to drive their economic growth have suffered as a result of the emerging market downturn and its knock-on effects, both in terms of demand for their commodities and in availability of financing for their major infrastructure and other development projects.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and one which only emerged as the continent’s biggest economy three years ago, is bedeviled not only by low petroleum prices, but decreased production due to attacks by the militants in the oil-producing Niger Delta region—at one point last year, the amount of crude being pumped nearly reached the lowest point in three decades. The rest of the economy in the West African giant essentially stagnated, hammered both by the government’s maladroit management of the currency float and by the failure of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to make much headway in improving the country’s overall business climate, as witnessed by Nigeria’s abysmal 169^th place ranking among 190 countries analyzed in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2017 report. 

Angola nudged ahead of Nigeria early last year to become Africa’s biggest oil producer, thanks in part to the latter country’s problems with its militants, but the distinction means less in a world of depressed hydrocarbon prices. With inflation projected to have been around 45 percent in 2016, while the country’s currency, the kwanza, lost nearly 20 percent of its value during the same period, the country’s grim prospects heading into the new year add to the uncertainty with the announced plans of longtime President José Eduardo dos Santos to retire later this year (elections are scheduled for August).

Similarly, Algeria’s heavy dependence on energy exports caused the growth to slow down to an estimated 3.6 percent in 2016 with the World Bank estimating it will plunge further in the coming year. Low oil prices will continue to weigh on government finances as inflation and unemployment both increase; the dinar has nominally depreciated 20 percent over the last two years. The 2017 budget signed by the country’s octogenarian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in late December raises taxes to compensate for declining revenues from hydrocarbons, signaling that the heavy public spending that enabled the regime to weather the so-called Arab Spring is no longer an option.

While South Africa was spared an end-of-the-year downgrade by Standard & Poor’s of its sovereign credit—it remains at BBB-, one notch above “junk” status—Moody’s opened 2017 by placing the country on a downgrade review, a step which serves notice to investors, some of whom have fiduciary obligations barring them from doing business in places branded with “junk” status. Moreover, the numerous corruption scandals surrounding President Jacob Zuma have divided the ruling African National Congress, already reeling from unprecedented rebuff in the August 2016 local government and municipal elections, adding to the political volatility that undermines investor confidence just as the country regained its title as Africa’s largest economy.

Despite its wealth of natural resources, both in terms of extractives and in potential for renewable energy, to say nothing of the extraordinary human capital in its people, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will struggle economically in the coming year. Notwithstanding a rickety last-minute political deal pushed by the country’s influential Roman Catholic bishops that is supposed to lead to presidential elections before the end of 2017, President Joseph Kabila’s decision to violate the constitution and hold on to power despite the December 19, 2016, expiration of his final term casts a long shadow over the fourth most-populous country on the African continent and the largest country by area in Sub-Saharan Africa. As Sasha Lezhnev of the Enough Project pointed out recently, the political crisis is not without its connection to economic woes, past and present: “Corruption has increased and prices for the key commodities that Congo produces have plummeted in recent years, e.g. with the price of copper going down by nearly half over the past five years. Average Congolese people are bearing the brunt of this. The price of some foodstuffs is up as high as 80 percent; the Congolese Franc has lost 27 percent of its value in 2016; inflation has increased to nearly 6 percent; Central Bank foreign exchange reserves have decreased by nearly half (45 percent) over the past two years. The Congolese government is also slashing state services, with budget cuts of 22 percent and a further 14 percent, including a 90 percent cut in spending on healthcare equipment.”

If some of the bigger and resource-dependent economies in Africa are in the doldrums, some of the continent’s medium-sized and more diversified economies will make interesting watching in the new year.

Côte d’Ivoire may well be Africa’s new economic powerhouse, with a diversified economy and growth in 2016 expected to hit 8.5 percent, the second-highest in the world. While there are occasional hiccups like the mutiny this past weekend by some soldiers left over from the country’s civil war a decade ago, by and large President Alassane Ouattara, an economist and former International Monetary Fund (IMF) director, is widely credited with sound macroeconomic management. Overwhelmingly reelected to a second and final four-year term in 2015, he has laid out an ambitious National Development Plan with major structural reforms to consolidate the private sector as well as to achieve inclusive growth. The IMF’s most recent regional economic outlook projects Côte d’Ivoire’s real gross domestic product (GDP) to continue growing at roughly 8 percent annually over the next few years, while the median for Sub-Saharan Africa will be just shy of 4.5 percent. According to data from the Ivorian government’s Center for the Promotion of Investments in Côte d’Ivoire (CEPICI), through in the first nine months of 2016, some 5,720 new enterprises were started in the country, many drawn by the business-friendly regulatory environment.

Fresh off hosting the 22^nd Conference of Parties (COP22) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change two months ago in Marrakech, Morocco continues to forge a role as an African—and, indeed, a global—leader on renewable energy. The kingdom, which is on track to meet more than 40 percent of its needs through renewable energy, primarily solar and wind, by 2020—an extraordinary turnaround given that just a few years ago the country was, according to the World Bank, the Middle East’s largest energy importer, depending on fossil fuels for over 97 percent of its energy. Moreover, in pursuit of the goal of making Morocco the commercial gateway to Africa as well as Africa’s bridge to Europe, King Mohammed VI has been busy implementing his strategy of making Africa the “top priority” of his foreign policy, with a string of official visits across Africa, including recent forays to Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, that have resulted in agreements for multibillion-dollar cross-investments in the agriculture, energy, and financial sectors, as well as the historic announcement last month of a Moroccan-Nigerian joint venture to build a gas pipeline to connect the two countries that will eventually link up to Europe. 

Senegal has long been a bastion of political stability in West Africa, a reputation consolidated in 2016 when voters in a constitutional referendum not only reaffirmed the two-term limit on the presidency, but cut the term of office itself down to five years from the current seven years, as well as enacted a raft of other measures to further good governance. President Macky Sall’s Plan for an Emerging Senegal, crafted with help from McKinsey consultants, includes twenty-seven flagship projects and seventeen major reforms, encompassing diverse sectors ranging from agriculture to energy to education to health to financial services to tourism. The objective of all this is to increase the West African country’s productivity in order to grow its GDP, create jobs, and facilitate industrialization. According to the year-end update to Ernst & Young’s Africa Attractiveness Index, Senegal—along with Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania—is expected to continue growing in the high single digits in 2017.

One possible bump in Senegal’s road to the future is that the country was counting on a second Millennium Challenge Compact from the United States to help address regional obstacles to economic growth. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) board selected the country a year ago, but the Senegalese government’s December 2016 decision to only vote for, but to actively co-sponsor, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 on Israeli settlements not only in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), but also in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, may cause Congress to closely scrutinize of a major appropriation for Senegal like an MCC compact, given the broad bipartisan support in the House of Representatives last week—by a margin of 342 to 80 votes—for a measure condemning the UN resolution and the Obama administration’s abstention on it. 

A largely diversified economic base, Kenya has largely been resilient through the emerging markets downturn of the last year. While final numbers for 2016 are still being crunched, it looks like East Africa’s largest economy grew by at least the 5.9 percent forecasted by the World Bank and that may even approach the 6.8 percent growth the revised IMF prediction estimated in October. One of Kenya’s advantages has been its membership in the East African Community, which has evolved from a customs union to a common market and has long-term aspirations of a monetary union and a political federation. On the other hand, the country faces not-insignificant political, security, and economic uncertainty in 2017 with presidential, parliamentary, and local government elections scheduled for August; the ongoing threat posed by al-Shabaab terrorists operating out of neighboring Somalia (recall that 2016 began with more than 100 Kenyan soldiers killed when the al-Qaeda-linked militants overran a peacekeeping base in El Adde, Somalia); and yet-to-be-determined impact on private-sector credit following the signing last year by President Uhuru Kenyatta of legislation capping interest rates at 4 percent above the benchmark central bank rate.

If it can weather the political crises that have led to mass demonstrations and the declaration of a state of emergency in late 2016, Ethiopia will, according to IMF estimates, be positioned to overtake Kenya as East Africa’s largest economy sometime in the coming year, having posted 10.8 percent average annual growth over the last decade, before drought hit the core agricultural sector this year (and anti-government protests erupted). Nevertheless, investors continue to flock to there—some $500 million in new foreign direct investment entered in the last three months of 2016 and an additional $3.5 billion was being processed, according to one analysis—and its large internal market (Ethiopia is the 13^th most populous country in the world) and low labor costs make it an attractive location to manufacture fast-moving consumer goods. In addition, Ethiopia’s investment in hydropower—last month authorities inaugurated Africa’s tallest dam, the Gibe III dam on the Omo River, doubling the country’s electrical output—will not only give it a reliable source of energy, but provide electricity to the region, including Kenya, which has signed up to buy some of the power produced.   

African countries face many challenges in 2017, but, alongside these, there are the fundamentally positive dynamics of many of their economies, including a growing labor force, increased urbanization, and advances in technology, as I argued recently in a new Atlantic Council Strategy Paper, A Measured US Strategy for the New Africa. The 2016 Republican Party Platform affirmed: “We recognize Africa’s extraordinary potential. Both the United States and our many African allies will become stronger through investment, trade, and promotion of the democratic and free market principles that have brought prosperity around the world. We pledge to be the best partner of all African nations in their pursuit of economic freedom and human rights.” As a new US administration takes office in less than two weeks, it’s time to look for ways to fulfill that pledge so that American citizens and business can join their African counterparts in grasping the continent’s burgeoning opportunities.

J. Peter Pham is Vice President of the Atlantic Council and Director of its Africa Center. Follow the Africa Center on Twitter @ACAfricaCenter.

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“Miracles can happen and I guess, in the Christmas spirit, one wants to acknowledge the possibility, but I would not wager” that Kabila will keep his end of the bargain, said Pham, who also serves as vice president for research and regional initiatives at the Atlantic Council.

The deal, struck at the end of December and signed by the opposition as well as members of Kabila’s government, though not Kabila himself, allows the president to remain in power until elections are held at the end of 2017 and a successor takes office. During this period, a person picked by the opposition will serve as prime minister and have powers that would check Kabila’s authority.

Under the terms of the agreement, brokered by the Catholic Church, Kabila cannot seek a third term in office, which would violate the constitution.

“If the agreement, as written, is to be honored it would essentially commit the president to a course which inevitably would lead to elections in which Kabila would be ineligible and a member of the opposition will probably be elected to head the country,” said Pham.

Elections originally scheduled for November of 2016 were cancelled after the election commission cited logistical and financial hurdles. Kabila formed a transitional government and said elections would be held in 2018.

The DRC has teetered on the brink of a crisis since Kabila failed to step down when his constitutionally mandated two terms in office expired on December 19. Dozens of people were killed in protests that erupted across the country. As the crisis deepened, leaders of the influential Catholic Church stepped in to broker an agreement between Kabila and the opposition.

By agreeing to the terms of the deal, Kabila is betting that the opposition will find it harder to rally its supporters on the grounds of a technical violation of the agreement as opposed to a tangible missed deadline to relinquish office, as was seen on December 19, said Pham. “It is always easier to rally people around black and white issues than it is to mobilize them around a legal argument, right as that argument may be,” he said.

The opposition, on the other hand, doesn’t want to plunge the DRC—a country where an estimated five million people were killed between 1997 and 2003—into another crisis “so they are willing to give one last chance for a soft landing,” Pham added. “One hopes they are right.”

Kabila took power in 2001 following the assassination of his father Laurent Kabila. He has served two five-year terms after elections in 2006 and 2011—the latter a highly disputed poll whose results were denounced by independent observers ranging from the country’s influential Roman Catholic bishops to the European Union’s election monitors.

J. Peter Pham spoke in an interview with the New Atlanticist’s Ashish Kumar Sen. Here are excerpts from our interview:

Q: What is the significance of this deal? Does it not just kick the can down the road and allow Joseph Kabila to remain in power for another year?

Pham: The Roman Catholic Church—represented by the Congolese Episcopal Conference (CENCO) and its president, Archbishop Marcel Utembi of Kisangani—pretty much pushed the deal. The bishops enjoy a great deal of moral suasion not only because the country is predominantly Christian—more than 50 percent Roman Catholic and an additional 20-plus percent members of other Christian churches—but because of the strong stand they have repeatedly taken, courageously speaking truth to power such as when Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa denounced Kabila’s “win” in the shambolic 2011 polls as “illegitimate.” Thus CENCO’s call for the parties to come to the negotiating table couldn’t be ignored.

In the end, the opposition gave way on a few issues. Most importantly, Joseph Kabila will be allowed to stay on at least until the election and the swearing in of a successor. Moreover, the agreement did not address directly the demand to deal with the political prosecution of Moïse Katumbi, the former governor of Katanga province, and the issue of [the political prisoner] Jean-Claude Muyambo, among others who have been persecuted by the Kabila regime. These individual cases have been set aside in the interest of getting an agreement. Katumbi, who is in exile, deserves credit for not allowing his personal fate to obstruct the deal. That issue will now be decided through the good offices of the bishops.

Kabila, on the other hand, also succumbed to pressure. The cardinal archbishop of Kinshasa delivered a strong Christmas sermon in which he made clear that “he who respects the constitution of the country has no fear of prosecution, but he who disrespects the constitution will not be forgiven for plunging the country into a crisis.” There was no doubt that the prelate was referring to Kabila, who had already overstayed his constitutional term of office. The United States and Europe, which had imposed sanctions against members of Kabila’s government, had also been moving toward imposing sanctions against the president and his family, including travel bans and asset freezes.

As a result, Kabila gave something as well. He originally wanted to appoint a prime minister of his choice from the opposition. The agreement calls for the prime minister to be chosen by the opposition and, more specifically, from those parts of the opposition that were not part of the earlier “agreement” of October 18, when Kabila coopted some minor opposition politicians and tried to pass the resulting pastiche as a “government of national unity.”

The key going forward is going to be in the implementation. The agreement says the prime minister will have the full powers given to a prime minister in the Congolese constitution of 2006. These are fairly significant powers, which, if exercised, can be a significant check on the president’s authority.

For example, Article 81 says the president can only appoint officials, including senior military officers, police commanders, and ambassadors, with the consent of the prime minister and the cabinet. The prime minister also has to countersign decrees of the president for them to have legal effect. In theory, these are significant checks on presidential prerogative if the constitutional provision is respected the way the political accord says it will be.

Furthermore, the text of Article 91 of the constitution says it is the prime minister and the cabinet who, “in coordination with the president,” define national policy. Given the great lengths that he has gone to avoid an election and remain in power, it is very difficult to imagine that Joseph Kabila will respect an agreement that gives that much [influence] to a prime minister who will not be his creature.

Q: Are you then not optimistic that the deal will stick?

Pham: Miracles can happen and I guess, in the Christmas spirit, one wants to acknowledge the possibility, but I would not wager on it. If the agreement, as written, is to be honored it would essentially commit the president to a course which inevitably would lead to elections in which Kabila would be ineligible and a member of the opposition will probably be elected to head the country.

Q: Are there consequences for Kabila reneging on the deal?

Pham: In theory, reneging on the deal or the deal falling apart puts us back to where we were before the deal, which is that the president has overstayed his term in office that expired on December 19. Potentially there could be protests, civil strife, and international sanctions—to say nothing of the risk of significant violence and major conflict.

The gamble that Joseph Kabila is taking is that it is one thing in the aftermath of December 19, a very clear black and white date, to mobilize protests and the international community; now it is going to be a he-said, she-said scenario on whether any specific action or failure to act [by Kabila] was a violation of the agreement.  It is always easier to rally people around black and white issues than it is to mobilize them around a legal argument, right as that argument may be.

The opposition is taking the gamble because they don’t want to plunge the country into conflict and so they are willing to give one last chance for a soft landing. One hopes they are right.

Q: Do you expect international pressure on Kabila to lessen as a result of this agreement?

Pham: That would be a mistake on the part of the international community. Vigilance is going to be critical to keep both sides committed to the agreement and moving toward the first-ever democratic transition in the country.

But I am a realist as well and I fear that once the immediate crisis is defused, it becomes a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.” Moreover, there are also multiple transitions underway in the international community with changes in personnel, including those who have been handling issues related to the Congo. There is a new United Nations Secretary-General just taking office; we are in the midst of a transition in the United States; France will undergo a transition in five months. Tom Perriello, who served as US special envoy for the Great Lakes region, was a political appointee and left his job on December 23.

It would be a real tragedy—indeed, a betrayal—if, amid all this shuffling of personnel, the Kabila regime essentially got a reprieve during which its members could continue to enrich themselves through the corrupt deals that investigative reporting by Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Le Soir [in Brussels] recently documented.

Q: There were few protests after Kabila remained in power beyond December 19. Kabila appears to have the backing of the security forces for now. Does the opposition have the public support to topple his government should he refuse to step down?

Pham: On one hand, with an agreement the opposition runs the risk of finding it difficult to rally the people around a legal violation. On the other hand, even without additional sanctions, the political uncertainty in the country is having a deleterious impact on its economy, on top of the negative impact of the low prices for primary commodities that are the Congo’s chief source of foreign exchange. The ability of Kabila and his supporters to get the resources to continue paying the security services that keep them in power when even the military and other public sectors are going weeks, if not months, without being paid, is not going to improve much. Even without the political grievances, the masses may take to the street over their economic plight.

Q: The election commission had earlier said it was impossible to hold elections before 2018. How is the DRC now in a position to hold elections in 2017?

Pham: The devil is in the details [of the agreement]. The question is, are the resources going to be there? One of the things they have created in this political agreement is a National Council for the Implementation of the Accord and the Electoral Process (CNSA). This is supposed to have twenty-eight members with CENCO, which mediated the accord, playing a significant role. The CNSA, as its name implies, will oversee the implementation of the agreement. The members of this council, however, have not yet been appointed. And it remains to be seen what resources they will have to carry out their mission, even if they have the political will to do so.

Ashish Kumar Sen is deputy director of communications at the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @AshishSen.

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The United States must work to avoid another ‘world war’ in Africa, says Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham

The United States must ratchet up pressure on Congolese President Joseph Kabila in an attempt to convince him to leave office; a failure to do so would risk dragging the country and its neighbors into a costly war, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

Kabila’s decision to remain president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) beyond his constitutionally mandated two terms has sparked deadly protests across the country. Etienne Tshisekedi, a senior opposition leader, called on the Congolese people to peacefully resist an “illegal, illegitimate leader.” Nevertheless, hundreds of protesters have clashed with security forces.

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The United States must work to avoid another ‘world war’ in Africa, says the Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham

The United States must ratchet up pressure on Congolese President Joseph Kabila in an attempt to convince him to leave office; a failure to do so would risk dragging the country and its neighbors into a costly war, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

Kabila’s decision to remain president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) beyond his constitutionally mandated two terms has sparked deadly protests across the country. Etienne Tshisekedi, a senior opposition leader, called on the Congolese people to peacefully resist an “illegal, illegitimate leader.” Nevertheless, hundreds of protesters have clashed with security forces.

Worried about the situation spiraling out of control and down a familiar path to civil war, Pham said that the United States must derecognize Kabila and go after his ill-gotten gains. “It is time to send a very clear and unambiguous signal because it is in the interest of the world not to get dragged into another Congo conflict, and have to deal with the loss of lives and the expense of peacekeeping,” he said.

An estimated 5 million people were killed in the DRC between 1997, when Mobutu Sese Seko was ousted after a 32-year rule, and 2003.

“Joseph Kabila has pushed us to this precipice. Let’s be very clear, he either does the right thing and surrenders power now or he will be removed out in some other way. The choice is his,” said Pham.

Kabila took power in 2001 after his father, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated by a bodyguard. He has served two five-year terms after elections in 2006 and 2011—the latter a highly disputed poll whose results were denounced by independent observers ranging from the country’s influential Roman Catholic bishops to the European Union’s election monitors. His final term expired on December 19.

Congo’s election commission has said, however, that it was unprepared to hold elections before 2018 because it will take at least until July of 2017 to update the voter rolls. In May, the constitutional court, appointed by Kabila, ruled that the incumbent could remain in office until a successor is elected. Kabila’s advisors say he believes stepping down before a successor is elected would violate the constitution, an interpretation disputed by many who point to the charter’s provisions for possible vacancies in the presidential office.

On this point the constitution is crystal clear, said Pham: “You serve your two terms and you get out.” Once the president’s second term ends, if a constitutional successor has not been elected, it is the duty of the president of the Senate to lead a transitional government whose principal responsibility is to organize elections within three months.

Kabila has formed a transitional government in which he has named a minor opposition leader, Samy Badibanga, prime minister. Under this arrangement, Kabila retains the presidency.

J. Peter Pham spoke in a phone interview with the New Atlanticist’s Ashish Kumar Sen. Here are excerpts from our interview.

Q: What is your assessment of the situation unfolding in the DRC?

Pham: This is a crisis that we knew was coming for a long, long time. I first wrote publicly about this looming crisis in 2014. The constitution of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is very clear. The president has, at most, two consecutive terms. Full stop. The text explicitly states that the limit on presidential terms is one of the parts of the constitution that cannot be changed.

We knew Kabila’s term was coming to an end and when the date certain was going to be. I warned that unless elections were held it would be taken as a signal that he was digging in his heels and planning to stay on beyond his limits. We have done two studies about the potential for conflict in the area and about the governance record of the current regime, both with a goal of raising awareness of what was at stake.

Q: If, as the election commission says, elections cannot be held until 2018 what is the way forward?

Pham: The constitution provides an alternative. If the president’s term ends, the government is taken over by the president of the Senate whose powers are carefully circumscribed and whose primary job is to organize elections within a very limited time. It is clear that the intent of drafters of the constitution and the overwhelming majority of Congolese who approved their work in an internationally-organized referendum was to head off the very possibility of the scheme that Joseph Kabila and his minions are trying to perpetrate. The election commission, appointed by this president, had all these years [to plan for the elections]. It wasn’t like it was a mystery that elections were due. The regime shouldn’t be allowed to remain in office because it failed in its duty to organize the elections. They also didn’t fund the elections. The budget last year for the rather questionable activities of the president was several times greater than the amount that was allocated for the electoral commission.

Q: Why is the transitional government formed by Kabila unacceptable?

Pham: The transitional government represents no one but a lame-duck president whose term has expired and who is banned from running again and one of the minor opposition leaders, both of whom each have at beat single-digit support. There was a very large scientific poll, the such first-ever conducted in the Congo, by the Congo Research Group at New York University that made it very clear that the vast majority of Congolese want Kabila out: 81 percent oppose any change to the constitution that would enable him another term in office and 74 percent say he should leave this year. The largest support went to Moïse Katumbi, the former governor of Katanga, who had the backing of 33 percent; the second-largest amount of support went to Etienne Tshisekedi, a longtime opposition leader aligned with Katumbi, who had the support of 18 percent. Between the two of them they not only had the two largest vote total but together formed the absolute majority of the country—and this in a system that only requires the winner to be first-past-the-post. These two leaders are not part of this so-called transitional government. In the same poll, Kabila was backed by just 7.8 percent of those interviewed.

There is also no provision in the constitution for a president whose term has expired to appoint a transitional government. The constitution is very clear. You serve your two terms and you get out. If elections are not held the president of the Senate takes over and has 120 days to organize the elections. You can’t wait till the expiration of your term and organize a new government under newly manufactured rules. How would people in the United States react if no elections had been held in November and then come January 20 President Obama were to say, “Well, we haven’t held elections so I am going to appoint a new government that will stay on for two more years and then we’ll get around to holding elections”?

Q: Is the national dialogue effectively over?

Pham: The only thing there is to dialogue about are the conditions under which Joseph Kabila surrenders power he is now holding illegally against the plain letter as well as the spirit of the constitution. Almost 90 percent of the Congolese people voted to approve the constitution, which was promulgated by Kabila himself after they ratified it. The Congolese people expressed their will. They wanted a president who had a two-term limit.

Q: Do you see the crisis in the DRC developing along the lines of Burkina Faso, where in 2014 protests ousted Blaise Compaore as he was trying to extend his 27-year rule?

Pham: I think it is far more dangerous. People forget that the last time Congo went into full political crisis, in the Second Congo War, nearly a dozen African countries were dragged into the conflict, plus various armed groups, and upwards of more than five million people lost their lives. It was, for good reason, called “Africa’s World War.” Given the fact that Kabila is staying on extra-constitutionally against the clear will of the Congolese people, he is bound to invite chaos.

Q: Is the country then back on the brink of a civil war?

Pham: It is on the brink of a very deep crisis that could conceivably lead to armed conflict. The thing for Kabila to do is to follow the constitution and get out of office and make way for the transitional government—not one of his own manufacture, but the one the constitution provides for.

Q: What should the international community do to defuse this crisis?

Pham: The United States led the way last summer sanctioning two officials complicit in the repression of political opposition and civil society. It has recently sanctioned two additional officials closely associated with the president, including his chief of security. The European Union has joined us in the latest round and the European Parliament has passed a toughly-worded resolution with wide support across party groups. It is time for the United States to get serious, and more specifically, to derecognize Joseph Kabila as the head of state of that country since by his own constitution he is no longer president.

The United States should also go after the assets—Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times has laid out considerable evidence of corruption in an extraordinary article which appeared over the weekend—of key members of the regime, including the president and his twin sister Jaynet, as well as to slap travel bans on them.

It is time to send a very clear and unambiguous signal because it is in the interest of the world not to get dragged into another Congo conflict and have to deal with the loss of lives and the expense of peacekeeping—to say nothing of the humanitarian tragedy that such an outbreak in violence would mean for the long-suffering Congolese people.

Joseph Kabila has pushed us to this precipice. Let’s be very clear, he either does the right thing and surrenders power now or he will be removed in some other way. The choice is his. Either way, there is no future for him in the Congolese presidency.

Ashish Kumar Sen is deputy director of communications at the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @AshishSen.

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Vice President and Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham welcomed participants and General James L. Jones, Jr., USMC (ret.), chairman of the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security and former National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama, introduced Katumbi.

In his remarks, Katumbi provided an update on recent events in the country in light of the rapidly approaching expiration of President Joseph Kabila’s second and final mandate on December 19. Katumbi reminded the audience that over the last year, the Kabila regime has failed to take a single step, physical or administrative, in preparation of elections mandated by the country’s constitution. Instead, the regime violently repressed opposition political parties, civil society, and the media.

According to Katumbi, Kabila’s strategy thus far has been to organize an “artificial and false” national dialogue that has culminated in a “unilateral agreement,” which delays presidential elections until 2018, lacks a precise date for when these elections will occur, and fails to acknowledge the constitutional provision barring Kabila from running for a third term.

Katumbi also laid out his position, calling for a formal promise from Kabila that he will step down as president on December 19^th and several additional steps aimed at relieving political tension and increasing the public’s trust in the political negotiation. Finally, he called on the United States and the international community to support a democratic transition of power in the DRC by maintaining and event stepping up pressure on the regime, including targeted sanctions against individuals complicit in either the illegal holding on to power or repression of peaceful protests.

Other participations in the discussion included current and former US government officials, as well as representatives of US and foreign civil society organizations.

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Across Africa, leaders are tinkering with term limits and prolonging their tenures. In an increasingly unstable Central African region, Joseph Kabila, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), appears poised to be the next African leader to sidestep the relinquishing of power and the election of his successor, constitutionally mandated for November 2016. A new Atlantic Council study by Dr. Pierre Englebert, “Congo Blues: Scoring Kabila’s Rule,” examines Kabila’s leadership of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country and traces the contours of the ineptitude, massive corruption, and frequent resort to violence in the face of criticism that characterize his decade and a half in power.

 

Englebert argues that, despite being in power for fifteen years amid relatively buoyant recent macroeconomic growth, Kabila has done painfully little to improve the lives of Congo’s citizens. At best, his tenure has been characterized by willful neglect, and, at worst, by adverse and bloody manipulation of the country’s political system. The study makes that case that his regime’s reliance on confusion, dithering, meaningless dialogue, absenteeism, theft, patronage, violence, and repression has effectively set the country back to the days of Mobutu Sese Seko’s klepocratic dictatorship.

What’s worse, Kabila doesn’t appear to be finished. Though constitutionally ineligible for a third term, he is now attempting to employ administrative technicalities to delay the upcoming presidential election. These maneuverings are dangerous, and lay the groundwork for renewed civil unrest led by frustrated political opponents—with potentially catastrophic consequences for both the Congo and the broader Central African region.

This issue brief was made possible through generous support from United for Africa’s Democratic Future.

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]]> https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/why-the-congo-matters/ Mon, 14 Mar 2016 20:49:34 +0000 http://live-atlanticcouncil-wr.pantheonsite.io/why-the-congo-matters/ With a population of almost 80 million people and unparalleled natural resources, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the DRC or the Congo) is a country of tremendous potential—but only that. One of the most violent places on earth, its people suffer from the brutality of armed groups and political instability. Now, President Joseph Kabila’s […]

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With a population of almost 80 million people and unparalleled natural resources, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the DRC or the Congo) is a country of tremendous potential—but only that. One of the most violent places on earth, its people suffer from the brutality of armed groups and political instability. Now, President Joseph Kabila’s steadfast refusal to move forward with constitutionally required elections in 2016 is a worrying indicator that new waves of violence may not be far off.

 

“Why the Congo Matters,” a new issue brief by Atlantic Council Africa Center Senior Fellow Dr. Gérard Prunier, makes the case for increased global engagement with the Congo at this vital juncture in its history. He situates the present-day DRC in its complex historical setting, beginning with the brutal Belgian colonial rule and chaotic decolonization process. In the 1990s, “Africa’s World War,” as the thirteen nation conflict became known, decimated the Congo and left a war-weary population with weak leaders and even weaker institutions.

Kabila, who has been in power for fifteen years, is ineligible to run for President under strict term limits enshrined in the constitution that he himself promulgated in 2005. Nevertheless, while simultaneously declaring respect for the constitution, he is attempting to employ administrative technicalities to delay the election of a successor. Citing Article 8 of the constitution, he claims that it is not lawful to hold elections without first updating the voter lists, a process that his government says may take anywhere from one to four years—a delay so significant that it would effectively amount to another term in office, and would likely result in wide-spread civil unrest led by frustrated opposition parties.

As one of the largest countries in Africa and a lynchpin of regional security, the DRC is an important front in the African public’s revolt against “presidents for life.” In 2016, the United States and its allies now confront a troubling—and potentially explosive—democracy deficit in one of the continent’s most strategic nations.

In the study, Prunier examines relevant US and European interests in the Congo, which range from security and economic concerns to humanitarian imperatives. He concludes that there is still time to prevent a new conflagration in the Great Lakes region, but not much.

This issue brief was made possible through generous support from United for Africa’s Democratic Future.

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