The elements of power, p.30
The Elements of Power, page 30
Vivas Kumar, a Stanford graduate who worked on Tesla’s supply chain for batteries from 2016 to 2019, told me that there had been concerns around cobalt even before Amnesty International and AFREWATCH released their landmark report on artisanal mining in 2016. “There had been a direct interaction from people at Tesla to mines in the DRC even before I arrived,” Kumar told me. “People came from headquarters with boots on the ground to see with their own eyes exactly where the cobalt was coming from.” They didn’t want artisanally mined cobalt in the supply chain, and what’s more, they wanted a steady supply of critical metals. Tesla began staking claims on raw materials, from cobalt to nickel to lithium. It started signing contracts that locked in supply for three years, five years, sometimes even ten years. “We wanted to move away from one- to three-month contracts to signing much more long-term contracts.”
Other companies seemed to be burying their heads in the sand when it came to what was happening in China. Apple, which used cobalt in nearly all of the batteries for its devices, didn’t appear to find Chinese control a threat, even as Xi Jinping was taking his country in a more and more nationalist direction. As one analyst told The New York Times, “The Communist Party is firmly in control, and both Western companies and Chinese companies in the private sector have been under attack.” But, the Times noted, firms like Apple had no plan B.
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, governments didn’t seem to understand the complexities of the supply chain and the risks of overconcentration in China, even as they passed laws and gave out subsidies that pushed people to buy electric cars. On the keynote presentation in 2021, Glasenberg had issued a dire warning. “The Western companies have not done it,” he said, referring to investment in mining. “They either don’t believe this is an issue or they believe they are definitely going to get the batteries from China.” He concluded with a critical question: “But what happens if that doesn’t occur and the Chinese say, ‘We are not going to export batteries; we are going to export electric vehicles’? Where are the batteries going to come from?”
Chapter 40
Green-Tinted Glasses
As the Kabila years came to a close, more and more mines found their way into the hands of Chinese companies. Sometimes they were pried out of the hands of their owners, people like George Arthur Forrest. Government and Gécamines officials would make it hard to do business. For example, at the Luiswishi copper-and-cobalt mine, which Forrest had operated since the mid-1990s, officials forbade the refining of metals on Congolese territory. “We lost a lot,” Forrest later wrote. “We continued to exploit the Luiswishi mine, but it just wasn’t as profitable anymore.” The new head of Gécamines, Albert Yuma Mulimbi, moved to take control of the mine, and Forrest eventually sold his share for peanuts. “As soon as he had got it back, he gave it to the Chinese,” Forrest later wrote. As Peter Zhou told me, Chinese firms were experts at playing the games of Congolese officials, whereby huge kickbacks would find their way into the pockets of people willing to do them favors.
But other mines seem to have been just as willingly sold by foreign firms. China Molybdenum had run the Tenke Fungurume mine since 2016, when it bought Freeport’s stake. The majority of the company’s shares are now held by a Chinese state body and by Yu Yong, a media-shy magnate who was, in 2025, the world’s 307th-richest person, holding a net worth of nearly $9 billion, according to Bloomberg. Yu also held a large stake in CATL, the battery giant founded by Robin Zeng. Because of its acquisitions in Congo, China Molybdenum became the world’s largest cobalt producer in 2023, overtaking Glencore.
China Moly, as the firm is known in the industry, or CMOC Group Limited, as it is now called in corporate filings, went from being a small molybdenum miner in the Chinese interior to a $21.7 billion international-commodities company during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Molybdenum, like cobalt, is a metal that comes into play quite a bit in modern life—it is used to create powerful alloys, as well as anodes used in X-ray mammography; it is also used in combination with cobalt to desulfurize natural gas and refined petroleum—this means that fossil fuels also sit within Congo’s supply chain.
In the wake of the acquisition of Tenke Fungurume, China Moly had become a copper-cobalt giant. Zhou, who worked on financing this acquisition by China Moly, praised the mine’s operations. “You’ll be shocked to see how modern-equipped it is,” he told me when we spoke in 2019. “The people working there—I mean, even the local Congolese employees—they’re properly protected, and they have good pay, and they have a good social life as well. There’s bars, there’s games.” But other miners were less convinced about Chinese businesses in Congo. “They cut corners—they don’t do things correctly,” Charles Carron Brown, the consulting mining engineer, told me. “They don’t protect the environment as well as they should.”
One of the things that has allowed China Moly to thrive is the company’s easy access to cheap financing through large, and often state-run, Chinese banks. Banks and big Chinese companies have close relationships that lead to very low-cost financing. Such deals have allowed Chinese firms to carry out their ambitions in the critical-minerals space. “The strength of China is that they can sponsor low-margin businesses,” said Brian Menell, the TechMet CEO. “It’s not a level playing field.” China Moly’s consolidation of its hold of Tenke Fungurume shows how far Chinese banks will go to help their compatriots pursue dreams of domination. “China Moly is a big client for Bank of China,” Devon Archer—one of the founders of BHR Partners—told me in January 2022. “The original idea of BHR was to be a cross-border outfit. It was a different time. Oligarchs used to be cool. We had a warm relationship with China,” Archer said. Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, was a cofounder. “That soured very quickly.”
Archer, who would later be sentenced to prison time for defrauding a Native American tribe in an unrelated deal (only to later receive a full pardon from President Donald Trump), was involved with helping China Moly fund the acquisition, beginning in 2016, of another tranche of TFM’s stock. This time, China Moly was interested in buying the tranche that Lundin Mining still owned: 24 percent of the mine for around $1.14 billion in cash. Archer understood that Lundin wanted China Moly’s money to cover a commodities shortfall in Lundin’s portfolio. “The Bank of China brought us this deal,” Archer said. “They needed an affiliate to be an equity placeholder. They loaned BHR money to buy Lundin. It went through a BHR account, and BHR got a fee—$300,000 or $400,000.”
It was a no-brainer for BHR and its president, Jonathan Li. “You have this great fee opportunity that covers payroll for the last seven months. Of course you take it. It was a foregone conclusion, and there was no vote,” Archer explained. During the sale of the Lundin tranche of TFM, Hunter had sat on BHR’s board, but Archer, who was close to the president’s son, told me he was not involved in the transaction. “None of the U.S. board members sat on the investment committee,” he said.
There was only light due diligence on the deal. “It wasn’t like buying a company,” Archer insisted. “It was nothing like that. It wasn’t a principal investment; we had no equity stake, no ownership. We were just a conduit for capital,” Archer said. “It was Bank of China trying to get around their banking restrictions.” (The Bank of China did not respond to requests for comment.) There has never been a suggestion that BHR did anything illegal or improper at the time of the TFM deal, although the optics of American citizens being involved in the sale of such an important asset to a Chinese firm rankled some. Gécamines did protest China Moly’s purchase of the mine, but it swiftly dropped its objections after the firm paid it $100 million in an opaque transaction that went down in early 2017.
On a separate occasion, BHR had invested around $15 million in the Chinese battery behemoth CATL. It was a successful investment, Archer said, and one that he knew well. He even sang karaoke with the firm’s CEO when he traveled to China to close the deal, he remembered. “They were there at the right time, and the right place, and they were”—like China Moly and Huayou—“well capitalized.”
China Moly also found partners to mine with, demonstrating just how interconnected large Chinese firms had become at the highest level. In 2020, the firm bought 95 percent of the Kisanfu mine, a greenfield cobalt site near Kolwezi, from Freeport-McMoRan for $550 million. Kisanfu has an estimated 6.8 million tons of cobalt and 3.1 million tons of copper. CATL took a stake in the mine in 2021. The company had already invested in a lithium project in Australia and a nickel project in Indonesia; now it owned a mining concern that controlled one of the most important cobalt deposits in Congo. The web of connections that bound these companies to one another was strong and made them stronger, despite outward appearances of rivalry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, Huayou helped bail out CATL when it suffered a dearth of cobalt due to supply-chain disruption. Other Chinese battery and EV firms, such as BYD and Gotion, a firm that was perfecting fast-charging batteries, would soon follow CATL’s lead into the critical-minerals space, investing in projects as far-flung as Chile and Indonesia.
As for the TFM deal, Archer told me that looking back on it in light of China’s rapid expansion into the battery space, he felt differently about it in 2022 than he had four years before. At the time, he said, “I was thrilled with the investment. I guess I had rose-tinted—or, rather, green-tinted—glasses on.”
Chapter 41
Seizing the Space
The highway along which 70 percent of the world’s cobalt is exported, somewhere near Fungurume, Congo, in 2019
The town of Fungurume announces itself not by a gradual accumulation of buildings but by a barrier. Specifically, a metal-spiked barrier tossed by a set of bored guards into the roadway. A sign tells drivers to Stop and declare the “provenance of products.” China Moly had seized control of the public road to ensure that no one was stealing minerals. Technically, the checkpoint was overseen by the OPJ, or judicial police, but I never saw an officer from the unit on any of the eight times I traversed the road.
It was one of the most egregious examples of the corporate seizure of public infrastructure in a country that was replete with them. The road was effectively controlled not by the police or by the Congolese army but by armed guards in the employ of a Chinese company with a sizable investment from the Chinese state. Since the Benguela Railway, which ran through Angola, was still not in use and the line to Lubumbashi was operational only once or twice a month, the highway was the export route by which some 70 percent of the world’s cobalt left Congo.
Once, in October 2019, during the dry season, Jeef Kazadi and I entered Fungurume, which consists mostly of low-slung buildings with the occasional two-story arcade: a hotel, a set of shops.
Painted across the pink facade of Chez Papa Lofo, one of the larger shops in Fungurume, are the words Dieu Dirige Mes Affaires (God Directs My Business). Papa Lofo might as well have written “China Moly Directs My Business,” for through the process of running the mine in Fungurume, the company has acquired the power of life and death in the region.
The barrier, however, hasn’t prevented people from smuggling copper and cobalt out of the concession. Because of its sprawling size, Tenke Fungurume is difficult to police, and huge communities of artisanal miners like Odilon Kajumba Kilanga scrape a living from the land there.
In June 2019, I had planned to visit the mine, but my scheduled trip was canceled by China Moly at the last moment because an “invasion” of artisanal miners threatened the site. That year, China Moly’s subsidiary decided to ask the government to do more to help it rid the site of an estimated ten thousand illegal miners. In response, the government sent in the army. (The company’s deputy general director later insisted that TFM had not asked for troops to remove the miners.) Eight hundred men were deployed under the command of General John Numbi, the former national police chief who had been sanctioned by the U.S. Justice Department in 2016 and was notorious for not only his repression of protests but also his alleged role in the 2010 killing of a human-rights activist and the activist’s driver. (Numbi denies any role in the murders.) At the time, Numbi told Bloomberg that the operation had been personally ordered by Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo, Congo’s president, but in the spring of 2023, Numbi told me that it was he, in fact, who had suggested to Lualaba Province’s governor, Richard Muyej Mangez Mans, that troops be used to force the miners out. Numbi showed no remorse: In fact, he remained proud of the operation to expel illegal miners.
The Congolese army arrived in the settlement of Kafwaya on June 13, 2019. Between Tenke and Fungurume and a little to the south of the east-west highway that connects East and West Katanga, Kafwaya was one of several ramshackle mining boomtowns scattered across southern Congo’s bush. There was money to be made in the town, which had sprung up on the back of the illegal trade in TFM’s minerals, mined by jobbing artisanal miners. But despite the wealth that lay beneath the soil, the town was not much to look at: It consisted mostly of shanties made from sacks, tarpaulin, pipes, branches, and the odd mud-brick.
After arriving in Kafwaya, Numbi’s troops warned miners to leave. Their settlements were on TFM’s property, after all. The year before, Muyej had railed against them. “Imagine yourself on less than a square kilometer, with one hundred and sixty makeshift houses built from tarpaulins,” he told the UN’s Radio Okapi. “It looks like hell.” But the Congolese troops were asking too much of the people at Kafwaya, many of whom were subsistence farmers and had scant little to do with artisanal mining. A lot of the miners and the people living in the settlement decided to stay put.
A few days after the soldiers arrived, the local civil-society organization reported that the Congolese troops had begun to burn Kafwaya’s market stalls. The message was clear: Leave immediately. Still, families remained: Their homes, their school, their lives were there. Then, a couple days later, as night fell, the battalion under Numbi charged through the town, burning dozens of homes and ransacking the school. A three-year-old girl and a fourteen-month-old boy were badly burned. (Numbi denied that anyone got hurt.) “They didn’t say anything to anyone,” an official in the settlement named Fabien Ilunga told Reuters’s Aaron Ross. “The army started to burn down the tarpaulin houses.”
“If the investors complain,” Numbi told Ross, “the government will take measures (to deploy the army) if it decides the police cannot handle it.”
But Numbi’s operation—and the checkpoints—did little to discourage artisanal miners from working on the site and trading cobalt and copper ore. Each time I crossed the TFM site by car, I overtook scores of motorcycles laden with the type of cheap polypropylene sacks used to transport artisanally mined ore. Minibuses filled with such sacks zipped to and fro down the road. Shantytowns made up of homes cobbled together from tarps and woven assemblages of the same sacks also appeared to rove about the region. I was told that there were occasional police or army raids, and the make-do dwellings would be dismantled in one location, only for them to spring up somewhere else. It was a game of Whac-A-Mole for the army, although in this case, the tunnelers were human beings operating at the squalid bottom of a globalized economy.
* * *
At around 6:00 p.m. on a gray afternoon in March 2023, I stopped with Kazadi at a settlement near Kafwaya to see if I could speak to artisanal miners there. People were coming off their shifts, walking along the paths that cut through the long grass by the road, heaving sacks and metal bars that they used to pry rock loose. The miners were easy to identify: They had cheap plastic flashlights strapped to their heads or swinging from their hands. A few young miners declined to talk before a man in a checkered shirt came up to me and introduced himself as Marcel. Just then, a kerfuffle broke out, and Marcel jumped into our car. We agreed to drop him off in Likasi, where he said he had an appointment.
Marcel was thirty-four. He politely told us that he was a négociant, or ore trader, and that he had five children, all in school. He spent much of his time buying minerals at Kafwaya. “The little I make here allows me to put food on my table,” he said. He would spend three days at a time collecting minerals to sell. “If God has blessed me, I can make one hundred thousand francs, even one hundred and fifty thousand francs,” he told us. This was around $50 or $60 a day.
“How much do the creuseurs make?” I asked.
“It depends on the quality of the minerals,” he said. “They can make maybe a million francs for three bombés. Maybe a million-two, a million-three.” That was around $500 to $650 at the time. (A bombé is a unit of measurement that equates to around one hundred kilograms.)
Marcel had worked in the mines since 1997, when his father died and Mobutu Sese Seko was ousted. He was nine then. “Things had been tough at home,” he said, “so I went to work in a mine called Milele, on the Zambian border.” He remembered the names of all the mines in which he had worked—a long list, names I had never heard of, places far off in the bush and accessible only by dirt road. The list underscored what a difficult job would-be mining regulators were facing in Congo. Some copper-and-cobalt mines were just so far away, so small, and so little known that oversight was near impossible and almost anything could happen in them. “After Milele, I went to a mine site called Kabundji. After Kabundji, I went to a mine site called Sandra, then Kipese, Kimanyuki, and Kamfundwa, which is near Kambove,” Marcel told me. “Then, after Kambove, I came to Lwambo, to a mine site called Kalabi, then to a site called Kwatebala, and after Kwatebala, that was how I found myself here at Kafwaya.”
