The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Africa's Richest Nation, Exploited and Divided

Reach into your pocket. Pull out your phone somewhere inside that pocket. Somewhere inside that phone, inside that battery that keep it alive right now. There is a metal called cobalt, and there is a better than two or three chances that the cobalt in your hands came all of the ground in one country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. I want you to hold two images in your mind at the same time. The first image, a child, maybe or precisely 10 years old, at the bottom of a hand duck pick in the south of Congo, no helmet, no boots, stripping, cupped, iron out of the deck with his bare hands for a couple of dollars a day. The second image, a king in Europaris more than 100 years ago, growing one of the largest fortunes on earth off the back of Congolese people whose hands were cut off when they did not produce enough. Different centuries, same country, same people bladed for it. People think those two things are separate stories. A dark chapter of history and a more than chain problem, two different things. One unbroken land run straight from the king palace to the foam in your hands. And tonight I am going to draw that line for you end to end, and I promise you, you will never hold your foam the same way again. Welcome back to Africa Decoded Podcast. I am your host, Paul Thomas. If you were here for the first episode, you already know that you we take the world of a continent, we follow where it actually goes, and we name the machine that keeps a rich land poor. No comfort, no fairy tale, just the truth with the receipt. If this is your first time, welcome. Here is all you need to know. This show is about how the rich continent on earth ends up with some of the poorest people on earth and who profit from keeping it that way. Last episode, we draw the whole map tonight. We zoom all the way in one country because the Congo is not just part of the story, the Congo is the story. Everything I taught you last week, the current, the extractions, the murderous leaders, the modern machine, all of it happened in the Congo in the most naked phone. So if you want to understand the whole continent, understand this one country, let the code it. For anywhere else on earth. Most places you can argue about the resources. Is it ready that rich? Is it just all the Congo in the argument? The Congo is by far, by many estimates, the single most natural water piece of land on the planet: copper, gold, tamu, tin, tanculu, cotet, urient, the urine in the bomb that dropped on Arishima and Nagasaki came from the Congo mines and covered the mentor of that mortal-ish. One country, trillions of dollars in the ground, and at that same country has spent the last century, and it have has one of the most brutalized, looted, and impoverished places in human history. People have died in numbers that should have shaken the war, and mostly did not. So tonight the question is simple, and it is the same question. The whole show is built on how does a country this rich end up like this, and who has the hands in the ground? We are going to walk it in order. Let's start where it started with a man who owned a country like a piece of furniture before the king, before the thief, understand what the press actually is because you cannot understand the greed without understanding the size of what there was to be greedy about. The Congo sit in the heart of Africa, scraddling the equator, wrapping around one of the netless rails in the world. It is vast, the second largest country in Africa, roughly the size of West Europe. And all on that enormous stretch of land sit a concentration of minerals of wealth that has no real equal anywhere. Let me just walk you through the counter in the north and the rivers from the centuries, Afro, and while rubber back when rubber was the old of the day, when the whole industrials suddenly needed it for a tire and suit, and in the center and soft copper, some of the richest copper deposited ever formed in a belt that run down into what now the money hard land, damn, gold, tin, urine, so pure and so accessible that when the United States needed minerals for their first atomic bomb, taking all of the Shankului demands in the Congo, and then in our time, the two the matter most potent which go in a tiny capacitor inside basically every phone, laptop, and game console on earth, and cobalt, the metal that make a rechargeable lithium battery stable enough not to catch fires. The battery in your phone, the battery in the electric car, every government on earth now wants you to buy. All of that mine cupboard on the entire planet, not a share, not a big chunk, the clear majority of the whole world supply of one country, it also holds well over half of the world's no carbon reserve. So the entire global project of green energy, electric cars, and clean furniture everywhere selling to you, it runs through the degree of the Congo. There is no electric evolution with all the Congo. None. The most futuristic industry on earth has at hand buried in the Congolese ground. Now hold that thought. The richest ground on earth. And let me introduce you to the first man who decided to own it. His name was Leopold II, King of Belgium. I knew you to understand something strange and important about what he did because it is the key to the whole century that followed. Leopold did not colonize the Congo for Belgium. Belgium, his own country, did not want it. He told the Congo for himself as a personal possession. One man privately owned a piece of Central Africa, roughly the size of West Europe. And he ran it as its own private business for profit. He called it the Congo Free State. Nothing about it was free. He got the war to sign off on it at the Belgian conference of the 1880s by addressing it up in a language of charity. He said he was bringing civilizations, threatening the slave tree, spreading Christianity, opening Africa to science and progress. The humanitarian sking, that is how it was sold. What actually happened was one of the greatest crimes in record in history. The world wanted rubber, bicycle, and then automobile have just created an enormous hunger for it. And the Congo have war rubbers vain. So Leopold administration turned the entire territory into a forced labor rubber operations. Every man had to bring in a set amount of rubber harvested from vent deep in the forest, boot up work that took him away from feeding his own family, and to enforce the cotet. They knew Storoff as an official policy. If a village came up short, the punishment was mutilations. Soldiers on Lippot authority cut off hands, the hands of grown men, of women, of children. There are photographs. The campaigners of their days make show of it, of congo parents staring at the serious hands of their own children. Which means hands become a curse of currency of the torrents. Village was brain, hostage was taken, wife and churning her to force the men to meet the robber quota. People was worked to death, staff and kill upright. How many die historians debate the exact fugus because Leopold wouldn't keep the kinds of records a criminal cap, but a serious estimate of the populations collab in that period run into the mediums? Some historians put it has higher has around 10 million people, a number in the same universe has the worst atrocity of the 20th century, and it happened between roughly 1885 and 1908 to fill European packages with robots money. And yeah, it is the part I never want you to forget. Not once. He ran the whole death machine from Belgium by milk and by ledger, and he grew stangling like rich doing it. He built palace and monuments in Belgians with the proceeds, some of which people still work past today without knowing what pay for them. Eventually their scandal got too big. Campina missionaries, a British investigator named Roger Classment, who documented the atrocity, they forced it into the opening. So it became the Belgian Congo. The private deaf camp became a national colony. And I want you to notice what changed and what did not. What changed the owner from a king to a country? What did not change the fundamental deal? The Congo still exists to be the drink for the benefit of people who were not Congolese. The coupons keep flowing. The colonial company times went up around the mines. An entire economy was built, but built like all the others we talked about. At that port at Europe, the Congolese themselves still lock up all of their own resources, denying education, denying any part to run their own affair that lasted another 50 years. And then in 1960 came the movement that should have set the Congolese people free, instilled the patent for everything since 1960, the years of Africa. And a young electrifying nationalist named Patrick Lulumba began it first democratically, choosing prime minister. I told you about Lulumba last episode. Tonight I want to slow down and show you exactly what happened because it is the clearest examples on the entire continent of what happened to a leader who genuinely tried to take his country's wealth back or take his country's resources back. Lumba was not moderate in the way the West wanted. He was a genuine nationalist. His whole vision was that the Congo independence has to be real. That political freedom without economic freedom was a custom. He wanted the copper, the diamonds, the minerals to serve the Congolese people who live on top of it. At the independence ceremony, with the Belgian king sitting right there, expecting to be things for his gift of independence. He refused to pretend. He described up loud to their faces, the detriment, relations, and violence of colonial rules, the false label, the margarite, the thief. He could not perform gratitude for his own oppressions. It was one of the bridiest speech of African leaders ever gave. His body was later dissolved in acid to leave no grief, nothing for his people to rally around. For decades, the full story was denied, but it came out. Declassified documents reveal how deeply the Western power wanted him gone and work to make it happen. In 2002, Belgium formally apologized. Decade later, Belgium returned the one physical remnant of him, the Soba, a single gold cup tool to his family for burial. That is what was left of the man who wanted the Congo resources for the Congo. An army officials who was censured to the coup against Lumumba. Consolidate it and rule the Congo, which he renamed Zahe. For over three decades, from May 1960 until the late 1990s, and the West loved him. For most of this co-war, Motumbu was our man in Central Africa to anti-communist reliable, a bull walk, and in exchange for paying that rule, he was allowed to do whatever he wanted at home. What he wanted was to steal. Motumbo turned the Congo into a personal ATM on a skill that gave the war cryptocursif a rule but thief. He looted billions. He had the mansions in Europe. Damon keep right on flowing out. That was the deal. Mutumbo keep the door properly open and the rough keep living and the West keep him in power and look the other ways at the thief and the Kungolese people pay for it all. Do you see the pattern lacking into place? The Kungu has a leader who wanted the roft for the people, Mumba, and he was murdered. And the Kungu has a leader who left the rough to keep living and stole the rest for himself, Motumbo, and he was protected for 30 years. That is not a coincident that the machine choosing it operate off. So by the Nantis, you have a country that is unimaginable, rich, that has been drained by kings, by dictator, and harled out to nothing. A giant, wealthy, broken state at the heart of Africa. And into that vacuum came the things that could kill most people than anything the Congo have seen yet. War. Not one war, a regional catastrophic fight, a large part over very many worlds we have been talking about. I am going to tell you about a war you have probably never heard names, and I want you to sit with how strange that is, but at the time I'm done. Some came claiming security reasons, but a United Nations partner of experts investigated and laid it out plainly. This war was also deeply above the illegal exploitations of Congo resources, the diamond, the gold, the cobbo, and especially the cotton. Amit and medicine sees mined, ran the extractions, and shipped the mineral art to farms, the fright, and to land package foreigners and domestics. The United Nations name of countries systematically hubling Congo Warfare through the chaos. And this is exactly when Content entered the global bloodscreen because this war overlapped with late 90s and early 2000s. Tech and mobile phone boom. Suddenly, the whole world needs tacklon for 8 giggets. Content's press park in Eastern Congo sitting on the content become a place where the minerals in the war shiny new form are being brought out of a war zone by people at gunpoints. Conflict minerals. And it does not have the most workly cited figures from the international rescue committee. Is that by 2008 the war and its aftermath has killed around 5.4 million people, most of them not from bullets, but from what war does hunger, disease, collapse, hospital, people driven from their homes into the forest to die of things that are traveling preventable. That figures, if you take it, make this the deadliest conflict anywhere in the war since the Second World War, deadlier than any war you can name from the last 88 years. Now in fairness, some researchers have challenged that number, accurate the survey mentor to overcome and pull the excess death lower in the lowest millions rather than 5.4 millions. If it that low and is a catastrophic of a skill that drawn conflicts, the entire war washed around the clock. Whether it is 3 millions or 5 millions, the point 10 and it jingling the deadliest war in modern human history was fought parklet over minerals in your electronic, and most of the planet could not even tell you it happened. Ask yourself why did a war this innumerable get a faction of the courage of far smaller conflicts elsewhere? Sit with that question. I think you already know the shift of that answer, and it is the same answer as the serious hands and the murder prime ministers. Some lives get content, some lives get news, and it never falled in death. East Congo has become reckless no peace since, wrecked up to today armed groups including one call M23, which the Congo and multiple government accuse neighboring Rwanda of backing, fighting for control of territory that just happened to contain cotton and other minerals' riches. The mine change hence, the mineral gets stuck out, the king continues, and it still at its core they fight over who controls the wrath of the ground. So that brings us finally all the way up to now to the cupboard ish, to the form in your packet. Let me close the line. Yeah, we are the present day, the clean green hard tech feature, and I am going to show you that it runs on the exact same logic as Leopold rubbers. The world decided to go electric, electrical laptops form grape storage, all of it run on lithium batteries, and the most common of those batteries need cupboard to stay stable, and the cupboard as we have established is over one minute Congolese, about 70% or more of their entire wall mine supply. So how does it come out of the ground today? Two ways you need to understand both. The first is big industrial mining, huge mechanic operations, and yeah, is who run the biggest of them. The largest share of the Congo Cobalt export is controlled by a Chinese company, CMOS, China Model North, CMOS and Swedish commodity giant clip coast together, they too alone account for something like 70% of the Congo covered exports. The majority of that metal that the entire global energy transitions depends on flow through a couple of foreign haircuts corporations operating on Congolese salt. The Wolf camp out, the company keep the lion's shares of the values. The second way is at the signals money, and this is where the land runs straight back to Leopold. A significant portion of Congo covered is dig by hands by ordinary people in unregulated danger peath with no safety equipment for a few dollars a day. Turn out collapse and bury people, and among those hand decoded are children. This has to be documented for years by human rights investigators, kids working cupboard, carrying socks of irons, breaking the ducks so that the metal can flow up a supply chain that in a sling device in your hands and the electric cars in a showroom in California or Belgium. Now sit back and look at the whole line I have drawn tonight. Leopold meant force Congolese people to harvest rubber for their tyres and wiring of industry age on a threat of losing their hands. Today, market force the property and government push Congolese people, including children, to dig cupboards for the batteries of the electric age. The technological change, the central change, the metal change, rubber to cupboard, the essential arrangement did not change at all. The wrath of the Congo still comes out of the Congo. The people who dig it get almost nothing. The value still flows to companies and consumers far away, and the whole thing still runs on the labels of Congolese bodies that the whole world could rather not look at. That is the unbreaking line from the King Ledger to the lack of train, one line. And if that was the whole story, it could just be desperate. But I promised last week I would never leave you thinking Africa is only a victim with no power. So let me close with the part that is actually changing, including the part where the Congos, this time, is starting to push back. There is what different now, and it is real. For the first time, the Congo has started to act like a country that knows it coding the war things that the whole world needs. In 2025, the DRC did something that could have been unthinkable. A generation ago, it looked at a global cobalt market that was paying it rack button press at eight multi-year load, meaning the wall of getting Congo Insexual metal cheap, and it slinged the brick. It heated cobalt export a ban and then it replaced the ban with a straight-cutted system to elaborately controlling how much cobalt is allowed to leave to force the press up and to force the war buyer to negotiate on Congolese term instead of just taking. That is a resources rich African countries for once using it leverage instead of being used by it. That is the exact thing Lulumba wanted and therefore being intended to show economies instead of revolutions, and it is part of the wildest shape you can see around Africa right now. Then with several countries starting to say we will not just shape our raw materials anymore. We want to process it here, refund it here, capture the values at home. That is genuine, that is power. Do not let anyone tell you Africans are just passive in this story. The Congo is making a move, but I keep my promise about honesty. I'm not going to hand you a clean victory because it is not one. Two hard truths sit right next to that hopeful one. The first, the upside grip is tightening, even has the Congo pushes back. China spent two decades embedding itself in Congolese mining through minerals for infrastructure deeds, and today China's frame dominates not just the mining but refining of cobalt, the highest value step where the real money is. So even when the Congo controlled the raw supplies, most of the profit making refinement still happen elsewhere. And when the biggest power cut deals with each other as they have been doing over critical minerals, mineral rich African nations can still end up as their teams being defided rather a party at the table. The news crumble is on with China, the West, in order of mavarant for Congo minerals. The player changed, the game outside of competing to control Congo Wolf did not. The Congolese leaders have looted their own countries. Motombo was the master, but he was not the last. Governor has been too corrupt. Contract has been signed by Congolese officials who pocketed the keybed and mineral money that doors still in the country, too often still in the raw hands. The army group tearing up the east, including Congolese atom, not just foreign ones. So yes, the king, the colonials, the corporations, the foreign armies, did immense documented harm, and the Congo's own political class has gained and gained betrayed people for cut. Both are truth. If I told you only one, I will be lying to you. The dearliest war since the Second World War fought over the many rows in the war, kicked and somewhere barely spoken of. So yeah, it's what I want you to carry out of this. Next time someone talks to you about the clean green electric future, the guilt-free technology, the batteries that are going to save the planet. I want you to ask the one question this whole show is built on who grand did it come out of, and what did they get for it? Because there is no electric future with all the Congo, and so far the Congo has gotten several hints: a murder leader, a looted treasury, 5 million graves, and children in paint. The future the world is selling has a build, and the Congo has been paying it for a very long time. See the line? Once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it. Next time on Africa decode, we follow the money out of the ground into the world. We are going to sit down with the two institutions that manage Africa's property and from the offside the international monetary forms and the World Bank. How help become the most effective tools of control ever invested, one that never has to fire a shot. Bring a strong stomach. If to not open your eyes, put this on in front of somebody who has laid open. That is how the silence breaks. One person, one phone, one line at a time. Until then, keep your eyes open. Keep asking who profit and never let anyone convince you that the poorest people are standing on the poorest ground in the Congo.