DRC lifts mining ban

The Democratic Republic of the Congo will lift a ban on mining in its eastern provinces that it imposed in September to try to cut off funding to armed groups. The decision came just one day after an attack against the Kinshasa residence of President Joseph Kabila.  

“The timing of the lifting of the ban was interesting coming a day after the coup attempt,” Mark Schroeder, director of sub-Saharan Africa at Stratfor, a global intelligence company, said in an interview from his office in Austin, Texas.

No one is clear on who was behind the armed attack on Sunday Feb. 27 and there is no shortage of suspects within and outside the country, but one theory Schroeder believes holds water is that the assailants may have included disgruntled members of the poorly paid armed forces — angry about the ban that interfered with their ability to profit from mineral extraction in the resource-rich eastern provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu and Maniema.  

“Soldiers are not getting well paid to begin with, and irregularly at best,” he says. “Military units that have been deployed in the eastern Congo have a pretty extensive presence there and they have grown quite happy extending their influence over mining and minerals and have grown rich….this ban really cramped their style.”

Lambert Mende, the country’s minister of information and media, apparently described the assault as a “terrorist attack” and “not a coup d’etat,” according to Bloomberg news reports. 

Presidential elections are slated for November. Kabila came to power in 2001 after his father, Laurent Desire Kabila was assassinated.

Schroeder notes that the Kabila government’s attempts to tighten its control over the country have pitted it against many entrenched interests.

“Efforts by the Kabila government to impose some stronger control over that very vast central African country runs them up against localized and regionalized interests who have been quite happy doing what they want with these minerals,” Schroeder explains. “In the last year or so he has been trying to get a better grip over the country and recentralize government control but that’s a massive undertaking and he understands there’s going to be some risks involved in that.” 

Schroeder does not believe the attack was part of a larger groundswell of popular unrest against dictators that has swept Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

“I wouldn’t say that Congo is all that vulnerable to that kind of popular uprising or protest,” he says. “The population is really spread out and it’s difficult for people to rise up and protest there. And Kabila is decently popular.”

At the same time, however, the country “is always vulnerable to insurrections by armed forces, whether they are domestic insurgent groups or insurgent groups supported by neighbouring interests that aren’t happy with Congo’s behaviour.”