PREVIEW
Kinshasa enlists Washington advisors to gain US support for military and diplomatic engagement as M23 escalates war in eastern Congo
President Félix Tshisekedi is offering the United States access to Congo-Kinshasa’s critical minerals as a bargaining chip to get Washington’s support to force out M23 and Rwanda from eastern Congo-Kinshasa.
Kinshasa has hired US lobbyists on a year-long contract worth US$1.4 million with a mandate to deliver ‘strategic engagements to advance defense security and critical mineral diplomacy with the United States government’, according to a filing on 20 February under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The contract is with Aaron Poynton, a US businessman who was tasked by Kinshasa last June with organising a roundtable for US and Congolese business and political leaders (Dispatches 19/6/24, Kinshasa gets a new business Poynt man).
Tshisekedi’s government had increased its engagement in Washington prior to Donald Trump’s election in November. Last April, state mining company Gécamines signed a one-year contract worth $925,000 with Mercury, a K Street lobby shop in Washington DC (AC Vol 65 No 10, Mining colossus Gécamines hires lobbyists to boost bargaining with Washington).
But Trump has made it clear – particularly in his demand that Ukraine sign an agreement granting the US access to a purported $500 billion in rare earths as part of a peace deal to end Russia’s invasion – that he will be overtly transactional.
Access to minerals has been one of the side stories of M23’s incursions in the Kivus. A United Nations expert report found that minerals were being smuggled from M23-controlled sites into Rwanda and then sold.
Tshisekedi has described the European Union’s cash-for-minerals deal with Rwanda as ‘an absolute scandal,’ and accused Brussels of being ‘complicit in the theft and looting of Congo’. In an interview with the New York Times on 24 February, Tshisekedi claimed that the Trump administration has already shown interest in a strategic minerals deal.
Such a prospect could attract more US funding for the $6bn Lobito corridor project linking Angola’s biggest port with the copper mines in Zambia, and eventually Congo-K.
Backers of the schemes had been concerned that the new US administration would be reluctant to back Lobito as it had become emblematic of ex-President Joe Biden’s Africa strategy. Until now it was unclear how US companies would be able to use Lobito to gain more access to Congo-K’s critical minerals.
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