“Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neocolonialism. Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil enrich not Africans but others.” — Kwame Nkrumah, Neo‑Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)
A child slides a plastic basin down a muddy slope to the mouth of a mine shaft. A man lifts the basin, shovels a fistful of wet ore into it, and passes it along. The tunnel shudders. Someone shouts. No sirens sound. No inspector appears. The ore will be sold to a trader who moves it through a chain of middlemen before it reaches a refinery on another continent. Somewhere else an electric car glides silently past a showroom, its owner proud of a small climate virtue. The battery inside that car carries a human story that rarely makes it into press statements.
This kind of scene is common in the copper-cobalt belt of southeastern Congo. It is raw, brutal, and ordinary. People work because alternatives have been stripped from them, and the global economy turns their labour into a resource for others. The promised “green” future looks different when you follow the metals that make it possible. If the world is serious about justice, it must stop pretending that the transition is only a technical challenge. It is a political one.
Cobalt at the heart of the transition
Cobalt plays a stabilising role in many battery chemistries. It helps prevent overheating, improves cycle life, and supports higher energy density in professional and consumer applications. That is why the global push for electrification, from smartphones to grid storage, has made cobalt strategically important.
The Democratic Republic of Congo sits at the centre of this mineral geography. The region’s ores are cheaper to access than many alternatives and have been integrated into global supply chains for decades. This is why control over cobalt is not simply an industrial question. It is a matter of geopolitical leverage, investment strategy, and development policy.
But geography alone does not determine who benefits. Patterns of ownership, legal frameworks, corporate practice, and state capacity determine where value accrues. In the current model, most of the value leaves the country long before the final battery is assembled.
A colonial inheritance that never went away
Mining shaped Congo in the colonial era. Belgian authorities and companies like Union Minière du Haut-Katanga built enclaves for extraction, built rail lines and ports to move ore to Europe, and organised labour through coercive structures. The Force Publique and other instruments of colonial rule enforced labour regimes that prioritised the needs of the metropolitan economy.
Those institutions did not simply vanish at independence. The legal templates for concessions, the physical export routes, and the habit of prioritising exports over local development persisted. New national elites and foreign investors adopted and adapted those systems. Contracts often mirrored old-style concessions: long-term exclusive rights, tax holidays, and a governance model that favoured capital mobility and profit repatriation.
The result is a political economy in which mining regions remain structurally peripheral. Infrastructure tends to move minerals out, not to connect regional markets. Public services remain thin near many concessions, and local people frequently do not control the land under their feet. That historical continuity explains why reforming a practice now looks like a battle over centuries of built power.
The human toll of commodity-driven “progress”
It is important to separate two common falsehoods. First, that industrial mining is inherently humane, and second, that artisanal mining is simply quaint or criminal. The truth is more complex and more disturbing.
Artisanal and small-scale miners extract ore using simple tools in tunnels that can collapse without warning. They live with the constant risk of injury, contaminated water, and chronic respiratory disease from dust. Children work in these sites in a way that violates basic dignity and undermines education. People enter and stay in this work because alternatives have been eroded.
Large-scale industrial mines bring displacement that is often violent, or at best poorly managed. Families may be relocated with inadequate compensation. Agricultural land and fishing grounds degrade because of sediment, runoff, and toxic contamination. When communities resist, they sometimes face intimidation and repressive policing.
Both forms of extraction feed the same supply chains. Brokers, buyers, and multinational companies benefit from a system where risk is concentrated in local populations while profits flow outward. That imbalance is not an accidental side effect. It is a functional feature of global commodity markets.
How green language shields the same relations
The companies selling the transition wrap their operations in language about responsibility, sustainability, and traceability. Terms like “responsible sourcing”, “net zero”, and “ethical supply chain” appear in annual reports and glossy marketing.
In many cases these tools serve to manage risk rather than to redistribute power. Traceability can show where a shipment originated. Audits can reveal dangerous sites. But audits and certification rarely alter ownership, tax avoidance strategies, or the structural incentives that encourage environmental harm. Firms can improve compliance without relinquishing control.
Regulation, when it appears, is uneven. Voluntary standards coexist with weak national enforcement in which inspectors are underfunded or politically constrained. The result is a polished narrative of progress that hides the day-to-day reality on the ground.
The economic mechanics that keep value flowing out
Understanding why Congo captures so little of the final value requires looking at how minerals become products. Raw ore fetches a price on global markets. Refining and fabrication add most of the value. When a country exports raw ore and imports refined materials and finished products, it loses the bulk of potential gains.
Tax rules, transfer pricing, and secretive contracts make matters worse. Many contracts grant long tax holidays, royalty structures that under-value minerals, or complex ownership arrangements through offshore entities. Multinationals can shift profits through transfer pricing and related party transactions so that taxable income in the producing country is minimal.
Commodity price volatility compounds the problem. When prices spike, companies may reap windfalls without proportional gains in public revenue if contracts cap state shares or if enforcement is weak. When prices fall, local economies remain exposed to the boom-bust cycle. That combination produces fragile development, where mining wealth is rarely translated into stable public investment in services, health, or education.
A new scramble for strategic minerals
The strategic importance of cobalt has attracted state-backed actors and multinational groups pursuing secure access. Global rivalries now shape investment flows. Actors with refining capability, downstream industrial capacity, or financial leverage use those assets to secure supply.
This competition can lock the producing country into dependent relationships. Deals often include promises of infrastructure, loans, or immediate revenue in exchange for preferential extraction terms. Those arrangements sometimes come with strings attached that reduce long-term sovereignty: security agreements, access to strategic ports, or control over refining capacity.
If ownership and control are not reconfigured to benefit producing societies, then the scramble for minerals simply reproduces older patterns of foreign domination in a new guise.
Ecological damage is not an externality
Mining leaves a complex ecological footprint. Open pits alter landscape hydrology. Tailings and waste rock can leach heavy metals into water systems. Forests are cleared to make way for operations and associated infrastructure. Soil contamination undermines agriculture for generations.
Communities that once relied on riverine fishing and small-scale farming find their options narrowed. Food sovereignty declines, and dependence on purchased goods rises. Health impacts increase, driven by polluted water and air-borne particulates. The ecological losses are intergenerational, reducing resilience to climate shocks and undermining future livelihoods.
This is a double injustice. The countries and communities suffering these harms contributed little to the emissions driving climate change, and yet they bear concentrated costs for technologies that primarily benefit wealthier societies.
Why transparency alone is inadequate
Calls for traceability, audits, and better reporting are widespread and sometimes well-intentioned. They can expose bad actors and support targeted interventions. But transparency by itself does not equal justice.
If ownership remains concentrated, then transparency reveals who benefits without changing the beneficiaries. If national institutions lack capacity, then evidence of harm does not lead to effective remedy. If legal frameworks favour investors, then transparency can be weaponised as a compliance checkbox rather than a lever for structural reform.
Real change requires rethinking who owns, who manages, and who decides.
What a politics of life would require
An eco-socialist approach reframes the question. It starts from democratic control, material sufficiency, ecological repair, and reparative finance. It rejects the premise that extraction must be the backbone of development.
Democratic ownership and community sovereignty
Decisions about extraction must rest with people who live on the land. That includes public enterprises governed by accountable institutions, cooperatives that deliver direct benefits to workers and residents, and legal frameworks that enshrine community vetoes. Ownership is not merely a legal form; it is democratic practice.
Reduce demand through sufficiency and circularity
The simplest way to ease pressure on extraction zones is to use less raw material. Policies that prioritise repair, modular design, and second-use batteries reduce demand. Consumer economies in wealthy countries must shift toward sufficiency, not constant expansion.
Regional industrialisation and value retention
Instead of exporting raw ores, countries can build refining and manufacturing capacity regionally. That requires investment, technology sharing, and protective industrial policy that avoids simply handing control to multinational corporations. With greater local processing, a higher share of value can stay within producing regions.
Reparative finance and climate justice
Wealthy nations must fund transitions in ways that respect sovereignty and build public capacity. That means grants and transfers, not loans that compound debt. Climate finance should be aimed at building public infrastructure, restoring ecosystems, and supporting livelihoods outside of mining.
Ecological restoration as development spending
Rehabilitation of land, rivers, and forests should be treated as core development activity. Restored ecosystems provide food, water, and resilience. Funding for restoration must be long-term and community-led.
Examples and paths already in motion
Across Africa, communities and organisations are experimenting with alternatives. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, and local processing initiatives offer models for placing benefits closer to producers. Regional bodies and blocs have proposed industrial strategies aimed at capturing more value from mineral wealth. These efforts are uneven, underfunded, and contested, but they offer a sketch of what is possible when political agency shifts toward people and away from extractive capital.
Solidarity networks in other regions have also demonstrated paths for reparative finance and technology transfer. South-South collaboration can help bypass some of the extractive traps embedded in older models of development assistance.
Technology paid for by politics
Technical innovations that reduce or eliminate cobalt are important. They can lessen future pressure on extraction hotspots. But unless those innovations are guided by democratic policy, they can become another route for firms to concentrate value while externalising harms.
Technology matters only when combined with political rules that set production goals, distribution priorities, and environmental limits. Without that, innovation follows corporate incentives rather than public need.
A closing call
If the transition is measured only in tons of material and megawatts of capacity, then it will be judged a success even as entire landscapes are degraded and communities are displaced. That would be a tragic outcome. A truly just transition would be measured by who gains power, who controls land, who decides whether extraction happens, and whether ecological damage is repaired.
Congo is not a warehouse of minerals for the world. It is home to millions of people, to rivers, forests, and lives that deserve protection. A green future worth having must begin by confronting the political economy that turns human life into a raw material.
To change course we need more than better reporting, more than cleaner branding, and more than technological fixes. We need collective politics that redistribute power, repair ecosystems, and reduce dependency on endless extraction. We need policies that treat ecological restoration as development, that make value stay closer to where it is created, and that centre the voices of people who have been asked to sacrifice for other peoples’ comforts.
If the world chooses a different path, then the tools of the transition can serve life rather than profit. If not, history will remember a green transition that repeated the same violences as the old one, only under a new name. The choice is political, and it is urgent.