still more than most get in a country where 73% earn less than $1.90 a day. Children work at 2530% of mines. Kitenge Mami, a teenager in Fungurume, says she goes to the quarry “because I don’t want to be a beggar”. Mining powers the wider econ omy: the motorcycletaxi drivers trans porting three sackladen miners at a time; coiff ed women selling “I heart drc” sacks for collecting rocks. One study suggests 60% of households in the region rely on ar tisanal mining for their livelihoods. Pollution is rife. Fathers with mining jobs are unusually likely to have children with birth defects. A law limiting pit depths to 30m is widely fl outed. Collapses are common. “There are no statistics but many, many are dying,” says Donat Kambo la Lenge, a humanrights lawyer. George Ngome, a pastor, says he presides over lots of funerals for miners without identity pa pers. “Their families never know.” By law miners must belong to coopera tives. Often these are little more than la bour gangs controlled by bigwigs. This year the provincial government named as its new mining minister the head of one of the largest cooperatives. The trading depots must be owned by Congolese. But they are often fi nanced by Chinese traders. Every depot is colloquially known as La Maison Chinoise. At one your correspondent’s jour nalistic interest is confl ated with the com mercial sort, leading to an off er to The Economist: “You can also exploit our ores.” It is mostly miners who seem to be get ting exploited. Some of them say that trad ers’ scales and spectrometers (used to mea sure the concentration of cobalt) are rigged. They complain about a litany of un offi cial “taxes” imposed by state agencies, chiefs, police and security guards, who can make $250 a night in bribes. “We have laws but there is no respect for the law,” says Mr Lenge. “Government is just corrupted.” Artisanal cobalt is trucked from trading depots to refi neries where it may be blend ed with ore from big mines. “Despite the eff orts of some companies to portray in dustrial [largescale] mining and artisanal mining as completely distinct,” argues the Natural Resource Governance Institute, an ngo based in New York, “the boundaries between the two are permeable.” The international fi rms that trade, re fi ne and use cobalt have tried to under stand what happens in their supply chains. Apple, for example, lists all of its cobalt re fi ners. Many companies use rcs Global, a consultancy with auditing staff perma nently stationed at ten artisanal mines. Some try to use less cobalt from Congo, especially the artisanal sort. bmw says it buys exclusively from Australia and Mo rocco. Tesla is producing batteries that use much less cobalt. And fi rms are sponsor ing initiatives to make life better for min ers. The Fair Cobalt Alliance, which counts
Tesla and Google among its members, is improving safety at an artisanal mine and renovating schools to give parents more reason to keep their kids away from pits. The Responsible Cobalt Initiative, an asso ciation of German car fi rms and industrial giants, wants to off er safety training. But critics say this is not enough. “There is artisanal cobalt in supply chains, even if it is not acknowledged,” says Benja min Katz of the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. “And there is very little being done to improve conditions.” A consultant to large fi rms adds: “You have a group of downstream businesses that get their an nual auditor report, pretend to be virtuous and go back to selling phones and cars.” In 2019 the Congolese government pro posed giving a subsidiary of Gécamines, the state miner, a monopoly over the buy ing of artisanal cobalt. “We are going to eliminate child labour,” said Albert Yuma, then the boss of Gécamines. “Perhaps not today, but tomorrow, the Congo will be the equivalent of opec [for cobalt].” As part of the proposal some revenue would go to wards improving mine safety. There are plenty of moral incentives to reform artisanal mines but not enough market ones. “There is a double standard,” argues Mickael Daudin of pact, an Ameri can ngo. “The approach is: ‘We will help you but we don’t want to buy from you.’” Firms argue that Congo ought to clarify the legal status of artisanal sites and that rich country governments should be clear about what amounts to a responsible stan dard for cobalt, as is the case with “blood diamonds”. Both steps could allow artisa nal cobalt into the market legitimately and improve the lot of Congo’s people. In Kolwezi, Pastor Ngembe watches a Christian channel on tv, seeking inspira tion for his sermon later. The topic is that ageold question: “drc is a rich country, so why are so many people poor?” n Battery bank World, cobalt mine production, 2021, % of total 0
25
50
Industrial mines
75
Artisanal
Others Russia
Congo
100
Australia
Source: US Geological Survey 300 km
Kinshasa
TANZANIA
012
Middle East & Africa
The Economist July 9th 2022
CONGO Tenke Fungurume mine Copper belt
Kolwezi ZAMBIA
ANGOLA Source: Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR)
Football in Sierra Leone
He shoots, he scores… FRE ETOWN
…again and again and again (allegedly)
U
nlike neighbouring Liberia (whose president, George Weah, was Africa’s fi rst recipient of football’s most presti gious award), Sierra Leone is not known for its footballing talent. But it would take an extraordinarily inept goalkeeper to con cede more than one goal every minute. Yet that is what allegedly happened on July 3rd, when Gulf fc and Kahunla Rangers re ported respective victories by 911 and 950 in league games. The only larger margin re corded in world football was 1490 in 2002, when players from a Madagascan team re peatedly kicked the ball in their own net in protest at poor refereeing. Football fans in Freetown, the capital, are outraged. “The over 180 goals are a na tional disgrace,” says Mohamed Kallokoh. “Our country is not serious about fair play.” The Sierra Leone Football Association (slfa) said the results were “impractical” and that it would investigate. News travelled quickly along the banter highway, but few bothered to verify it. En quiries by The Economist suggest that, un like in Madagascar, the bumper scores did not actually occur. Eric Kaitell, the boss of Kahunla Rangers, says he watched the fi rst half, which ended with his team up by 20, then went home for a nap. When he woke he learnt his team had supposedly scored another 93. Football is, as the cliché goes, a game of two halves. But that is a stretch. Mohamed Patel Jabbie, the chairman of Lumbenbu United, which allegedly lost 950, says: “My team only conceded fi ve goals.” He adds that it would be impossible to score more than 90, partly because the pitch was waterlogged. He reckons the scores were changed after the fi nal whistle. Why? The clubs and the slfa are, for want of a better phrase, shifting the goal posts. First there were suggestions of matchfi xing for gambling syndicates, but that seems unlikely given that these were amateur games not covered by bookmak ers. Mr Jabbie suggests that the two teams needed this many goals to get promoted. African players are prominent in the world’s best teams but domestic leagues are underfunded and their players under paid. There might be a strong incentive to move up to the country’s premier league, where there is some prize money. Mr Kaitell apologises to fans and says he will get to the bottom of the matter. The only upside for Sierra Leone is that its goal keepers are not as bad as they seemed. n
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