3 minute read
Sierra Leone football
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 economy: the motorcycletaxi drivers transporting three sackladen miners at a time; coiffed women selling “I heart drc” sacks for collecting rocks. One study suggests 60% of households in the region rely on artisanal 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 flouted. Collapses are common. “There are no statistics but many, many are dying,” says Donat Kambola Lenge, a humanrights lawyer. George Ngome, a pastor, says he presides over lots of funerals for miners without identity papers. “Their families never know.”
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By law miners must belong to cooperatives. Often these are little more than labour 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 financed by Chinese traders. Every depot is colloquially known as La Maison Chinoise. At one your correspondent’s journalistic interest is conflated with the commercial sort, leading to an offer to The Economist: “You can also exploit our ores.”
It is mostly miners who seem to be getting exploited. Some of them say that traders’ scales and spectrometers (used to measure the concentration of cobalt) are rigged. They complain about a litany of unofficial “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 refineries where it may be blended with ore from big mines. “Despite the efforts of some companies to portray industrial [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 firms that trade, refine and use cobalt have tried to understand what happens in their supply chains. Apple, for example, lists all of its cobalt refiners. Many companies use rcs Global, a consultancy with auditing staff permanently 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 Morocco. Tesla is producing batteries that use much less cobalt. And firms are sponsoring initiatives to make life better for miners. 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 association of German car firms and industrial giants, wants to offer safety training.
But critics say this is not enough. “There is artisanal cobalt in supply chains, even if it is not acknowledged,” says Benjamin Katz of the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. “And there is very little being done to improve conditions.” A consultant to large firms adds: “You have a group of downstream businesses that get their annual auditor report, pretend to be virtuous and go back to selling phones and cars.”
In 2019 the Congolese government proposed giving a subsidiary of Gécamines, the state miner, a monopoly over the buying 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 towards 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 American 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 richcountry governments should be clear about what amounts to a responsible standard for cobalt, as is the case with “blood diamonds”. Both steps could allow artisanal cobalt into the market legitimately and improve the lot of Congo’s people.
In Kolwezi, Pastor Ngembe watches a Christian channel on tv, seeking inspiration 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 75 100
Industrial mines Artisanal Others
Congo Russia Australia
Source: US Geological Survey
Kinshasa
300 km
C O N G O
TANZANIA
Tenke Fungurume mine
Copper belt
Kolwezi
ZAMBIA Football in Sierra Leone He shoots, he scores…
F R E E TO W N …again and again and again (allegedly)
Unlike neighbouring Liberia (whose president, George Weah, was Africa’s first recipient of football’s most prestigious award), Sierra Leone is not known for its footballing talent. But it would take an extraordinarily inept goalkeeper to concede more than one goal every minute. Yet that is what allegedly happened on July 3rd, when Gulf fc and Kahunla Rangers reported respective victories by 911 and 950 in league games. The only larger margin recorded in world football was 1490 in 2002, when players from a Madagascan team repeatedly 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 national 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. Enquiries by The Economist suggest that, unlike in Madagascar, the bumper scores did not actually occur. Eric Kaitell, the boss of Kahunla Rangers, says he watched the first 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 five 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 final whistle.
Why? The clubs and the slfa are, for want of a better phrase, shifting the goalposts. First there were suggestions of matchfixing for gambling syndicates, but that seems unlikely given that these were amateur games not covered by bookmakers. 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 underpaid. 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 goalkeepers are not as bad as they seemed. n
