In our last article we wrote about Mobutu Sese Seko, who was installed with Western help after the murder of the Congo’s first elected leader, and kept in place for thirty-two years because the minerals under his country mattered more than the people on top of it.

The obvious response is that this is history. Mobutu died in 1997. The Cold War is over. Africa negotiates its own contracts now.

So let us look at what is being signed today.

July 2025: the agreement

In July 2025, the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a mineral exploration agreement with KoBold Metals — a California company founded in 2018, backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, by Bill Gates, by Jeff Bezos and by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

KoBold’s method is the modern part. It uses artificial intelligence and large-scale computing to analyse geophysical, geochemical and drilling data, looking for deposits that conventional exploration missed. It has refined the approach in North America and Australia. Now it is applying it to Africa.

The detail that tells you everything

Inside that agreement is a clause about archives.

KoBold undertook to digitise the geological records held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, and to provide free public access to historic geoscientific data through Congo’s National Geological Service.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa is at Tervuren, outside Brussels. It was built by Leopold II to display the Congo he owned personally. Its collections and its archives are the physical residue of Belgian rule, and its geological holdings are the survey records of the colonial period — the maps and measurements taken while extracting rubber, ivory, copper and uranium from a territory whose people had no say in any of it.

An American artificial intelligence is being trained on Belgian colonial survey data to locate Congolese lithium.

The archive is the same archive. The rock is the same rock. What has changed is that the searching is now done by algorithm and the metal in demand is used in car batteries rather than telephone wire.

How the deal came about

The sequence is worth setting out in order, because the order is the argument.

In June 2025, President Donald Trump brokered an agreement intended to halt the fighting in the mineral-rich east of the Congo — in return for Western investment. The KoBold deal followed the next month.

The United States State Department had stepped up its diplomatic presence in the DRC in the preceding period, with high-level visits aimed at laying the groundwork for mineral agreements.

And the deal explicitly supports the Lobito Corridor — the rail route being developed with American and European backing to carry Congolese and Zambian copper and cobalt west through Angola to the Atlantic, rather than east into Chinese supply chains. State Department officials describe it as one of the key pillars of US strategy in the region.

The joke at the heart of the corridor

The Lobito Corridor exists to reduce dependence on China.

In his book on the critical-minerals race, the journalist Nicholas Niarchos records asking the planners a simple question: how would lithium from Manono actually reach the railway?

They told him the easiest way would be to build a road — with China Railway Seventh Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

Niarchos also reports that despite the investment and the guarantees from Washington, comparatively little copper and cobalt has so far actually left Congo through Angola by rail on its way to the United States.

A corridor built to break Chinese dominance may need a Chinese state company to build the road that feeds it.

His conclusion is the one worth quoting in substance: until the hard questions are answered with integrity, the corridor remains just another extractive route.

The argument on the other side

We are not going to pretend this is a simple morality tale, because it is not, and readers who want that can find it elsewhere.

All of that is true. And none of it answers the question that actually matters.

The question

Congo has been the world’s largest cobalt producer for years. It is the second-largest source of copper on earth. It holds some of the biggest lithium deposits yet identified.

And it remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with as many as 150 armed groups operating on its territory and a war in the east that has never properly ended.

Sixty-five years of independence. Uranium, copper, cobalt, diamonds, coltan, now lithium. Belgian, then American, then Chinese, now American again.

At what point does a country this rich get to be rich?

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the only test that matters, and it is answerable with numbers: how much of the value stays, how much processing happens in-country, how many Congolese engineers are employed, what the tax take is, and what it builds.

On the historical record of the last century, the answer has been: very little, almost none, few, negotiable, and nothing that lasted.

Not just Congo

You told us this looks like a pattern. It is, and it runs straight through the countries we cover.

The colonial version of this was enforced by soldiers. The current version is enforced by contract, by capital, and by the simple fact that a country needing revenue this year cannot outwait a company that can wait a decade.

What honest scrutiny would look like

Not opposition to mining. Congo needs the revenue and the world needs the metals. Scrutiny, which is a different thing.

Publish the agreements in full

The July 2025 framework has been reported in summary. The complete terms — royalties, tax provisions, local content obligations, environmental undertakings, dispute resolution — belong in the public domain in Kinshasa, not in a filing cabinet. Congolese citizens are the owners of the deposit.

Name the value split

For every tonne of lithium leaving Manono, what proportion of the final value stays in the DRC? That figure exists inside a spreadsheet somewhere. It is the single most important number in the entire arrangement and it is never published.

Ask where the processing happens

Raw ore leaving Africa is the colonial pattern. Refining in-country is the thing that changed South Korea and is changing Indonesia. If the lithium is refined outside Congo, this is a nineteenth-century arrangement with twenty-first-century technology.

Track the corridor honestly

The Lobito Corridor is presented as strategic infrastructure. It should be judged on tonnages actually moved and on what Angolan, Congolese and Zambian communities along the route receive — not on announcements.

Follow the AVZ dispute

An Australian company, AVZ Minerals, has been in a prolonged legal dispute with Kinshasa over Manono’s mining rights, and KoBold’s agreement positions it as the government’s preferred partner to resolve that impasse. How a contested title is resolved tells you a great deal about how the next one will be.

Why we publish this

We are not anti-investment, anti-mining or anti-American, and we hold no brief for China either.

We publish it because this website is called African Independence, and independence has always been the question of who decides what happens to what is under the ground.

In 1960 Patrice Lumumba said the Congo’s mineral wealth should be administered by the Congolese. He was Prime Minister for ninety days and then he was flown to Katanga and killed.

Sixty-five years later, the wealth is still not administered by the Congolese in any meaningful sense, the country is still poor, the east is still at war, and the newest agreement to extract from it was signed within a month of a peace deal that traded an end to fighting for investment access.

The technology has improved beyond recognition. Artificial intelligence now finds in months what took colonial surveyors decades.

The direction of travel has not changed at all.

Verified: 29 August 2026.
The KoBold Metals agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, signed in July 2025 and confirmed publicly by President Félix Tshisekedi, is reported by Reuters, Bloomberg, Semafor, Mining Weekly and Metal Tech News. Terms described — exploration licences over more than 1,600 square kilometres, the Roche Dure deposit within the Manono project, the appointment of a Congolese envoy, and the undertaking to digitise geological records held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa with public access via Congo’s National Geological Service — are as published in those reports. Seven exploration permits across Tanganyika and Haut-Lomami provinces were confirmed by the DRC mining registry on 27 August 2025. The reported investment figure of over one billion dollars relates to the acquisition of AVZ Minerals’ stake and is as published; this publication has not independently verified it. KoBold’s investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and funds linked to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as stated by the company and in reporting. The account of Lobito Corridor logistics and the reference to China Railway Seventh Group is drawn from reporting by Nicholas Niarchos, author of The Elements of Power, published by Rest of World. Ghanaian comparisons draw on our own published investigations, sourced on those pages. No allegation of wrongdoing is made against KoBold Metals, its investors, the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or any named individual. This article examines publicly announced commercial and diplomatic arrangements and the historical pattern into which they fall.