The dispute over Africa and the ‘soft power’ of the Vatican

Any of the millions of phones in the world contains several grams of cobalt, an essential ferromagnetic mineral for all types of electronic devices. But its presence is especially noticeable in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs): Tesla’s Cybertruck will carry between 10 and 15 kilos of this metal.

Cobalt-free – a Latinized term from German Kobalt– there will be no green transition. Medieval Saxon miners named it so because of the kobolds (goblins, spirits of the earth) who, they believed, had him bewitched. One of its radioisotopes (CO-60) is essential in chemotherapies against cancer.

In 2030, the automobile industry alone will need as much cobalt as was mined in total in 2017. According to the International Energy Agency, an average electric car needs six times more metals than a conventional one. If the goals of the Paris Agreement were met, the demand for cobalt would double – or quadruple – in the next 20 years.

The US Geological Service calculates that the proven reserves of cobalt – that is, those that can be extracted with existing technology – are around 7.6 million metric tons. In the earth’s crust and seabed there could be 145 million more tons. The question, according to Seaver Wang, director of a recent UCLA-MIT study on strategic mineral reserves, is whether they can be sustainably mined and processed, something that remains to be seen.

blood cobalt

In red cobalt (2023), Siddhart Karan describes the extreme –and atrocious– conditions in which cobalt is extracted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which concentrates two thirds of the reserves and 75% of the production of the metal, stained by the blood of the Congolese.

The DRC is a country scarred by centuries of slavery and colonialism. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, turned a territory 80 times larger than Belgium into his personal property in order to exploit his enormous wealth: ivory, rubber, diamonds… As Adam Hochschild writes in King Leopold’s ghost (1999), between 1885 and 1908 the mass murders of the colonial regime claimed between five and 10 million lives. Severed hands became so common that foremen and slavers used them as currency.

After independence in 1960, the Mobutu Sese Seko regime (1965-1997) created the state mining company Gécamines, which went bankrupt in the 1990s, leaving thousands of miners jobless. These later dedicated themselves to exploiting the deposits in the Katanga region, “the new heart of darkness”, as Kara calls it.

Between 1998 and 2002 the war in the Great Lakes area involved nine African countries and claimed two million lives through violence and the famine and disease it caused. The wounds are still open.

Chinese companies like TFM and CDM, which dominate the Congolese mining sector, produce 75% of the world’s refined cobalt. About two thirds are excavated with heavy machinery in industrial mines. The rest is extracted by artisanal miners to whom intermediaries usually pay $40 for an amount of ore that it takes them to dig out of the ground an entire night.

In certain areas, cobalt is found in tunnels and tunnels, such as the Shabara mine, where in 2018 Kara saw 15,000 men and boys work in a crater where they could barely move or breathe. In the collapse of one of its underground galleries, 63 miners died. Since the raw ore is mixed with that which is mined industrially, there is not a shred of clean cobalt.

SA Predators

Amnesty International and Afrowatch have linked Apple and Samsung to abusive practices to seize cobalt. The situation is not very different in other sectors. According to Steven Nabieu Rogers, director of the Africa Faith & Justice Network, multinationals such as Cargill from the US, Karuturi from India, Beidahuang from China and Star from Saudi Arabia sign long-term farmland leases with clauses specifying that any legal problems will be dealt with. must elucidate in the courts of their countries.

“Amnesty International and Afrowatch have linked Apple and Samsung to abusive practices to get cobalt”

In December, the Swiss miner Glencore had to pay the Kinshasa government compensation of $180 million for collusion and bribery between 2007 and 2018. In the first half of 2022, Glencore, owner of the Mutanda copper and cobalt mine in the DRC, it made profits of $18.9 billion and paid fines of about $1.66 billion to various governments, including the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.

In 2017, the US sanctioned the Texan Halliburton for paying bribes in Angola and the Israeli tycoon Dann Gertler for doing so in the DRC. In November 2021, a Stockholm court charged Ian Lundin, the majority shareholder of the Lundin Energy oil company, with complicity in war crimes committed in 1999 in Darfur by the Sudanese regime of Omar al-Bashir.

The new dispute for Africa

Africa is home to 54 countries with an economy of 3.4 trillion dollars (3% of world GDP). In January, the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, spent 10 days in Senegal, Zambia and South Africa, where she denounced that China is a barrier to the restructuring of African countries’ sovereign debts.

In the last six months, Sergie Lavrov has made three tours in various African countries. A few days after the Russian Foreign Minister’s visit to South Africa, his government announced that his navy would participate in naval exercises with Russia and China off the coast of Durban, in the Indian Ocean, between February 17 and 27, coinciding with with the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the UN General Assembly, South Africa was one of 26 African countries that refused to condemn Russian aggression. Moscow is taking advantage of the prestige of the Soviet Union, which during the Cold War supported anti-colonial movements and welcomed thousands of African students to Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University. In October 2019, when he received 43 African heads of state in Sochi, Putin recalled that Russia never had colonies in Africa or participated in the slave trade.

Hunting

The IMF estimates that Russian-African bilateral trade was around $15.6 billion in 2021, compared to $254 billion for China. Combining propaganda, arms sales and mercenaries, Russia’s political influence is far greater than these figures reveal. Africa is a very attractive hunting ground for predators. In countries like the Central African Republic – one of the fiefdoms of the Wagner Group, the private army, of Yevgueni Prigozhin – there is almost no State, controls or borders.

According to Sipri, between 2012 and 2021, Russia sold 45% of the heavy weapons purchased by African countries. The Kremlin knows that the moment is right in French-speaking countries due to the counterproductive effects of French military operations such as Sangaris, which ended abruptly in 2016. Furthermore, in 2021, the Bamako government expelled the French ambassador. On the other hand, Emmanuel Macron accused Russia in Benin of being the “last imperial colonial power” in Africa.

In Africa, from Zanzibar to Zambia, China has financed, built or operates 35 major ports and thousands of highways, railways, airports and bridges. According to Deloitte, in 2020 Chinese construction companies received 31% of projects worth $50 million or more, up from 12% in 2013. These projects include parliamentary complexes in Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe and Burundi’s presidential palaces. , Guinea-Bissau and Togo.

The reinvention of Catholicism

On that contested terrain, the world’s smallest state has enviable soft power, as Pope Francis’ recent visit to the DPR and South Sudan demonstrated on his fifth trip to the continent in 10 years. African problems, after all, are also those of the Church of Rome.

Of the 1.36 billion Catholics, 236 million are African. Half of the 105 million Congolese are Catholic, making their church the largest in Africa in a country where 67% of the population is under 26 years of age.

It’s not just the number that counts. African Catholics are reinventing Catholicism, turning it into social action. Cáritas, which manages 2,185 hospitals and medical posts and health centers, provides educational and health services in various regions that the State cannot – or does not want to – provide.

After attending Mass on Sundays, congregations often head to protest demonstrations, preventing their ban or repression. In the last elections of 2018, the Church sent 40,000 observers to polling stations, leading to the first peaceful transfer of power since 1960.

At the N’dolo airport in Kinshasa, the Argentine pope celebrated a mass before almost a million faithful, the most massive of his pontificate, in which he denounced the “forgotten genocide” in the DRC. In the middle of the papal mass, the crowd began to chant in the Lingala language “Fatshi (nickname of President Felix Tshisekedi) your time is up, go at once.”

In the Ituri and Kivu regions there are more than 19 active armed groups. In 2021, the Italian ambassador, Luca Attanasio, was ambushed in Goma while leading a delegation from the UN World Food Program.

Catholics and Presbyterians

In Juba, the South Sudanese capital, Bergoglio was joined by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Ian Greenshields, leader of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), the three largest Christian congregations in the world’s last country to become independent, in 2011.

Some six of the 11 million South Sudanese are Catholic, including the president, Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, who dominates the government and security forces. Machar, his Presbyterian vice president, belongs to the Nuer ethnic group, a traditional rival of the Dinka, replicating in the country on the upper Nile the wars of religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Year after year, billions of dollars in oil revenues are lost in the labyrinths of corruption. According to Crisis Group analyst Alan Boswell, South Sudan, which has the third largest oil reserves in Africa, is essentially a “slush fund” (slush fund).