According to reports, DR Congo hires Washington advisors to gain US support for military and diplomatic attention as M23 escalates the war in eastern Congo. President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Félix Tshisekedi, is offering Washington access to Congo-Kinshasa’s valuable minerals as a bargaining instrument to get the US’s support to drive out M23 and Rwanda from eastern Congo-Kinshasa.
Congo has hired US lobbyists on a year-long agreement worth US$1.4 million with the aim of delivering ‘strategic engagements to advance defence security and critical mineral diplomacy with the United States government’, as reported in a filing with the Foreign Agents Registration Act on 20 February.
As reported, The contract is held by Aaron Poynton, an American businessman who was assigned by Kinshasa last June to arrange a roundtable discussion for business and political leaders from the US and Congo (Dispatches 19/6/24, Kinshasa gets a new business Poynt man).
Tshisekedi’s government had expanded its involvement in Washington prior to Donald Trump’s election in November. Last April, state mining firm Gécamines signed a one-year contract worth $925,000 with Mercury, a K Street lobby shop in Washington DC, to boost bargaining with Washington).
Furthermore, regarding Ukraine, Trump has explicitly stated – especially through his insistence that Ukraine sign a deal allowing the US access to a claimed $500 billion in rare earth minerals as a component of a peace agreement to halt Russia’s invasion – that his approach will be distinctly transactional.
The mining of minerals has been a secondary aspect of M23’s incursions into the Kivus. A report from United Nations experts revealed that minerals were being smuggled from areas controlled by M23 into Rwanda for sale.
Tshisekedi referred to the European Union’s cash-for-minerals agreement with Rwanda as ‘an absolute scandal’ and blamed Brussels for contributing to ‘complicit in the theft and looting of Congo’. During a February 24 interview with the New York Times, Tshisekedi asserted that the Trump administration has expressed interest in a strategic minerals agreement.
This development could draw increased US investment into the $6 billion Lobito corridor project, which connects Angola’s largest port with the copper mines in Zambia and eventually to Congo-K. Advocates of this initiative feared that the new US administration might hesitate to support Lobito, given its association with ex-President Joe Biden’s Africa strategy. Until now, the pathway for US companies to leverage Lobito for greater access to Congo-K’s essential minerals remained uncertain.
