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The Chief's Lieutenants Appointed to Make Final Adjustments with the Trump Team
Whoever wants to achieve success combines expertise and efficiency. Tshisekedi is working hard to achieve this.
The hard-working Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and her colleague for Mines, Kizito Pakabomba Kapinga Mulume, along with the Chairman of Gécamines SA, Guy-Robert Lukama Nkunzi, are the three musketeers appointed by President Tshisekedi to negotiate the final adjustments to the barter deal, critical minerals for security, between the DRC and the United States.
Before the end of the summer, the sky of strategic relations amidst the mining transactions between the US and the DRC is unlikely to be clouded by a single cloud.
The three-headed special coordination body established by Fatshi's primary mission is to discuss each clause of the "minerals for military support" deal with the US administration.
To ensure its success, Félix Tshisekedi has strengthened the Kayikwamba-Kizito-Lukama coordination body with high-level legal experts, including Pascal Agboyibor, a partner at ASAFO & CO, internationally renowned for his expertise in the energy, mining, infrastructure, and project development sectors in Africa.
The coordination body will also be supported by a technical secretariat composed of 22 experts whose essential role will be to produce regular reports on the progress of the negotiations, as well as the results of the implementation of the agreement in preparation.
The profile of Jules Alingete
The state-owned mining company, Cominière SA, and the Mining Registry (Cami) are also among these technical experts. Within the civil society movement, fingers are crossed in the hope that "American contracts would not contain leonine and obscure clauses like Chinese contracts."
In the initial draft of Chinese contracts presented to the National Assembly by the then Minister of ITPR, the late Pierre Lumbi O'kongo, a certain Kabale, not otherwise identified, appeared in the notes like a hair in the soup.
Speaker Vital Kamerhe L.K. Kingi was unable to prevent elected officials from the opposition, then led by the MLC, from heaping more harsh criticism on Chinese contracts.
It took more than 15 years for the incorruptible Jules Alingete Key, then head of the IGF department, to return to the infamous contracts and force the consortium of Chinese companies (Sinohydro, Crec, and Afrexim Bank) to rebalance the financial package in favor of the DRC, with an additional US$7 billion allocated to road infrastructure construction.
As with the revisiting of the Chinese contract under the leadership of the IGF, Félix Tshisekedi insisted on transparency in the negotiations and compliance with the Congolese legal framework (particularly the mining code and regulations), as well as the certainty that the deal with the US, in addition to security guarantees, would also offer definite economic benefits for the DRC.
So, a win-win situation!
Kobold CEO: "DRC, the best place in the world!"
And according to analysts who spoke to Ouragan.cd, the presence of delegates from Cominière SA is justified by Mr. Tshisekedi's desire to offer the lithium mining operation in Manono, a 19-hour drive from Bukavu, to the American group KoBold Metals, co-owned by billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
KoBold has apparently convinced the Australian company AVZ to drop legal proceedings against Cominière and join the new pact.
KoBold is a young mining company that gained notoriety in 2022 by investing in the development of a copper deposit in Zambia.
"The company aims to harness new technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, to explore strategic minerals needed for the energy transition."
In 2023, its CEO, Kurt House, stated that the DRC is probably "the best place in the world" for the materials his company is looking for.
Never one without two.
It's highly likely that the American firm KoBold would find imitators on Wall Street.
However, for many civil society organizations specializing in the extractive sector, Guy-Robert Lukama is considered the Albert Yuma of the regime, as he holds multiple positions and negotiates contracts considered as murky as those of Joseph Kabila.
And his presence among Congolese negotiators arouses suspicion.
The United States has targeted a wide range of minerals, which are, in fact, being swallowed up in other, better-known places, such as copper, cobalt, or lithium.
Since April 15, 2024, Uncle Sam has increased to fifty (50) the list of minerals it considers critical or strategic.
These are: aluminum, antimony, arsenic, barite, beryllium, bismuth, cerium, cesium, chromium, cobalt, dysprosium, erbium, europium, fluorspar, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, graphite, hafnium, holmium, indium, iridium, lanthanum, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, manganese, neodymium, nickel, niobium, palladium, platinum, praseodymium, rhodium, rubidium, ruthenium, samarium, scandium, tantalum, tellurium, terbium, thulium, tin, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zinc and zirconium.
All these minerals, if not their indices, are found in the Gecamines concessions.
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Never one without two.
