Now I'm not claiming to be Nostradamus but if there isn't some serious political pressure put on the DRC I forsee a future where the DRC loses both ICC and ICSID arbitrations and they still couldn't give a fuck. And we'll be in for many a long year trying to recover the damages from them.
It's now clear that the entire country is rotten with corruption from the ground up and the elite only care about their own short term wealth.
It seems like our best hope is that Western powers can put the pressure on with the Lobito Corridor project and that not all of the DRC political class are happy to be beholden to China for the foreseeable future.
We haven't really had any evidence that AVZ problems will be linked to that deal though and lithium only being one aspect of Congolese mineral wealth required by the west. It's a matter of if the west will allow the Chinese to dominate and control the lithium market by stealing Manono.
Mate, I too am perplexed about the West's silence about Manono, given its geo-political importance. What are the yanks and Europeans thinking when they bang on relentlessly about cobalt and other new age minerals and link them to their national interests, but somehow forget about the single most important source of high grade lithium on the planet. While lithium may be rather plentiful globally, Manono's quality and scale is not replicated anywhere else.
And don't get me started on our federal government's silence and apparent lack of interest in AVZ and Manono. In 2020, the FIRB blocked Yibin Tianyi Lithium from taking a 24.99% stake in AVZ Minerals on the basis of national interest, but since then...absolute radio silence while AVZ is abandoned to fight alone.
Cheers
F
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