The elements of power, p.13
The Elements of Power, page 13
Kabila’s decision to go to the market and sell off mining assets would shape Congo for years to come, and it would create a marketplace where only those with the fattest pocketbooks would survive. In retrospect, looking back on a world that was globalizing and consuming more and more products derived from mining, a world in which Beijing was flexing more muscle and the West was becoming more averse to risks, the path to China’s dominance in energy storage takes on a certain sense of inevitability. But in the 1990s, China was still a haven for things being churned out on the cheap.
And where Congo was going was anyone’s guess. Even as their war against Mobutu continued to rage, Kabila’s rebels had begun to run fire sales of Congo’s most prized copper-and-cobalt assets. Kabila, formerly a Maoist, was prepared to go to the market to fuel his political ambitions, and there were those on the market who were all too willing to comply. On April 9, 1997, just over a month before Mobutu fled, Kabila’s forces seized Lubumbashi and made it the de facto rebel capital.
The next day, Bill Turner, CEO of Anvil Mining, flew in. Anvil was an Australian mining firm that had just submitted the year before an application to work in Katanga under the Mobutu government. “We want to know how the new authorities intend to honor the old contracts signed with the Mobutu regime,” he told the French newspaper Libération. “We will not renegotiate our contracts—it took us years to snatch them from Mobutu.” The vultures, he said, were circling, looking for deals with the rebels. He seemed to be counting himself as a vulture too. The visit paid off: Anvil was allowed to explore for minerals in Katanga. On February 27, 1998, Kabila personally ratified the Dikulushi Mining Convention with the firm. The convention gave Anvil a 90 percent stake in the Dikulushi copper-silver mine on the shores of Lake Mweru, which the firm said would produce 20,000 tons of copper and 1.8 million ounces of silver a year.
* * *
The sales of mines by Kabila’s rebels before the fall of Mobutu’s government formed the germ of the mining regime that now provides the world’s battery and electric-vehicle industries with so much of their copper and most of their cobalt. The day after Turner arrived, more international businessmen flew into the capital of Congo’s copper-rich South. When their planes landed, company officials were driven through Lubumbashi’s wide streets to the twin concrete slabs of the Karavia Hotel, nestled next to a small lake and Lubumbashi’s golf course. In faded rooms that had originally been designed by Gécamines for visiting dignitaries, they went over their pitches with Kabila’s men. Kabila himself arrived on the fourteenth, by way of a corporate jet owned by the mining entrepreneurs Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle. The rebel leader set up in one of Mobutu’s palaces.
But Mobutu was still at the head of government in Kinshasa, and the deals that were being struck at the Karavia were not valid under the Zairean Constitution, which declared that the subsoil belonged to the state. In the blanched luxury of the hotel’s halls, nobody seemed to care. The old order was dissolving, and a new one was being constituted before their eyes. “This is the first time that a developing country recovering from economic devastation and civil war has gone straight to the private sector for help,” Africa Confidential noted. Bechtel, the U.S. engineering and construction behemoth, even began to provide the rebels with satellite imagery, and according to The Wall Street Journal, Robert Stewart, an executive at Bechtel, began to travel around Congo with Kabila, instructing him on how to put down “ethnic uprisings.” The investors at the Karavia were told by a rebel who was advising Kabila on financial matters that they had better commit capital or risk losing out. “I think those who trust us today will have a jump-start on you,” Mawampanga Mwana Nanga, the finance adviser, told the investors. The foreign businessmen understood that the money would go directly to Kabila’s rebel army.
The air crackled with tension between sparring suits at the Karavia. The atmosphere was so thick that even the breakfast buffet felt like a battlefield. Boldface names, such as South Africa’s Anglo American Corporation, were present, as well as smaller mining companies and “junior miners,” firms that prospected for mines in the toughest-to-access parts of the world. Among the latter were representatives of Anvil Mining; Consolidated Eurocan Ventures Ltd., a firm founded by Adolf H. Lundin, a Swede (family motto “No guts, no glory”); and the Boulle brothers’ firm, American Mineral Fields, Inc (AMF). Junior miners are often hard-bitten, larger-than-life characters who have grown accustomed to living under pressure. As Max Boulle told The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andrew Maykuth, “You need strong nerves to work here.”
Jewels, the HSBC Equator banker, also traveled to Lubumbashi that May. He invited Katumba, his mild-mannered apprentice, to join him; he thought the young man might be able to learn something. But Katumba was also a local, and local knowledge can sometimes be the difference between doing a deal and going home without a contract. Besides, Katumba was eager to learn. When they arrived at the airport, they noticed a group of men speaking among themselves. “One of them recognized Katumba and called out to him,” Jewels recalled. He asked Katumba who the people were. “He said they were his old school friends, but they turned out to be Kabila’s people.”
Jewels had come to Lubumbashi to talk to Gécamines about a $30 million loan for a concession in Kolwezi called Tilwezembe. HSBC Equator was involved in arranging the funding for the project. Soon after arriving, Katumba advised Jewels that one of his friends wanted to meet them later that evening at the Karavia for a drink. Mwana, the rebel finance adviser, arrived in his T-shirt and running shorts. “He had been a waiter or something in the States,” Jewels remembered. He made few promises. “It wasn’t for me to tell whether they were going to win the coup or not. You know, I recollect being quite cautious in what I was saying because I didn’t know them.”
The HSBC bankers met with the rebels several times at the Karavia. At one point, according to Katumba’s memoir, Mwana turned to Katumba and asked, “Why are you speaking to me about other people before your country, our country?”
Katumba replied that he was employed at the bank, and that his country had never offered him anything. “You are here,” Katumba said. “Mobutu is over there.”
Mwana retorted that there would be a new government in Kinshasa in seven days. “Think of your country. You ought to put your talents at the service of your country,” the finance adviser said, snorting. “That’s what I propose to you.” With that, Mwana abruptly ended the meeting.
Mwana’s words, however imperious, spoke to a secret longing that Katumba had long nurtured. The banker did feel called to public service, but he demurred that day in Lubumbashi. “That which is most important to me,” he later wrote, “that which I truly like, that which lives in my most profound depths, I rarely exteriorize, and then only by barely noticeable signs.”
At the Karavia, someone pointed out a young man to Katumba. To the banker’s reckoning, the man, who was in his twenties, looked “calm and serene.” It was Joseph Kabila Kabange, Laurent-Désiré’s son, a man Katumba would soon come to know as “the Boss.”
* * *
One night at the Karavia’s bar, two of the attendees almost got into a fight. On one side was an official from Anglo American; on the other, someone who worked for the Boulle brothers’ AMF. In the year before, AMF had signed a deal with Mobutu’s government for what the Belgian colonialists had christened the Prince Léopold Mine, a huge underground zinc-and-copper complex in Kipushi, on the Zambian border. But when Kabila’s rebels took the river port of Kisangani in March 1997, AMF decided to go all in and back the rebels, letting Kabila use the company jet. “Do you wait until everybody gets here and be last or do you get in early?” Max Boulle said at the time. “We’ve made a conscious decision to get in early.”
With Kabila’s men looking set to overthrow Mobutu at any opportunity, it was looking like Anglo American, a behemoth that controlled more than half of private business in South Africa, might lose the rights to several diamond mines to the upstart Boulles. The company was left looking a little stupid. Tired and overwound at the Karavia’s bar, Anglo’s officials finally hit a boiling point when it was revealed that the Boulle brothers had scored a contract with the rebels to reprocess the tailings at Gécamines’s sites in Kolwezi. (Tailings are rock scrap left over from already worked minerals.) In earlier generations, this material had been cast aside, but now it could be processed again with modern techniques to squeeze even more metals from the scrap. Some of the tailings in Kolwezi dated all the way back to the colonial era. And that was what so irked the South Africans at Anglo: Just like the beginning of Congolese independence marked the downfall of many a Belgian firm that had dominated in Congo, Kabila’s arrival seemed to portend the end of the firms that had established themselves under Mobutu. They believed that at the Karavia, under their noses, the Boulles had just signed a billion-dollar deal that gave them access to more than a million tons of copper and 275,000 tons of cobalt.
But all was never as it seemed in Congo. The Belgian social scientist Erik Kennes has written that although dark money flowed freely at the negotiations, not a single contract was truly signed, sealed, and delivered. That December, around the time Kabila went to China, he reneged on the deal he signed with the Boulles, claiming it had been falsified. In Texas, the Boulles brought a $3 billion suit against Anglo American for wrecking their deal, but Anglo denied the charges. The case ended up being dismissed.
And so it would go for the next decade and a half. Caveat emptor. The history of Congo’s mining after Kabilist deregulation is littered with such stories: Welcomed with open arms when the money was flowing, small and large companies were cast aside when a better offer was on the table. Hard-nosed businessmen like the Boulles and the Zimbabwean entrepreneurs Billy Rautenbach and John Bredenkamp—people who have all, at one time or another, been criticized by the international press for their lucrative exploits in some of Africa’s poorest nations—got a once-over from Congolese leadership.
Even George Arthur Forrest, the Katanga-born businessman who was used to double-dealing under Mobutu’s regime, got duped. Due to his deals with Gécamines, Forrest was in some ways known as the progenitor of Congo’s mining privatization. “For international companies wishing to invest in the mining sector in Katanga, George Forrest has become a must-have operator,” one European academic wrote in 2004.
When I visited Lubumbashi, from 2019 onward, one of the town’s central squares was called Square George Forrest, and he had donated much of the town’s art museum. Nevertheless, in a rare interview with a Belgian newspaper in 2023, Forrest would grumble that “Kabila took over our mines.” Forrest’s family had been in Congo since 1921. “He didn’t compensate us, and the Belgian government did nothing to help us. We lost these mines and a lot of money. This is an area to avoid.”
But few people seemed to mind that Kabila was, for the moment, reneging on his promises. It just wasn’t a priority to many international observers. The war in the East was developing into a veritable bloodbath, and Kabila was becoming ever more erratic and authoritarian, locking up dissidents and silencing freedom of expression. The huge profits that could be imagined in Congo, however, meant there were always people who would jump at the chance to fill the investment gap if they thought the price was right.
Stewart, the Bechtel official who had traveled with Kabila, reportedly supplying him with satellite data and helping him put down uprisings, was furious when he learned that the mine concessions promised to him had been signed over to a Rautenbach company, Wheels of Africa. The journalist Howard W. French later wrote that while working in Congo during the period, he saw “an impressive, bound briefing book” that purportedly outlined Bechtel’s plan. “Bechtel would shepherd in the construction of roads, dams, airports, and other projects on a massive scale, all of which would be collateralized or paid for by Congo’s mineral wealth.” The plan sounded a lot like a resources-for-infrastructure deal that China would negotiate with Congo—and that U.S. commentators would criticize—only a few years later. “For reasons that have to do with the erratic policies of the Kabila government but also with the United States’ chronic inability to invest much focus on Africa, they all came to naught,” French concluded, “and China, with a greater appetite for risk and a longer-term vision about the continent, ran with the ball.”
Chapter 18
Plans on the Back of a Comet
Dan Gertler claims to have fallen in love with Congo while smoke was still rising over Kinshasa. It was May 1997, and Mobutu Sese Seko had just fallen. Gertler was twenty-four. He had just finished two years of military service in Israel, and he was out to prove himself in Africa.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no international businessman in Congo’s copper-and-cobalt mining industry would receive more scrutiny than Gertler. At first, however, the young man had no interest in critical metals. He was focused on diamonds. The precious stones were part of his inheritance, after all: His grandfather Moshe Schnitzer was known as “Mr. Diamond,” and the square in front of the Israel Diamond Exchange was called Moshe Schnitzer Square. Moshe had created the exchange, and Shmuel Schnitzer, Moshe’s son (and Gertler’s uncle), was one of its fastest-rising stars.
The name Schnitzer came from the Yiddish word for “to cut”—and cutting diamonds is how Moshe rose to prominence after he arrived in Mandatory Palestine from Romania in 1934. During the 1940s, working as a diamond cutter, he joined the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group agitating for the creation of an Israeli state. In 1967, Moshe became the president of the Israel Diamond Exchange. He held the post until 1993. Under his tenure, exports of polished diamonds from the country increased from $200 million to $3.4 billion.
Diamonds—and Israel—were everything to Moshe. “There was no real separation between diamonds and family life,” Shmuel told a journalist in 2002. Gertler remembered getting up at five every morning as a child to learn how to polish stones. Moshe’s Irgun comrades had made their way to the top of Israel’s defense and political apparatus—powerful people like the right-wing prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. These deep connections between Moshe and the Israeli military and state apparatuses would occasionally shine through as Gertler built his network in Congo.
Gertler was the son of Moshe’s daughter Hanna and Asher Gertler, a onetime professional soccer goalie turned diamond trader. At first, the son wanted to follow his father onto the playing field, but he was asthmatic, so he focused on his other talents, excelling in mathematics and science. He was also personable, which helped—boisterous, endlessly talkative, and, to some people, very likable, with a broad smile that flashed a set of gapped teeth. (The charm wasn’t universal, however: As one mining executive who later worked with him told me, “Dan was annoying as hell.”)
Under the charming facade, Gertler quickly grew to nurture an ambition passed down to him by his grandfather: He wanted to control the supply chain for diamonds, thereby cutting out middlemen and miners—people like the Boulles and companies like De Beers and Anglo American—and keeping more of the profits for himself. While speaking to two journalists from the magazine Jeune Afrique, a childhood friend of Gertler’s recalled that the young man had a “particular” understanding of the world: “When he looks at a wooden chair, he ponders not only how it was made, but from which forest it came, and what infrastructure made it possible to exploit the forest.”
Gertler decided to strike out on his own to try and see whether he could make some diamond deals away from the family business. He soon began to focus on Africa, the continent where the overwhelming majority of the world’s diamonds came from. Vast sums could be made with the right connections and know-how.
By the time Gertler reached Congo, he had already negotiated deals in Angola and Liberia, but he hadn’t yet made the big score that would cement his reputation.
Watching the news coming out of Kinshasa as Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s troops took the city, Gertler saw an opportunity, one that he, like the miners at the Karavia, understood would accrue to those who got in early. He took a flight from Tel Aviv to Germany and then to South Africa: After twenty hours, his plane finally touched down in Kinshasa.
* * *
Kabila’s rebel army had seized the capital from Mobutu on May 17, 1997, only a few days before Gertler’s arrival. The streets were patrolled by child soldiers. In the aftermath of its capture, the city was anything but safe. The Big Vegetables had vamoosed with whatever they could take—to Belgium, to the countryside, or to nearby African countries—and the capital felt ransacked and raw. Kabila, the new president, spent his first nights in the city on the sofas of the VIP lounge at the Chinese-built Kamanyola Stadium, accompanied by the Rwandan commanders who had managed his rebellion for him.
Outside, the city, a symbol of everything Kabila had ever fought against, was a skeleton of its former self. The remnants of Mobutu’s troops and loyalists were rounded up and incarcerated. The nights spluttered with the noise of bullets. Kabila realized that Congo faced the same problem it had encountered after decolonization—a lack of skills—so he began to make job offers to the former dictator’s bureaucrats. Kufi Kilanga, who was thought of as a professional, was offered amnesty and a job with the new administration, but as his son told me, he just couldn’t bring himself to work with the people who had unseated Mobutu.
