The Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) ranked 176 out of 187on the latest United Nations Human Development Index and two new investigations have shed more light on why that’s the case.
Despite being Africa’s biggest copper producer and the world’s leading source of cobalt with “up to $10 billion” worth of those minerals mined and sold abroad, an investigation by Global Witness, the anti-corruption charity, shows that “as little as 6%” of DR Congo’s annual mining exports reach the national budget.
As a result, despite the country’s vast mineral wealth, an average Congolese national is “among the poorest on the planet,” Global Witness says.
This reality, described as a “paradox of poverty”, is the consequence of large scale corruption which ensures very little of the country’s mineral wealth find its way back to the people. Between 2013 and 2015, mining revenue of up to $1.3 billion—twice the amount the country spends annually on health and education—failed to reach the treasury, according to Global Witness. The shortfall is blamed on a “dysfunctional state-owned mining company and opaque national tax agencies” as well as “corrupt networks linked to President Joseph Kabila’s regime.”
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