Today is the birthday of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first democratically elected leader, killed within seven months of taking office with the help of Belgium and the United States. Why did they kill him? Not for communism, whatever they said at the time. For believing the Congo’s wealth should belong to the Congolese. That was enough. Sixty-five years later the fight he died for is still lost, and the clearest winner today is China.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo holds an estimated $24 trillion in untapped minerals, the richest ground on earth, including close to half the world’s cobalt reserves. Yet it ranks 179th of 193 countries on the UN Human Development Index, below Afghanistan, with more than 80 percent of its people in poverty. The wealth is Congolese. The ownership is not. Half a century ago the historian Walter Rodney explained why: Africa’s poverty is produced, not inherited, through exploitation in trade and exploitation in investment. The Congo is that thesis written in cobalt. And China now runs the machine.

The model is simple. Own the mine, control the refining. Chinese firms hold stakes in 15 of the Congo’s 19 industrial cobalt mines. One company, CMOC, owns 80 percent of the giant Tenke Fungurume mine; in 2024 it lifted its cobalt output to 114,000 tonnes and pushed its share of the global cobalt market from 24 to 31 percent in a single year. The Congo now supplies the great majority of China’s cobalt, and Chinese plants refine about 78 percent of the world’s supply. So the country that owns the metal does almost none of the work that makes it worth anything. It just digs.

Put hard numbers on it. In 2024 the Congo exported about $29.6 billion in goods, roughly 90 percent of it minerals. The state kept around $5 billion. On top of that, a 2025 state audit found a $16.8 billion gap between what mining firms reported to the tax authorities and what they declared to the community funds they are legally bound to pay, over 2018 to 2023. So of every $30 billion that leaves the ground each year, the Congo holds on to maybe five. Seventeen cents on the dollar. The other 83 leave the country. And $24 trillion still sits underground, in a place where most people live on less than $2 a day.

Follow a single tonne of that cobalt up the chain and the drain becomes visible. At the mine gate, CMOC booked a record net profit of 13.5 billion yuan, about $1.9 billion, in 2024, most of it from its two Congolese mines. One foreign miner’s profit, nearly 40 percent of what the entire Congolese state collected from mining that year. One rung up, at the refinery, China turns the ore into battery-grade chemicals at margins of 35 to 45 percent. One rung higher, its lithium-battery industry, built on those refined inputs, turned over about $97 billion and made around 70 percent of the world’s cells; its champion, CATL, cleared roughly $7 billion in profit, more than the Congolese government took from all of its mines combined. At the top sit the electric cars and the phones those cells power, a market worth more than a trillion dollars, almost none of it captured in Africa. Of every dollar the Congo’s rock will finally earn, the country keeps a handful of cents. The rest compounds abroad. And this, remember, is what the world has learned to call a green transition.

China’s defenders point, fairly, to what the money has built. And it has built things. The question is who they are for. Under the Sicomines “minerals-for-infrastructure” deal, Chinese firms laid some 480 kilometers of roads, the boulevards of Kinshasa, the Cinquantenaire Hospital. But look at the map. The showpieces sit in the capital, where they buy the government goodwill, while the working roads run through the cobalt belt, the arteries that carry the metal out. It is exactly the exploitation through investment Rodney described. Capital that builds only what deepens the drain.

And the Congolese pay for these gifts with their own minerals. A 2023 state audit found the Chinese partners had earned close to $10 billion in profit while the country received $822 million in infrastructure, a fraction of the $3 billion promised, with Kinshasa left a minority shareholder on 32 percent. The deal was tax-exempt until the loans are repaid, so the treasury sees little for years; one model found its net present value to the Congo had fallen from $10 billion to minus $150 million. After years of protest it was renegotiated up to $7 billion in 2024, but only while copper holds above $8,000 a tonne. CMOC, which bought Tenke from America’s Freeport in 2016, later paid the state a roughly $2 billion settlement for underdeclaring what the mine held. An admission, in other words, that the country had been robbed in plain sight.

Then there is the debt, the oldest instrument of the drain. The IMF’s 2024 review puts the Congo at moderate risk of debt distress, and made its own lending conditional on the country first restructuring its debts to China, after which Beijing stretched repayment out fifteen more years. Sicomines itself is a debt secured against a mountain of copper. The Congo borrows against the very wealth being carried out of it, then has to keep the mines running flat out just to service what it owes.