The city of Bunia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is synonymous with gold — which is why it’s not rare to find its residents keeping nuggets of the precious metal in their homes.
In the outskirts of the city, Okimo (Office de Kilo-Moto) has been mining gold since the colonial period when Belgium’s King Leopold II treated the vast territory as his personal estate until the Belgian parliament forced him to cede the territory to the state in 1908.
Okimo is the biggest gold mining company in the DRC currently producing about 160 kilogrammes per year. Production would have been higher if its plant wasn’t decript.
Around Bunia, freelance mining is allowed as long as you sell the gold to Okimo. However, the freelancers prefer to sell their gold, illegally of course, to buyers from Kenya and Uganda who pay more.
In the city of Goma, 450 kilometres south of Bunia in North Kivu Province, the evidence of illegal gold trade is obvious.
In February, a privately-owned aircraft registered in USA was seized for allegedly being used in illegal traf ficking of gold. It had a motley crew and passengers comprising American, British and Nigerian nationals.
According to local officials, 450 kilogrammes of gold and around $6 million (Sh500 million) were found in the plane. On March 14, the aircraft was flown to Kinshasa where the crew members and the passengers are in police custody.
In spite of Bunia’s and Goma’s mineral wealth, the region is ravaged by deep poverty. What is more, the perennial instability in eastern DRC has a direct link with the availability and illegal exploitation of precious minerals.
For more than ten years, wars and rebellions have wracked eastern DRC. Thousands of traumatised Congolese say they would like to live very far away from this “resource mattress” of gold, coltan, cassiterite, diamonds or timber considering the suffering they have faced, more so from hegemonic neighbours like Uganda and Rwanda.
Says Aloys Kaberuza, a Rwandan living in the DRC: “How can’t one understand why the Congo is frequently subject to attacks from neighbouring countries considering that God put all the natural resources at the DRC side of the border and nothing on our side?”
The minerals are illegally exported through a network of foreign companies without the knowledge of the Congolese government.
In early March, President Joseph Kabila travelled to Nairobi to discuss the illegal trade of DRC gold and in particular a huge consignment of 2.5 tonnes and valued at Sh10.5 billion that had been flown into Kenya and disappeared.
“There is a great deficit of communication after the presidential trip to Nairobi. We would like to know which gold is involved and where exactly it was stolen from,” says Lutu Mbega, an MP from the Bunia region.
The city of Nairobi is considered in DRC to be a key transit point for smuggled Congo gold to other cities such as Dubai, Brussels, Hong-Kong and London but the shaky DRC government simply does not have the capacity to neutralise the gold-smuggling ring.
Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime concentrated on the very big mining companies which, between them, accounted for 80 per cent of the national income.
These were Gecamines (Générale des Carrières des Mines) based in Katanga Province and MIBA (Minière du Bakwanga) in Kasai-East Province.
Gecamines mined and processed copper while MIBA specialised in diamonds. The two companies have virtually collapsed.
Today, things remain unchanged. The government prefers the big companies at the expense of small scale, freelance mining operations.
At some point under the Mobutu regime, the exploitation and the trade in mineral resources was liberalised.
That meant anybody was free to exploit mineral resources anywhere in the country as long as he sold the product to the government through specialised public companies.
In other words, direct exportation, circumventing the government was illegal. The illegal mining intensified in September 1996 during the rebellion in eastern DRC that was backed by Rwandan and Ugandan forces.
Both Rwandan and Ugandan troops were targeting the main mineral sites close to the border. In Rwanda, the so called “Congo Desk” and various businessmen were involved in the extraction and sale of DRC minerals. In Uganda highly-placed military figures were implicated as well.
In 2000, the troops from the two countries fought in the DRC city of Kisangani over the control of diamond sites.
Since then, the illegal extraction of DRC gold became ‘privatised’ under the various rebellions that were instigated by either Rwanda or Uganda.
And, as the big guns boomed, DRC warlords got involved in the illegal businesses in order to equip their own militias with arms and other supplies.
Despite the signing of the Pretoria peace deal in 2002, the illegal business has never stopped. There are no airfields in the Walikale District in the east but many small aircraft from ‘nowhere’ land daily on a strip of road in the bush in this remote area.
Locals can see this clearly organised activity every day. The planes offload parcels containing clothes or medicines and money and take off with loads of minerals.
Few know the origin and the destination of these flights. According to some observers, the aircraft generally fly back to Kigali or Nairobi.
According to local sources, the buyers of Congolese minerals are a mixed bunch: native Congolese, and trans-border traders from Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.
Multinational companies and some international banks have been mentioned as being involved in the racket.
The sellers are an equally varied mix. Leaders of the FDLR Rwandan Hutu militia, members of the CNDP Tutsi militia of Bosco Ntaganda, officers of the Congolese army, and assorted other militias active in eastern DRC.
In fact, credible sources in Goma suggest that Gen Ntaganda could have been involved in the transactions linked to the American-owned plane that authorities seized in February.
