Blood River Read Free Page B

with Zambia and then 2,000
kilometres south to the closest functioning port, Durban, in South
Africa, before finally being shipped to China.
    The whole procedure is relatively straightforward, and for a
while I almost bought into the sentiment expressed on a road sign
I spotted as Yav drove me into Lubumbashi. The sign said,
`Lubumbashi - City of Hope'. There were plenty of cars in the
town centre, a few shops were open, and I was told a hotel near
the main square had just started taking guests again for the first
time in years.
    But during the four days I spent in the city, staying at the guest
house in the compound used by Clive's cobalt-mining operation,
I learned how this sense of normality was an illusion and how
regular rules of commerce simply do not apply in the Congo. For
those who think Africa's problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt
economics in the Congo.

    In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in
Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that
the local economy grew or even stabilised. In the town's Belgian
Club, I saw Chinese traders and Lebanese middlemen splashing
money around on $20 pizzas and expensive imported beer. They
had plenty of cash and they wanted to spend it on raw cobalt ore.
But in spite of this substantial income, the pernicious reality of
Congolese commerce meant that norms of economic development
did not apply.
    In order for the investor to make any money he needed the
necessary paperwork to drive the cobalt out of the country, and in
order to arrange the necessary paperwork he needed to pay off the
Ministry of Mines, not just locally in Lubumbashi, but also at the
national level in Kinshasa; and if the Minister of Mines changed,
which happened regularly, a whole new matrix of payments and
bribes had to be put in place for the new man in the job. And once
you finished with the Ministry of Mines, you would have to
repeat the whole process at the Immigration Department, the
Department of Customs, the local Governor's Office, and so on. So
gross were the profits to be made on the cobalt that some investors
were prepared to pay the web of bribes and unofficial 'taxes'
demanded by the authorities, and to tolerate this commercial
chaos.
    At the Belgian Club I drank Simba beer and ate chips doused
with mayonnaise, in the Belgian style, with one of the few
Europeans bold enough to risk involvement in Lubumbashi's
cobalt boom. Belgium's links remain closer with Katanga than
with any other province of their old colony and a photograph of
the Belgian royal family looked down on us from the wall as I
listened to his mind-boggling stories about local business
anarchy. On numerous occasions trucks had been loaded in
Lubumbashi with sacks of cobalt ore worth $50,000, but when they arrived in South Africa the sacks were found to contain
nothing but worthless soil.

    'Between here and South Africa you don't just have thousands
of kilometres of tarmac road,' he said. `You have three international borders, from the Congo into Zambia, from Zambia into
Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe into South Africa. At each one,
you have officials demanding handouts. Each one of them can be
bribed by a rival cobalt shipper to cause you delays and other
problems. And the drivers can be bought off by rivals, so when
they stop to sleep at night, God knows what happens to the bags
of ore on the back. Some of the buyers who come here to
Lubumbashi decide it's cheaper just to set themselves up on the
main road south through Zambia, say, and wait there with a gang
of gunmen armed with AK-47s to help themselves to whatever
comes down the road. The truck drivers are so badly paid that
they are not going to risk their lives to protect the load. If you
offered them a hundred-dollar bill, most drivers would pull over
and let you pinch some or all of what's on the back.'
    There was nothing funny