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The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recently made a minor splash in the international news when, towards the end of last month, it sent Apple a letter bearing a series of questions regarding the company’s possible usage of conflict minerals from the country’s benighted east.
Along with the letter, which hasn’t been made public, Amsterdam & Partners, the law firm acting on behalf of the government of the DRC in the United States, also published a report looking into the networks that sanitise the minerals by smuggling them, mainly through Rwanda, into international markets.
The report, like the letter, accuses Apple and other big tech companies of knowingly abetting, and illegally benefiting from, this exploitative syndicate. By doing so, the accusation continues, Apple and its ilk are ultimately perpetuating the suffering of Congolese people, and the further disenfranchisement of the country as a whole.
The DRC contains the world’s largest reserves, and is the main global supplier, of coltan, the mineral source of tantalum. It also has significant reserves of tin, tungsten and gold. All four elements are crucial to the manufacture of electronic devices; tantalum from Congo is probably inside the computer or phone on which you are reading this article (the cobalt in its battery is probably also from the DRC, though it probably came from further south).
As it happens, these four minerals, often abbreviated as 3TG, are also the main internationally recognised conflict minerals. Publicly traded companies in the United States are required by law to disclose how they source them to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); the European Union (EU) imposes a similar requirement on all companies in the 3TG supply chain.
Apple’s latest SEC filing, covering 2023, states that it had no reason to believe that its supply chain “directly or indirectly financed or benefited armed groups in the DRC or an adjoining country.” The DRC’s letter casts doubt on that characterisation, with Robert Amsterdam, of Amsterdam & Partners, retorting that Apple’s “claims do not appear to be based on concrete, verifiable evidence.”
The DRC gave Apple three weeks to respond to its questions, failure to which the country would explore further “judicial options in the U.S. and France.” It is not clear whether and how Apple will respond (so far, it has only directed journalists to its SEC filing), and exactly what judicial options the DRC intends to pursue.
What is clear right now is that the DRC’s gambit, though bold and justified, is unlikely to produce, nor even contribute to, a lasting improvement in the lot of the people at the bottom of the country’s 3TG supply chain. And this is not so much because the effort itself is misguided (it probably is), but rather because the government mounting it has proven itself woefully inept at seeing such initiatives through.
It all boils down to the crippling indecisiveness of Mr Félix Tshisekedi, the DRC’s unimaginative president. Since his first day in office, most of his initiatives to address the country’s deep-rooted injustices have been marked by impulsive initiation, lacklustre planning, and, when they inevitably start falling apart, thoughtless replacement with new, even more grandiose initiatives.
Consider, for instance, Mr Tshisekedi’s halting attempts to quell the conflicts that enable the extraction and smuggling of 3TG minerals in his country’s restive east in the first place. First, in 2022, he tried to sneakily repurpose a regional peacekeeping force from the East African Community into combat operations against M23 rebels, the main menace in the area.
When this didn’t work, he kicked out that force and pivoted to trying to pull off a similar move with another force from the Southern African Development Community. Unfortunately, his hope that the latter force would be more energetic with the rebels hasn’t been rewarded. The M23 rebels continued to advance, and have now encircled Goma, the largest city in the east of the country.
Along the way, he has alienated nearly all of the DRC’s most important regional allies. And by initiating, and then failing to de-escalate, a bitter war of words with Mr Paul Kagame, the president of neighbouring Rwanda and, for all intents and purposes, the main backer of the M23, Mr Tshisekedi has worked himself into a corner from which he cannot negotiate with his worthy foe.
His bumbling has all but ensured that his government no longer has control over most of the territory in which the 3TG minerals are mined, mainly by militant groups, mainly illegally. Things have gotten so sketchy in the area that, in the election that dubiously granted Mr Tshisekedi a second term last year, 1.5 million voters in the region were left out.
With this context in mind, the letter to Apple ceases to be the opening shot in an upcoming epic battle for the dignity of the Congolese people. It becomes, instead, a weaselly wisp of smoke from an ancient, sputtering engine that’s begging to be put out of its misery. It is, in short, a virtue signal.
And that’s why the only real beneficiaries of the action against Apple will be the big Washington D.C. and Paris law firms that have been retained by Mr Tshisekedi to carry it out. They’ll get their fat fees. And then Mr Tshisekedi will pivot to another grandiose scheme.
Mathew Otieno is a Kenyan writer, blogger and dilettante farmer. Until 2022, he was a research communications coordinator at a university in Nairobi, Kenya. His article is printed with permission.
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