Wealth Without Guardians: How Congo’s Riches Became Everyone’s Gain Except Our Own

There are two ways to lose a treasure.

One is to never find it.
The other is to find it, but fail to guard it.

The Democratic Republic of Congo did not fail the first test. Our minerals, forests, rivers, and land are known to the world. We failed — or were prevented from passing — the second: guardianship.

In Chapter 1 of The Rise of the Wazalendo, I describe Congo not as a poor country, but as an unprotected vault. The door is half-open, the locks are rusty, and the guards are underpaid, corrupted, or absent. Around this vault, the world has built entire industries.

The question we must ask is simple: How did Congo become the supplier of the world and the beneficiary of so little?

The Curse of Riches

The world is going through a historic transition. From fossil fuels to renewables. From analog to digital. From combustion engines to electric vehicles. At the heart of this transition are minerals, and Congo sits at the center of the map.

• Cobalt: 70% of global reserves, around three-quarters of global production

• Coltan (tantalum): majority of known reserves

• Copper: key player in global electrification

• Lithium: emerging, largely untapped reserves

• Water: the Congo River, second-largest discharge in the world

• Forests: the second-largest tropical rainforest on Earth

• Arable land: around 80 million hectares, most of it uncultivated

On paper, this is a blessing. In practice, it has often behaved like a curse.

Why? Because when wealth appears in a territory where institutions are weak, borders are porous and security is fragile, it becomes an invitation: for foreign powers, for multinational corporations, for neighboring states, for local warlords and for opportunists of all kinds.

If the state does not occupy the role of guardian, someone else will.

The Historic Pattern: Exporting What We Don’t Control

Since the early days of colonial exploitation, Congo’s riches have been extracted primarily to develop other nations.

Under Leopold II, rubber flowed out, blood flowed inside. Under Belgian rule, copper and uranium left Katanga while mining towns were managed as enclaves, more connected to Brussels than to Kinshasa.

After independence, new actors arrived, but the logic remained. The labels changed — concessions, contracts, structural adjustment, foreign direct investment — but the distribution of power did not.

One of the clearest examples of this pattern appears in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent regional war, neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda dramatically increased their exports of minerals like coltan and gold — despite having little to no known reserves of these minerals within their own borders.

International institutions themselves recorded this paradox. Minerals apparently “produced” in those countries were, in reality, taken from Congolese soil during periods of occupation, rebellion or “joint security operations.”

Congo became a mineral reservoir with broken walls. Others built fortune and stability on the back of our instability.

The Invisible Cost of Extraction

When we talk about mineral exports, we usually focus on the numbers: tons, price per ton, GDP growth. What we ignore is the cost.

The cost in lives.
The cost in displaced communities.
The cost in destroyed environments.
The cost in lost future opportunities.

In eastern Congo, entire generations have grown up near mines controlled by armed groups, companies or local power brokers who operate in zones where the state is weak or absent. For many families, the mine is both the only source of income and the main source of danger.

Children dig with their hands. Women carry heavy sacks. Men descend into unsafe shafts. Accidents are common. Contracts are opaque. Taxes often enrich the wrong pockets.

And when the minerals leave, they rarely return as public goods.

• Rarely as schools.

• Rarely as hospitals.

• Rarely as decent roads.

• Rarely as reliable power.

Instead, they return as expensive imported products that most Congolese cannot afford.

This is what happens when a state allows wealth to be extracted without being guarded.

Lumumba’s Warning

Patrice Émery Lumumba understood this logic long before the term “critical minerals” entered the global vocabulary. In his independence speech, he warned that political sovereignty without economic control would be an illusion.

He was not killed because he was confused. He was killed because he saw too clearly.

To reclaim our sovereignty today, we must revisit his warning:

• Who owns our mining titles?

• Who controls our export routes?

• Who benefits from tax regimes and exemptions?

• Who polices the mining corridors — the Republic, or private actors?

It is not enough to have Congolese names on company boards if the logic of extraction remains the same. A local flag on a foreign model of exploitation is not liberation. It is a rebranding.

Guardianship as a Strategy

So what does it mean, concretely, to become guardians of our wealth?

First, it is a security question. Mineral zones must not be left under the control of armed groups, foreign proxies or parallel power structures. A state that cannot control its mining areas cannot claim to be sovereign.

Second, it is an institutional question. Contracts must be transparent, renegotiated when necessary, and aligned with a long-term national vision. Regulatory agencies must have teeth, not just titles.

Third, it is a moral and generational question. Every time we sign an agreement that mortgages our future for a short-term gain, we betray our youth.

Guardianship means:

• Refusing contracts that export raw minerals without local value addition.

• Securing corridors so that minerals do not pass through rebel checkpoints.

• Ensuring that communities near mines have priority access to infrastructure, health and education.

• Training a new generation of Congolese professionals — geologists, engineers, lawyers, negotiators — who can defend national interests at the table.

From Warehouse to Nation

Today, Congo is often treated like a warehouse: a place where you go to pick up materials, not a place where you invest in long-term transformation.

A warehouse can be managed with minimal security and maximum exploitation. A nation cannot.

To move from warehouse to nation, we must flip the logic:

• Instead of exporting cheap ore and importing expensive products, we must add value at home.

• Instead of tolerating ungoverned mining zones, we must deploy security forces trained to protect both people and resources.

• Instead of allowing neighboring countries to “re-export” our minerals as theirs, we must enforce traceability and regional accountability.

This will not happen overnight. It requires political courage, regional diplomacy and internal reform. It will create friction with those who benefit from the current disorder. But the alternative is clear: another century of being rich on paper and poor in practice.

The Role of the Wazalendo

The rise of the Wazalendo — citizens who organize to defend their communities from external aggression and internal betrayal — is a signal that the Congolese people are tired of being only the spectators of their own story.

But spontaneous courage must be connected to strategic guardianship.

This is where compulsory national service comes in. By creating structured paths for youth into both military and civic service, Congo can:

• Train guardians of territory and guardians of resources.

• Build infrastructure around strategic sites.

• Create agro-industrial, energy and security hubs where young people learn skills while protecting national interests.

Our minerals should not be defended only by contracts signed in capital cities, but by structures on the ground — bases, roads, patrols, communities and institutions that make plunder costly and sovereignty real.

A New Covenant With Our Wealth

We cannot change the past. Our minerals have already built railways in Europe, skyscrapers in Asia and gadgets in America while leaving potholes and broken schools at home.

But we can change the future.

A new covenant with our wealth would say:

• No more mining without security.

• No more exports without local value creation.

• No more contracts that do not serve our children.

• No more treating Congolese communities as collateral damage for global supply chains.

Congo’s riches were never meant to be a curse. They became one because guardianship was absent.

The rise of the Wazalendo is not only about defending villages against rebellions. It is about defending the very idea that our wealth belongs first to our people.

The world has benefited for long enough from a Congo without guardians.
It is time for a Congo that guards, organizes and directs its riches for its own rebirth.