The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) sits at the centre of global great power competition. It holds the world’s largest cobalt reserves, significant lithium, copper, and coltan deposits, minerals essential to the energy transition and advanced technology supply chains, and borders nine countries across the heart of Central Africa. That combination of resource wealth and strategic position makes the DRC one of the most consequential states on the continent.
This article makes two arguments. First, that President Félix Tshisekedi has used the DRC’s geopolitical weight and mineral wealth not to advance national development, but to secure international backing for a regime that critics argue is operating beyond its constitutional mandate. Second, that the U.S. minerals deal, rather than stabilising the DRC, risks entrenching the very governance failures that have fuelled the conflict, according to analyses by international policy institutes and regional observers.
There appears to be a pattern in which natural resources are leveraged and commercialized to obtain diplomatic support and political advantages. The DRC’s resource wealth has, arguably, failed to translate into greater state capacity. Weak institutions and endemic corruption have instead produced an entrenched patronage economy in which access to strategic mining assets is routinely negotiated through opaque channels, outside formal regulatory processes. The country functions as a conduit for illicit financial flows, with politically connected actors, domestic and foreign, structurally embedded in the extractive sector.
Tshisekedi has pursued an expanding sequence of security partnerships with SADC, the EAC, Burundi, Uganda, several hundred Romanian mercenaries known informally as “the Romeos”, the private military company Blackwater, and most recently the United States, in each case offering economic and mineral incentives in exchange for military support and diplomatic cover. There is little evidence that these arrangements have been grounded in a coherent national security strategy. The pattern is consistent: it appears that external actors are brought in on terms that serve the regime’s immediate survival, and in nearly every case, they have failed to achieve their stated objectives.
It increasingly appears that the conflict has effectively become the DRC’s primary governance tool. Domestic policy development appears to have stalled: ministerial proposals for expenditures outside the war effort are routinely framed as concessions to “the enemy”, with Rwanda invariably cast in that role. War mobilises international solidarity and suppresses accountability; arguably, that is where its political value lies for Tshisekedi.
Western donors and investors are not unaware of the DRC’s governance dysfunction. Inconsistent regulation, unpredictable taxation, and pervasive patronage networks are well documented risks. What increasingly overrides that caution is geopolitical anxiety: the fear that disengagement cedes ground to China. Tshisekedi seems to calibrate his approach accordingly, deploying the threat of Chinese entrenchment as leverage to extract political and security support from Western partners who know the structural risks but calculate that absence is costlier. The next section examines several unintended consequences of the U.S. mineral deal.
The U.S. is unlikely to extract full value from any mineral agreement in the DRC. The deal will sit alongside a thicket of overlapping and competing contractual arrangements, operating within a sector defined by weak governance, opaque intermediaries, and entrenched informal networks. Tying political and security support to mineral access does not resolve these conditions; it accommodates them, and in doing so, trades the prospect of long term stability for short term transactional gains.
On security, the DRC appears to function in a condition of effective statelessness. Tshisekedi has aligned, according to multiple regional security assessments, with over one hundred armed groups, domestic and foreign, including the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a militia with roots in the 1994 genocide and documented operational integration with the Congolese army. Whether he can disarm them remains doubtful; his military lacks both the capacity and, many would argue, the political will. Sustaining his regime therefore means sustaining their presence. Any external economic actor seeking to establish operations in eastern DRC will encounter these groups not as a peripheral risk, but as an embedded feature of the political economy.
Politically, U.S. backing has tilted the domestic balance of power. There is growing concern that opposition parties are being systematically weakened as Tshisekedi consolidates authority, emboldened by the implicit protection of the world’s most powerful government. The constitutional reform agenda, which Tshisekedi shelved under military pressure from the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC) advance in 2024, has now been revived. A third term bid, once politically untenable, is back on the table, a prospect increasingly discussed by regional media and political commentators. The evidence presented here suggests that Washington’s endorsement has not restrained authoritarian consolidation and may have contributed to it.
It could be argued that U.S. support has had the effect of shielding the DRC government from greater scrutiny of its human rights record, an issue raised by several human rights organisations and policy commentators.
The systematic persecution of the Banyamulenge, a Congolese Tutsi community documented by United Nations experts and human rights researchers as subject to ethnically targeted violence and displacement, has received minimal international attention. Those who raise it risk being cast as obstacles to deal making. The pattern is one of substitution: quick political denials stand in for accountability, and the transactional logic of the minerals agreement forecloses the harder questions about ethnic violence and impunity.
The DRC’s strategic importance is not incidental to Tshisekedi’s political strategy; it is the strategy. One interpretation of these developments is that, by converting mineral access into geopolitical currency, Tshisekedi has secured international support that has insulated his administration from scrutiny over governance failures, constitutional overreach, and human rights abuses. For Western partners, the calculation may appear rational in the short term. The evidence suggests it is not: every external actor that has entered the DRC on Tshisekedi’s terms has found the conditions worse than promised, the commitments less binding than expected, and the exit harder than anticipated.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the editorial position of The Southern African Times.
Dr. Alex Ntung is a London-based research consultant and political analyst specialising in governance, security, conflict, and development in Sub-Saharan Africa. With over 15 years of experience, he advises governments, international organisations, and development partners across the region.
