A Financial Centre to Convert Our Resources into Sustainable Prosperity

In Kolwezi and Lubumbashi, this year’s major mining gatherings are reminding the world of a simple reality: the DRC is no longer merely a mining country. It is gradually becoming one of the strategic centers of gravity in the global competition surrounding critical minerals.

Copper, cobalt, lithium and germanium are no longer just commodities. They now underpin batteries, electrical grids, artificial intelligence, data centers, energy infrastructure and the defense industries of the 21st century. According to multiple international estimates, several trillions of dollars will need to be invested in global mining, energy and logistics infrastructure by 2050 to meet projected demand. Copper alone may require more than 250 new large-scale mines — projects capable of producing several hundred thousand tonnes annually — in order to avoid a structural supply deficit.

Yet world-class mines require extraordinary amounts of capital: between US$2 billion and US$10 billion in CAPEX for today’s major copper-cobalt projects, even before accounting for the power generation, railways, ports and logistics systems required to make them viable.

The Congolese question therefore becomes straightforward: does the DRC simply want to extract these resources, or does it also intend to organize the financial, industrial and technological ecosystems surrounding them?

The Congolese challenge is no longer only mining-related. It is financial, energy-related and institutional.

This is where the experience of Vietnam deserves close attention. Vietnam did not attempt to replace Singapore or Hong Kong. Instead, it gradually built a credible, disciplined platform connected to its real economy. The DRC should pursue a similar logic: developing in Kinshasa a specialized financial center focused on mining, energy, logistics and infrastructure.

Sub-Saharan African capital markets outside South Africa already provide useful reference points. Markets in Nairobi, Lagos and Casablanca have enabled banks, telecom firms and industrial groups to raise significant amounts of domestic capital. Safaricom in Kenya and MTN Nigeria mobilized billions of dollars and profoundly reshaped perceptions of local market risk. Their success generated a major psychological effect: demonstrating that African financial markets could absorb substantial capital flows and finance regional champions.

The Congolese mining sector must now follow a similar path.

Mining companies are capital-intensive by nature and require rapid access to deep pools of financing. This is why dual listings — simultaneous listings across multiple financial markets — will become strategically important for the DRC. A mining company listed in Toronto, London or Sydney, while also being listed in Kinshasa or on a future regional African exchange, could simultaneously access major international capital pools while allowing Congolese and African investors to participate directly in ownership.

This local participation is critical.

Local capital plays a role far deeper than simply providing complementary financing. It acts as a strategic signal in the international perception of risk. When local entrepreneurs, banks, insurers or pension funds invest sustainably in their own country, they send a powerful message: those who understand the terrain best still believe the long-term risk-reward equation remains favorable.

Markets read behavior as closely as they read balance sheets.

This is why figures such as Aliko Dangote and Tidjane Thiam regularly emphasize that no lasting transformation can occur if local elites themselves refuse to expose their own capital to their domestic economy.

The DRC must therefore ensure meaningful Congolese participation in the ownership of its mining assets, but also in the supervision and execution of mining operations themselves. Botswana, through Debswana, and Angola, through the gradual expansion of state participation in strategic extractive assets, demonstrate that deeper national participation can progressively strengthen domestic accumulation capacity, even though each country’s trajectory reflects its own unique realities.

Companies such as Ivanhoe Mines and executives like Robert Friedland have already shown that world-class mining projects can be built in the DRC. The next stage must consist of connecting these successes more directly to African financial markets, regional capital pools and local industrial capabilities.

This ambition, however, will only be credible under one condition: solving the energy equation.

Behind every major mining power that successfully industrialized stood first an energy power. No serious mining industrialization can emerge sustainably without a robust energy foundation. Electricity availability, grid stability, affordability and transmission capacity will directly determine Congolese industrial competitiveness. Without reliable, abundant and competitive power, no local refining or value-addition chain will reach viable industrial scale.

The example of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is particularly instructive. Beyond the dam itself, Ethiopia managed to mobilize massive domestic participation around a national strategic project. In a country marked by war and famine, the project produced a profound psychological effect: a society participating directly in its own reconstruction.

The DRC must also deepen the sophistication of its financial instruments. The Fonds de Promotion de l’Industrie and the Strategic Investment Fund of the DRC already represent useful building blocks. But the country must go further: mining infrastructure bonds, green bonds, co-investment vehicles and specialized funds dedicated to logistics and energy corridors.

The Lobito Corridor already illustrates this new global logistics competition. Additional corridors will need to emerge around railways, ports and river transport, in partnership with global logistics specialists such as CMA-CGM, AGL and other international transport operators. Tens of billions of dollars will be required by 2050 to sustainably modernize Congolese mining, energy and logistics infrastructure. African pension funds, insurers, regional banks and even small local savers must progressively be integrated into these financing structures.

The same logic applies to technical subcontracting. Companies such as Master Drilling and LeverEdge IV Resources (DIG CT) demonstrate that world-class African technical expertise can emerge around mining services.

Finally, no long-term investor will sustainably commit billions of dollars without institutional stability. Governance, regulatory discipline, transparency, ESG compliance, adherence to standards such as Dodd-Frank and the Kimberley Process, investor protection and fiscal predictability have now become competitiveness factors just as important as ore grades themselves.

The mining sector will therefore serve as a full-scale test case. If the DRC manages to organize intelligently what is arguably the most globally attractive sector of its economy, then other sectors tied to import substitution and industrial development may progressively follow the same trajectory.

Because true sovereignty does not merely consist in owning resources. It consists in knowing how to finance them, transform them, insure them, monetize them and govern them.

That is the Congolese challenge. And now is the time to begin organizing it.

Eric Mboma
African Council on Minerals and Energy (ACME)

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