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Across Congo, Freelance Miners Dig In Against Modern Industry
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By the early 1990s, pervasive corruption had caused the collapse of Gecamines, the economy and Mobutu's government, ushering in a decade of civil war and such desperation that some people were eating corncobs for sustenance.
After toppling Mobutu in 1997, President Laurent Kabila issued a presidential decree aimed at rebuilding the middle class. His message to the people: Head back to the mines and start digging.
Tens of thousands did -- a desperate, diverse population, ranging from former Gecamines workers to unemployed lawyers to children, that represented a cross section of Congo's societal failures. The government later enacted laws that made the mining effectively illegal.
"I completed my secondary school but didn't have money for university," said 19-year-old Michel Kabul, who recently started digging at an old Gecamines site with Luamba. He'd prefer to study medicine, he said.
Instead, he trudges each morning to a balding hill near the camp, drops 20 yards down a manhole-size shaft, and tunnels horizontally.
"When you finish," one digger said, "you feel you've been thrashed."
The diggers usually work in groups of three, heaving out bags of ore. The haphazard tunneling undermines the stability of the earth above, which often collapses. Every week, about 10 miners die in accidents, provincial officials said.
Luamba's three-man team can produce perhaps two 220-pound sacks of copper ore a day, a bounty quickly consumed by a slew of dubious taxes, fees and prices.
After those costs, each miner ends the day with about $4, perhaps a fifth of the value of one 220-pound sack. The going rate for a decent loaf of bread is $1.50.
A middleman sells the ore to buyers such as Daniel Tam, a British citizen from Hong Kong who declined to give his company's name. Though he has his own mining concession, Tam said he buys only from diggers working other spots, "because it is cheaper." With a single phone call, he can find a buyer abroad.
"The Chinese, the Indians, the South Africans," he said, naming all the buyers. "The selling is easy."
The diggers are not the only ones suffering in such transactions. Congo is also losing out on taxes and jobs as the less-valuable raw ore is hauled out of the country before being processed into a final product worth four times as much.
