This country profile was published in November 2008 in our annual 'Africa in 2009' issue. The next edition, 'Africa in 2010' will be on sale 23 November 2009.

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President Joseph Kabila’s government will face severe tests of its authority in 2009 after a few lucky breaks in 2008. The best news for Kabila himself has been the May 2008 arrest of Jean-Pierre Bemba in Belgium on a warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has removed his main political rival from the scene. The president was also helped by the postponement of local elections, which are now tentatively scheduled for 2009.


Outright war has followed in the wake of the Amani peace initiative for the troubled Kivu provinces, after its shaky start in January 2008. Laurent Nkunda of the rebel Conseil National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) has pushed to capture more territory; the hapless Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) have failed to stop him, and the UN Mission, MONUC, is again fighting a rearguard action to prevent the fall of strategic towns to the rebels. The DRC is committed to driving out from its territory the Front Démocratique pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a militia at war with the Rwandan government, but if the CNDP’s military advances continue, the DRC government may well revert to its tactic of covertly assisting the FDLR in the hope that the battle-hardened militia might have more success than the FARDC against the CNDP. This would further entrench the FDLR’s already strong position in North and South Kivu, as the militia patiently waits for an opportune moment to return victorious to Rwanda. The only alternative to a military resolution of the crisis is to revive the Amani process, or something very like it.


MONUC had hoped it would not have to worry again about destabilisation in north-eastern DRC by Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). But LRA fighting flared up again in late 2008, forcing MONUC to redirect resources and attention there from the Kivus, and the issue promises to be another serious challenge in 2009.


Across the country, Kabila’s influence is in flux. The resignation of the octogenarian prime minister Antoine Gizenga in September 2008 should have created an opportunity for the injection of new dynamism into government, as the most obvious candidate for the job seemed to be Olivier Kamitatu, holding the post of planning minister and one of the most talented of the ex-Bemba supporters in the cabinet. In October, the premiership went to former budget minister Adolphe Muzito, a close ally of Kabila from Gizenga’s Parti Lumumbiste Unifié (PALU), who promised to head directly to the country’s east to resolve problems there.


If local elections take place in 2009, and it is still not clear they will, with Bemba out of the way and his Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo in disarray, parties belonging to the pro-Kabila Alliance pour la Majorité Présidentielle should do well, consolidating the president’s power base at local levels. MONUC is still on hand to provide logistical support for the elections, but these will still be impossible without the donors paying most of the estimated $120m costs. Donors are increasingly uneasy about the heavy-handed, authoritarian direction Kabila’s presidency is taking and have thus far hesitated to pledge the necessary funds.

The government’s negotiation of a massive loan agreement with China’s Exim Bank has caused something of an impasse in relations with the IMF, and hence with other donors too. Worth around $9bn, the loan is due to be paid to the Sicomines joint venture between the DRC copper mining parastatal Gécamines and several Chinese state-owned companies. Sicomines is supposed to spend a third of the money on copper and cobalt mining and two-thirds on an ambitious national infrastructure rebuilding programme.


Kabila is relying on these Chinese projects to fulfil his promise to voters that he would rebuild the country, and the loan has been structured so that the DRC government does not, in the view of both the DRC and the Chinese government, take on any extra debt. The IMF disagrees, insisting the DRC government will end up with the debt, and refuses to approve a new lending facility until the matter is resolved. Paris Club creditors concur with the IMF, and are withholding debt relief. The big economic policy challenge for the government will be to find a way to have its cake and eat it, retaining the Chinese loan but still somehow getting a new IMF programme, plus debt relief. The IMF is unwilling to be accused of sabotaging the DRC’s best hope of reconstruction since independence, and already has a compromise in mind, but this will require concessions from Chinese state companies they may not be willing to make.


International mining investment in Katanga Province will ramp up still further, boosting copper and cobalt production substantially and laying the foundations for larger future increases. Rising production will boost the economy and real GDP growth could reach 9% in 2009, the highest figure for decades. 


Companies mining in the DRC have been rattled by an ongoing review of their mining contracts by the government, and there will be considerable interest in the outcome of a looming legal battle between the government and First Africa Diamonds, which owns the valuable Sengamines diamond concession. After reviewing the Sengamines contract, the government has said it will cancel First Africa Diamonds’ licence and the company has said it will seek international arbitration. 


The state-owned diamond miner Société Minière de Bakwanga (Miba) is launching a major debt-funded recapitalisation programme in 2009, which it is relying on to boost kimberlite diamond production from its current dismal levels. Recorded artisanally-mined alluvial diamond output might, however, take a dip during the year, because of the impact of the return to the Kimberley Process of neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville, making it legal once again to export diamonds from there. Because diamond export taxes are lower in Brazzaville than in the DRC, this may lead to many DRC-produced diamonds being smuggled to Brazzaville for export. 


2009 will be an important year for oil exploration and there should be a much clearer picture about the extent of the oil reserves beneath Lake Albert, which straddles the DRC/Uganda border, and at the same time about which companies will emerge victorious from their current bitter struggle to secure rights to extract Lake Albert’s oil. The sensitive political issue of how much of the lake’s oil belongs to the DRC is likely to take far longer to resolve. 

2009 promises to be a strong year for telecommunications. There are around 6.5m mobile phones in operation in the DRC today, while subscription rate growth was 50% in 2007, and is likely to be at least as high again in 2008 and 2009. This would bring the number of mobile phones in operation to around 15m, though this is still only half what mobile phone companies think is possible in a country with a newly-estimated population of 66m.


Two new mobile operators are likely to start up in the country in 2009: South Africa’s MTN and Kuwait’s Hits Telecom, hoping to challenge market leaders Vodacom and Zain (formerly Celtel). It is unclear if they will try to swallow up one of the DRC’s smaller companies like Supercell or if they will try to buy what would be the country’s seventh and eighth operating licences. 


Much to the frustration of mobile phone companies, there will probably be no connection in 2009 between the DRC and the West Africa Festoon System, a submarine fibre-optic cable connecting African countries with an Atlantic seaboard to an international network. This is unlikely to arrive until 2010 at the latest, so the country will continue to rely upon costly satellite connections until then.