The Spine Africa Project Helps Triathelete Reach Finish Line

April Houston shares a striking similarity to those in theCongoshe is about to help – they run.  However, the reasons for their journeys are very different.  On July 15, April will be taking part in the King Orthopedics Big Shark New Town Triathlon.  She will be competing in her first triathalon that includes a 4-mile run, a .62-mile swim, and a 20-mile trek on her bicycle.  April is currently raising money through this triatahlon for The Panzi Foundation, an organization that aids the victims of sexual violence in theCongo.  While April pushes her body to the limit she knows it pales in comparison to the distance and the fear those in theCongomust conquer to escape the genocide and the violence being perpetrated there.

April has long been interested in genocide prevention.  She notes, “I have always been opposed to injustices of all kinds, even as a child.  I moved toSt. Louis and in 2006 I met a group of young men who were refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  I heard their stories of fleeing attackers in the middle of the night, running for days, seeing their friends and neighbors slaughtered in front of them, not knowing if their parents were alive or dead.  At that point I told them that I would commit myself to do everything possible to help.”  April is a former recipient of the Carl Wilkens Fellowship, an opportunity that “provides a diverse set of emerging citizen leaders with the tools and training to build sustained political will to end genocide.”  The Fellowship was formerly offered through United to End Genocide (previously known as The Genocide Intervention Network).

For the past decade the Congo has been engaged in a power struggle between opposing political parties and armed militias from surrounding countries all of whom are interested in Congo’s vast wealth of unmined resources.  The result has been the deaths of over 5 million Congolese natives, the rape of millions of women, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.

The Spine Africa Project has seen firsthand the catastrophic consequences of this violence during the organization’s many trips to the Eastern Congo.  The Spine Africa Project is aNew Jersey based non-profit organization that provides spinal surgery to those injured as a result of the atrocities withinCongo.  Unfortunately, the basic provisions for spine surgery do not yet exist inCongo despite the alarmingly high number of injuries.  Sadly, the life expectancy of someone in the Congo with an untreated spinal injury is less than two years.  The goals of The Spine Africa Project are to provide medical treatment for those in need as well as educate the local physicians in the field of spine surgery.  This will allow them to address and treat spine related injuries within their communities.

Through a mutual friend at the Panzi Foundation, The Spine Africa Project learned about April’s endeavor. “Here was someone who was well aware of the situation in Congo and was doing something to help.  To us, the value is not only in the financial contributions people make but also in raising awareness about what is happening in Congo.  It is obvious that April is doing both of these things,” says Daniel Goldberg of The Spine Africa Project.

April’s website highlights her desire to raise funds and outlines what those funds could provide for the women of Congo.  For example, as little as $340 will cover all the costs for a fistula surgery at Panzi Hospital.  The Spine Africa Project strongly believes in April’s cause and donated enough money for her to reach her initial goal of $1,000.  Shortly thereafter, April set her sights higher and doubled her fundraising goal to $2,000.  Together, April and The Spine Africa Project are teaming up to raise awareness through social media and other marketing channels to spread the word of April’s mission and encourage further donations.   As of today, April has raised $1,540 of her $2,000 goal.  When asked what would be a single overriding goal to help those in theCongo, April didn’t hesitate, “Empowering the women.  The Congo is full of strong women who have survived extreme emotional and physical trauma.  Giving them the knowledge and tools to take control of their own destiny would put their entire country on a different trajectory”.

Grassroots fundraising projects such as this one truly make a difference in the war-ravaged areas of the Eastern Congo.  This is because the funds are given directly to the institutions they support and not to governments which have been riddled with corruption. Donations can be made up until the day of the triathlon via April’s website.  Please help support April as she endeavors to help those truly in need.

To Help Congo Heal, World Must Have Faith in Grassroots Projects

Recently, Severine Autussere wrote an article in regard to how grassroots organizations are vital to aiding those in Congo.  Severine Autesserre is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of “The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding.”  The article paints the picture of grassroots groups being the largest providers of resources that go directly to those who need it.  We could not agree more.

The Spine Africa Project is an organization based in New Jersey that provides spine surgeries for those injured in the Eastern Congo as a result of civil violence and conflict mining.  Several times per year our small teams of physicians travels to the Panzi Hospital to perform life saving spine surgery for those injured.  Currently, there are no provisions for spine care in the Eastern Congo despite the staggeringly high rate of spinal injuries.  Due to this lack of care the average life expectancy of someone who suffers a spinal injury is less than two years.

Our goal is not only to immediately address these injuries but to educate the local physicians as to how to treat these injuries themselves.  A large part of our organization is focused on the education of the local medical personnel utilizing a combination of both expanded formal education as well as a hands on approach to the surgical cases performed by The Spine Africa Project team.  More information can be found on our website as well as in the video below.

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Severine Autesserre | June 25, 2012

The situation in Congo keeps deteriorating even though its civil war has officially been over for years and the United Nations’ second-largest peacekeeping mission is based there. The international community has failed to help Congo achieve peace and security because it fundamentally misunderstands the causes of the violence. 

Since the end of the transition to peace in late 2006, living conditions in the country (formally the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire) have become the worst in the world, according to the most recent Index of Human Development. 

Average life expectancy at birth is 48 years, and close to 80 percent of the population survives on less than $2 per day. Various armed groups, including the Congolese army, are committing horrific human rights violations, especially in the eastern part of the country. About 200,000 people have fled their homes since late April to escape the fighting and abuses. 

The civil war in Congo was the deadliest conflict since World War II, and it created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. More than five million people died from 1998 to 2007 as domestic and foreign armed groups fought to control the territory, destabilizing much of Central and Southern Africa. 

Babies and elderly grandmothers were raped. Some two million people — and as many as 80 percent of the inhabitants of Congo’s eastern provinces — fled their homes to escape the violence. 

African and Western diplomats, along with UN officials, actively supervised negotiations to end the war. In 2002, they brokered a peace deal, and in 2006 they organized the first democratic elections in Congo’s history. 

To this day, the peacekeeping mission they set up is the only force capable of protecting the population from the ongoing violence. 

But it has been a case of misguided intervention. One reason is that foreign diplomats, UN peacekeepers and many NGOs tend to view the fighting exclusively as a consequence of national and international tensions — especially power struggles among Congolese and foreign elites — and a spillover from the Rwandan genocide. And they typically consider intervention at the national or regional levels to be their only legitimate responsibility. 

They neglect to address the other main sources of violence: distinctively local conflicts over land, grassroots power, status and resources, like cattle, charcoal, timber, drugs and fees levied at checkpoints.

Most of the violence in Congo is not coordinated on a large scale. It is the product of conflicts among fragmented local militias, each trying to advance its own agenda at the village or district level. Those then percolate and expand. 

Consider tensions between the Congolese of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous communities in the eastern provinces of South Kivu and North Kivu. These have roots in a long-standing competition over land and traditional and administrative power that began in the 1930s under Belgian colonial rule. 

The conflict escalated after Congo’s independence in 1960 as each camp recruited allies outside the province. With the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the crisis in the Kivus took on a regional dimension: local actors forged alliances with various Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, to promote their own agendas. 

Rather than address these issues, though, international peacemakers have lately singled out three features of the ongoing conflict: as a primary cause of violence, the illegal exploitation of natural resources by Congolese and foreign armed groups; as a main consequence, sexual abuse against women and girls; as a central solution, reconstructing state authority. 

International programs have thus emphasized three priorities: regulating the trade of minerals, providing care to victims of sexual violence and helping the central government extend its authority. This approach has provided a simple narrative that was easy to sell to audiences and donors in the West. 

It has also backfired. Perversely, attempts to regulate the trade of minerals — like Section 1502 of the US 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and a temporary mining ban imposed by the Congolese government from September 2010 to March 2011 — have enabled armed groups to strengthen their control over mines. 

These measures focused on stopping the illegal trade of minerals but did nothing to destroy the actual power base of armed groups. 

In the absence of any broader political, economic or social reforms, local military leaders have managed to remain the principal power brokers in the rural areas of eastern Congo. In some cases, they have even expanded their mining operations while vulnerable populations lost their livelihoods. 

The international community’s disproportionate attention to sexual violence has also raised the status of sexual abuse in a dangerous way. Some combatants now use it as a bargaining tool by threatening to commit mass rape if they are excluded from negotiations. And state-reconstruction programs have done little more than boost the capacity of the authoritarian central government. 

Addressing the consequences of sexual violence and these other abuses is important, of course, but donors should do more to address their underlying causes. Most important, they should approach the resolution of conflicts in Congo from the bottom up. 

They should assist local groups — official authorities, NGOs and civil-society representatives — with the funding, logistical means and technical capacity necessary to implement narrowly tailored programs. 

As the UN Security Council convenes this week to renew the mandate of its peacekeeping mission in Congo, it should refocus its efforts on supporting grassroots projects directed at resolving local conflicts, especially over land. If the international community continues to address the consequences of the violence in Congo rather than its most important causes, it will only add to the death toll.

The Spine Africa Project feature in Wayne Magazine

Violence Keeps Congolese in Fear

In the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, many are fleeing the violence between FARDC troops and Ntaganda’s rebel forces. The displaced are men and women, young and old. And they all have the same look on their face – of fear.

Mattresses on their heads, tired children on their backs, goats and a few pots in hand. This is just a snapshot of the displaced population in Sake, 27 kilometres from Goma. To date, hundreds of people are moving towards North Kivu’s capital and the region’s largest city. Others seek refuge right across the border in Rwanda.

Mostly from the territory of Masisi, they have left to escape the continued fighting between Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and General Bosco Ntaganda’s cronies. Clashes began when Congolese soldiers belonging to Ntaganda’s camp defected last month. Shortly before, Congolese President Kabila had expressed intent to hand over Ntaganda to the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Civilian casualties
Fear, despair and starvation are the daily realities of the displaced.

Shashire, a mother of five from Kimoka, testifies to this. “When the fighting started, we only saved the children and nothing more. We are going to starve to death here, since morning we have not received any food. No assistance from the authorities,” she says. “It is very difficult for us and for the children.”

Migihaba, a 50-year old man from Mushaki, recalls what forced him to move. “We heard several gun shots, and even bombs exploded,” he says. “And then they take young people from us by force to integrate them into the army. It is against this background that we took flight.”

A conflict with unknown origins
The soldiers Migihaba refers to are from the former National Congress for People’s Defense (CNDP) rebellion. Ntaganda served as their chief of staff alongside leader Laurent Nkunda, who was arrested by Rwanda in 2009. That very year, the CNDP was integrated into the Congolese army and Ntaganda was promoted to general.

According to Sake community chief Lawi Katahanwa Mbira, the army’s split compelled people to flee. “We do not know why they fight, because, in principle, they form a single army,” he says. “The problem is that we do not differentiate between CNDP and FARDC, because they all wear the same uniform. The population is simply the victim of a war whose origins are unknown.”

No aid
The battles plague the local population. No offer of aid has been reported. “We have not received any help from the government. We need water and food. We sleep outside, on the ground,” says Shashire.

Even more worrisome, it is rumoured that rebels are advancing. On 1 May, shootings by a drunk military man in a Sake square incited retaliation from soldiers in hills surrounding the city. Residents panicked.

What next?

Military sources of the special commando unit based in Mubambiro, which is two kilometres from Sake, are confident the FARDC will soon get the situation under control because of the CNDP defection from the national army. In a press release, CNDP chairman Edward Bangashusu requested Congolese authorities to negotiate a way to ending hostilities.

Meanwhile, the population fears the situation will worsen. Nobody wants to relive the 2008 war. Sake community chief Mbira says: “Even if we fail to eat, we must stop the war because we do not want to die. We want peace.

– Passy Mubalama, Goma

Congo Clashes Thwart Plans to Export Conflict-Free Minerals

-Bloomberg Business Week

Renewed fighting in Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern Kivu provinces will block plans to start exports of so-called “conflict-free minerals” from the region next month, North Kivu’s provincial mines ministry said.

In March, Congolese Mines Minister Martin Kabwelulu approved sales from 11 tin-ore and coltan mines in the Masisi territory in North Kivu, where Congo’s army is now battling a breakaway faction of soldiers loyal to former rebel General Bosco Ntaganda. Both minerals are used in the manufacture of electronics ranging from mobile phones to jet engines.

“We were hoping to start exporting from green-lighted sites in Masisi, mostly coltan, but unfortunately the trouble we’re seeing is in Masisi,” Emmanuel Ndimubanzi, the head of North Kivu province’s Division of Mines, said in an interview in Goma, the provincial capital, on April 28. “It won’t work.”

For more than a decade, armed groups and some members of the Congolese army, including Ntaganda, have funded their rebellions and enriched themselves through the sale of minerals found throughout the region, according to the United Nations.

As more buyers choose to avoid purchasing minerals that may have supported one of the world’s deadliest conflicts, Congo’s share of world tin sales dropped to 2 percent last year from about 4 percent in 2008, when it was the fifth-largest supplier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In North Kivu, home to the country’s biggest tin mines, mineral sales have fallen more than 80 percent in the past three years, according to mines ministry statistics.

Millions Dead

War in eastern Congo began in the mid-1990s when the aftermath of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda spilled over the border. Fighting spread throughout Congo, a country about the size of Western Europe. Congo’s mineral wealth helped fund a series of international and civil wars that left at least 3.1 million dead between 1998 and 2007, according to the International Rescue Committee. Most died from starvation or preventable disease, according to the New York-based aid agency.

A mixture of ethnic, political and economic disputes still plague the Kivu region, which is rich in tin ore, coltan, wolfram and gold. In 2010, the U.S. passed a law designating those four metals “conflict minerals,” spurring an exodus of buyers from Congo worried about reputational risk.

Congo’s Mines Ministry is working with partners including the tin and electronics industries, regional governments and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to create mineral-supply chains that don’t fund conflict.

Projects Derailed

The new fighting will derail those projects in the Kivu provinces, according to John Kanyoni, the president of North Kivu’s association of tin buyers and one of the biggest suppliers of Congolese tin.

“As long as there is conflict there, no one will be purchasing minerals,” Kanyoni said by phone from Kigali, the Rwandan capital, on April 30.

The current fighting began last month, when about 300 soldiers loyal to Ntaganda deserted the army amid speculation he would be arrested. The International Criminal Court has indicted Ntaganda for war crimes. Last week, fighting broke out between the army and fighters linked to Ntaganda on at least three fronts, according to the UN. The political wing of Ntaganda’s former rebel group denied he was involved in the mutiny in an e- mailed statement April 30.

Trade Relocating

Congo’s tin and coltan trade has begun shifting to other provinces with less exposure to armed groups, Kanyoni said. In Katanga province, companies including Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola Solutions Inc. (MSI) (MSI), Finland’s Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) and AVX Corp. (AVX) (AVX) of the U.S. are backing a project to mine tantalum for their electronic devices that is certified conflict free.

In Maniema province, west of North and South Kivu, Malaysia Smelting Corp. (SMELT), the world’s third-biggest tin producer, is in talks with the government to develop an industrial-scale project.

Last year, Katanga produced 4,277 metric tons of tin ore, a 10-fold increase since 2009, when it accounted for only 3 percent of the country’s official tin exports and none of its coltan sales. The production compares with the more than 13,000 tons of tin ore North Kivu produced in 2008.

North Kivu’s mineral trade previously accounted for 90 percent of export earnings and as much as 50 percent of provincial revenue, North Kivu provincial official Ndimubanzi said. That money “has dried up,” he said.

Western companies have stopped buying from the region, according to ministry statistics, and the Chinese businesses that are buying about 85 percent of the province’s remaining tin ore production are paying lower prices, Ndimubanzi said.

More than 2,800 tons of tin ore worth about $37 million and 111 tons of coltan valued at $2.5 million was shipped out of Goma in the first three months of this year, according to provincial statistics.

“We’re hoping the security situation won’t degenerate further,” he said. “The only hope for us is to export these conflict-free minerals.”

An Uphill Fight Against Malaria in the DR Congo

On World Malaria Day yesterday, health and aid organisations were highlighting how malaria control measures such as bed nets and early treatment for sufferers can drastically reduce deaths from the disease.

But despite much progress over recent years, in many countries malaria remains the greatest threat to health, particularly among children. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), for example, malaria is the leading cause of death among young children. It accounts for over a fifth of all deaths among the under-fives, with around 300,000 young children dying from it each year. 

Aid organisations working in the country are particularly concerned this death toll might be even higher this year. Cases of malaria have been surging. One agency which treats malaria in the DR Congo is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); in 2009, MSF treated over 45,000 people. By last year, the total had climbed to 158,000 and already in 2012, over 85,000 people have been treated.

With its many lakes and areas of stagnant water, malaria is endemic in the DR Congo. But the increase in cases could also be due to further displacement of communities in certain regions as families flee their homes because of fighting. This means they often leave protective bed nets behind. With limited healthcare services operating over this vast country, even in stable regions, it’s frequently hard for sufferers to reach medical centres. And parents often leave it too late to bring sick children in for treatment.

An article in the Guardian highlights the huge need for medical assistance with malaria in the DR Congo. When MSF set up a treatment centre in Kinkondja in the Katanga Province, over 5,000 patients came to be screened in a four week period. 80% of these tested positive for malaria and 10% were already suffering from severe malaria. This is particularly dangerous in children, who develop anaemia. This is because the malaria parasite destroys red blood cells. In severe cases, children die unless they can receive a blood transfusion. When the MSF team arrived in Kinkondja, they found that around 50 dead children were being buried every three days. After broadcasting radio messages about bringing children in for early treatment and distributing bed nets, the situation in Kinkondja has improved. 

MSF has deployed emergency medical teams in four provinces, but the charity is conscious that in other areas “healthcare is simply non-existent”. They know that more medical teams are urgently required to bring the number of deaths from malaria down across the country. Meanwhile, the global campaign to fight malaria is hoping to raise 3.2 billion dollars in funding for its ongoing fight against this killer. The goal of the United Nations is to have “near-zero” deaths from the disease by 2015. In the DR Congo, as in many other African countries, this goal unfortunately looks optimistic at best.

 

 

 -SOS Children

 

Congo Eyes A Greater Share Of Its Mineral Riches (BBC)

The recently refurbished Grand Karavia hotel in Lubumbashi, the mining capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, offers everything international business people want. There are plush rooms, fine dining and a cigar bar overlooking the swimming pool.

Yet in the copper, cobalt and uranium-rich Katanga province around the city, some 184 out of each 1,000 babies born can expect to die before they reach the age of five. That is more than in any country in the world.

With a new generation of oil fields and mines coming on stream across Africa, many governments on the continent are determined to avoid this so-called natural resources curse. But African leaders with riches under their feet are facing a two-pronged challenge.

First, they need to increase the share of wealth from underground resources that stays in their country, as they concede extraction to the multinationals that have the capital and technology.

Secondly, they must find ways of spending that money wisely – to protect it from outright graft and to inject it into their economy in a sustainable way.

“A number of African countries have run into new natural resources – Sierra Leone, Niger, Tanzania, quite a few of them – and are very eager to make sure that they do better than countries across the region have done in the past,” says Antoinette Sayeh, director of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Africa department. “One of the issues around that is just getting more in the way of revenues.”

Improved terms

One example is Guinea, where president Alpha Conde pushed through deep mining reform within one year of his election in 2010.  The Guinean state will now receive a 15% free stake in all mining projects for the country’s flagship minerals – bauxite, iron, gold and diamonds.

Guinea has made sure it gets a larger share of the profits made from mining its minerals

The secretary general of Guinea’s mining ministry, Guillaume Curtis, says the new legislation was a response to “mining contracts with abusive clauses that made it impossible to increase the state’s revenue”. Export taxes are now indexed on global metal prices and fiscal exemptions have been cut.

“Yes, there are heavy investments, but the eight-to-12-year tax holidays given by our countries are exaggerated,” Mr Curtis says. The Guinean authorities are also negotiating with existing concession holders to improve the terms of contracts signed in the past.

Just one year ago, the British-Australian miner Rio Tinto agreed to give the government $700m (£435m) and a 15% stake to keep its Simandou iron ore project.

Government stake

Democratic Republic of Congo has adopted a similar stance.

The Democratic Republic of Congo government wants to increase its stake in mining projects

After a controversial review of existing mining contracts in the past five years, president Joseph Kabila has decided to rewrite mining legislation.

According to mining minister Martin Kabwelulu, Democratic Republic of Congo’s $5bn (£3.1bn) annual copper exports yielded only 2% in taxes last year.  “The problem here lies in deductible costs, for which there is no restrictive list in the mining code,” he says. “Mining companies have been inflating them at will and we must put a limit on those deductible costs in the revision of the mining code to make sure that the state gets a fair share.”

Democratic Republic of Congo will, like Guinea, increase the government’s stake in mining projects, he says.

New dilemma

Complaints about abusive oil and minerals contracts abounded at a recent conference on the management of African natural resources in Kinshasa.

Getting a greater share of the earnings from copper and other minerals could help the Democratic Republic of Congo fight poverty.  Disgruntled delegates from Mozambique and Cameroon said companies had conned their countries into accepting ridiculously low mining or transit fees. This could mean the end of unabated competition for investors, in which governments have been falling over each other to offer extractive multinationals the lowest possible tax pressure.

Yet, assuming African countries do retain more revenues from their natural resources in the future and protect them from the greed of corrupt officials, they will face a new dilemma. “There are urgent spending needs in these countries on health, education, poverty reduction,” explains Tony Venables, professor of economics at Oxford University. “But it’s also important to remember that these are finite resources, this is possibly a one-off opportunity. The country needs to get something sustainable from it, and in particular it needs to try and use it to increase the rate of growth in the country. That means investment in the domestic economy.”

Professor Venables and other analysts say that African leaders should be prepared to invest a significant proportion of the revenues from natural resources into productive infrastructure. To do so, they must face up to critics who may well say that “you cannot eat roads”, a complaint often voiced by opposition voters during the last Democratic Republic of Congo election campaign.

No magic formula

Yet channelling massive revenues from natural resources into infrastructure development is no silver bullet. If sound procurement methods are not in place, if the local construction industry does not have the capacity to provide the railways and buildings the government wants, if there are no plans in place for the long-term maintenance of new infrastructure, the best intentions could send fragile economies into inflation spirals and damaging boom-and-bust cycles. Professor Venables thinks African countries that strike gold with natural resources should increase their spending on productive investments progressively, but he stops short of giving the antidote to the resource curse. “It’s very difficult and obviously completely country-specific,” he says. “I certainly can’t give you a magic formula to work it out.”

Africa’s Richest Man Gives Aid to Congo

Africa’s richest man, Nigerian Aliko Dangote, has donated $500 000 to victims of last month’s munitions blasts in Congo which killed at least 282 people, his group said on Tuesday.

Dangote made the donation at the weekend in the Congolese capital Brazzaville with a pledge to increase his charity works as well as create more jobs for Africans this year.

“About this philanthropy, I think from this year, I personally want to take it very seriously. I want to be much more aggressive than what we have had in the past,” he said in a statement.

Speaking at the occasion, Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso said that his gvernment has started reconstruction of houses affected in the blasts, adding that “this contribution will go a long way in building new houses for the victims,” the statement said.

Dangote, rated by Forbes as Africa’s richest man with vast interests in oil and gas, banking, flour, sugar and food production in Nigeria, also operates in about a dozen other African countries.

The powerful March 4 blasts in Brazzaville, blamed on a short-circuit and fire, killed at least 282 people, injured 2 300 more and destroyed hundreds of homes around the munitions depot, leaving 14 000 people homeless.

Congolese Fight Back Causing Warlord To Surrender

A senior commander of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) militia, Lt. Col. Idrissa Muradadi, has surrendered in the face of a military offensive by the Congolese army and UN forces.

FDRL is an outfit operating mainly in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and it’s composed of elements responsible for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.

Speaking to The New Times, Jean Sayinzoga, the Chairman of the Rwanda Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission (RDRC), confirmed the development.

“He is still in Congo, I am yet to get more details,” said Sayinzoga.

DRC Army Commander, Col. Sylvain Ekenge, also confirmed Muradadi’s surrender saying that he turned himself in with three of his bodyguards on March 10.

Ekenge said the captive is now in the hands of the UN peacekeeping mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) prior to his repatriation to Rwanda. He said Muradadi surrendered because of military pressure.

The Congolese army, backed by MONUSCO, launched an offensive on February 15 to hunt down FDLR fighters after a series of attacks by the rebel group.

“More than two dozen civilians have been killed by FDLR since New Year’s. The latest attack by the FDLR in South Kivu on Feb. 25 killed 4 civilians and left three others injured,” Ekenge told agencies.

“We will continue this offensive until all of the rebels go home”.

In the same region, 15 other rebels and 74 of their dependents also turned themselves over to the military, Ekenge said.

$70 Million in Congo Mining Revenue Untraceable

Anti-corruption investigators in the Democratic Republic of Congo say they cannot trace more than $70 million that mining companies claim to have paid to the government.

Professor Jeremy Dumba is the Congo coordinator of a global anti-corruption watchdog, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or EITI.  His team has collected figures on what mining companies say they paid the DRC government, and what the government says it received from those companies.  On Thursday, he announced that he could not make the two sets of figures match.

Dumba said there are a lot of gaps in the figures, and he and his team had not been able to reconcile the payments declared by companies with the state’s receipts.  He said it was very difficult to get figures from the state revenue service that matched what the companies had declared.

Dumba submitted the figures as part of a long-overdue EITI report on Congo.  He said the latest figures collected for the years 2008 and 2009, show mining companies say they paid tax revenues far higher than what the government says it received from them.  In 2008 for example, they declared payments of $121 million, while the government said it received $69 million.  In 2009 the gap was smaller — $99 million paid, say the companies; $73 million received, says the government.

EITI 

The EITI was launched by the British government in 2002 and is supported by the United States and other Western countries. It brings together governments, companies and civil society to try to ensure that taxes from mining, oil and gas are properly accounted for and go to national treasuries. The initiative aims to improve governance in countries that depend on those industries so that the revenues are used to reduce poverty.

The amount of tax that companies say they pay should equal what governments say they receive.  For most other countries applying for EITI membership the amounts are more or less equal.  But figures for Tanzania and Mali also show gaps of tens of millions between payments and receipts.

Congo has applied for membership of the scheme, and President Joseph Kabila has said that his government is committed to it.  But before becoming a full member, the country’s reports on company payments and tax receipts have to be approved by the EITI board.

Unreliable data 

Dumba said the figures for the DRC’s oil industry add up, but the data has has been able to collect on the mining sector is not reliable. 

Another Congolese anti-corruption expert, Jean-Claude Katende, said it was difficult for Congo to provide accurate figures because its mining industry is more complex than the industry in other countries.

“You have countries that have three or four or 10 mining enterprises whereas in the DRC you have more than 200 mining enterprises,” Katende noted.  “And to that you should add the petroleum industry and the comptoirs.”

Comptoirs are licensed exporters of minerals.

Data

Another problem, Katende said, is that Congo does not have a centralized databank for its mining sector.  But, he said, the government is working with donors on a plan to computerize mining data, which will then be held centrally.

The gap between what mining companies pay and what Congo’s government should receive may be far greater than the tens of millions unaccounted for in Dumba’s report.

Mining companies may be hiding some of their income and thus paying less tax than they should. Dumba said he knew of cases where this may have been happening.

He said for example there’s the case of a company that exported 400,000 tons of minerals.  They should have paid 2 percent tax on that, but their tax declaration came to much less, indicating that they hadn’t declared all their income. 

It has also been claimed that in the past few years the government has sold large mining concessions at far less than their market price. British member of parliament Eric Joyce, chairman of the UK Parliament Great Lakes of Africa group, has alleged that in the past four years Congo has lost more than $5.5 billion through the sale by the government of mineral assets at less than their fair market value. He said the sales had been made through offshore companies which had captured the profits.

Transparency 

When asked about Joyce’s allegation last year, President Kabila said he was not going to respond to a British MP. He said his commitment to good governance was meant to benefit the Congolese people, not to please foreign politicians.

As evidence of open dealings, Kabila said that his government’s $9 billion mining deal with a Chinese consortium, its biggest deal in the mining sector, was only signed after it was debated and approved by the parliament. 

 

Originally covered by Voice of America.