Félix Tshisekedi’s Government Faces Backlash Over Illegal KoBold Mining Deal in Manono

The recent revelations by Reuters regarding a signed agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government and the U.S.-based company KoBold Metalsconcerning the development of a portion of the lithium-rich Manono deposithave cast a harsh spotlight on the institutional dysfunction at the highest levels of Congolese governance.

Far from being a minor procedural oversight, this political act marks yet another milestone in a concerning trend of executive behavior that treats legality as an optional courtesyan empty formality to be brushed aside when immediate political or economic interests are at stake.

AVZ Minerals, the majority stakeholder in the contested project, has emphasized that this new agreement flagrantly violates an active international arbitration ruling, which explicitly prohibits unilateral action pending the resolution of ongoing legal proceedings.

By disregarding this legally binding injunction, Kinshasa not only exhibits blatant contempt for international law but also signals an alarming indifference to its own contractual and legal commitments. This is more than a mining disputeit reflects the unraveling of governance itself, with arbitrariness becoming the operating model of the state.

This is not an isolated incident. It is symptomatic of a deeper malaisea regime that, across nearly every domain, from public finance to natural resource management, from electoral processes to market regulation, is navigating blindly, lacking both ethical compass and institutional grounding.

The law, once the backbone of the state, has been reduced to a manipulable toolbent, ignored, or weaponized depending on short-term political calculations. When legal frameworks are treated as façades, the very foundation of the republic begins to erode.

What’s particularly disturbing is the government’s willingness to trample on arbitration mechanisms it voluntarily agreed to, to violate the established rights of investors who followed due legal process, and to broker opaque deals with carefully chosen partners outside public scrutiny.

This ad hoc style of governancedriven by collusion, haste, and improvisationcontinues to isolate the DRC from international norms and devastates its credibility in the global economic arena.

It must be said, with the utmost seriousness: a regime that no longer respects its own word, disregards the laws that bind it, and routinely violates its freely undertaken commitments, becomes a source of legal insecurity. It delegitimizes itself from within and discredits itself on the global stage. When the rule of law is dissolved in a tide of private and partisan interests, society pays the price through capital flight, investor distrust, andmore profoundlythe erosion of the social contract.

The KoBold affair is not just another governance misstep; it could mark a decisive fracture. If lessons are not drawn from this violation of international lawif the slow disappearance of norms and principles is not met with firm resistancethen the Democratic Republic of Congo will cease to function as a true state. Instead, it will become a chaotic arena of competing interests, absent of regulation, justice, or a shared national vision.

It is long past time to reaffirm that the law is not a rhetorical ornament. It is the very foundation of legitimate political coexistence. To abandon it is to undermine the very basis of national sovereignty.