The Democratic Republic of the Congo has by far the richest cobalt mines in the world, and they are linked to the supply lines bringing the materials needed to make our batteries.
If there’s a hell, it’s a teenage mother with a sick child strapped to her back, breaking rocks and putting them into a sack while she and her baby breathe in toxic dust. If she’s lucky, she’ll make a dollar or two and they will buy something to eat. They will both be dead in less than a year.
I thought I had seen the worst of human suffering when I lived in the DRC in the early 1990s. At that time, the region now producing cobalt was known for its copper production. The riches from these largely industrial mines lined the pockets of the American puppet dictator, Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko, while his people lived in squalor. In their dark humour, Congolese spoke of a nonexistent law called “Article 15: Débrouillez-vous”, which meant “figure it out; find a way to get by”.
Misery expanded southward as the demand for cobalt, a byproduct of copper mining, became essential to modern technology. Joseph Kabila made deals with Chinese, Swiss, Canadian, and other foreign mining corporations and enriched himself the way Mobutu had. Félix Tshisekedi, the first democratically elected president of the DRC since 1960, has done little to bring foreign mining corporations under control. Today, millions of Congolese men, boys, women, and girls dig cobalt from the ground, break stones, wash them in contaminated water, put them in raffia sacks, and carry them out of the mines. They often end up seriously injured or dead when walls of earth collapse onto them.
Philippines Latest News, Philippines Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Opinion: How we communicate with banks, order food, contact city hall in the post-pandemicPolling reveals which communications habits may have changed
Read more »
Opinion: How we communicate with banks, order food, contact city hall in the post-pandemicPolling reveals which communications habits may have changed
Read more »
Opinion: Federal tax incentives could help solve the rental housing crisisBuilding rental housing is not a good investment, in large part because of deep government involvement, but tax cuts could help. Read more.
Read more »
Opinion: Doug Ford has yet to do the bare minimum on the Greenbelt development scandalThe staffer at the centre of the controversy has resigned, the RCMP may investigate, and the Premier and Housing Minister admit the process was flawed. So why is the plan still under way?
Read more »
OPINION: We must do more to address homelessness amid N.L. housing crisis'We must recognize that the faces of homelessness are not anonymous; they are the sons and daughters of our community'
Read more »
Opinion: Fleeing the fires in Kelowna was a horror movie come to lifeAn area still haunted by wildfires that wreaked havoc two decades ago grapples with fresh destruction and the terror of not knowing what comes next
Read more »