China and Congo recently inked a deal that will allow China to mine cop­per out of the coun­try. In exchange, China agrees to pay for and build 4,000 kilo­me­ters of road­way and 2,000 kilo­me­ters of railway.

The agree­ment has many crit­ics, most of all the World Bank and Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund, also many anti-corruption advo­cates are opposed to the deal.

To hear more of the crit­ics side, we go to this analy­sis from reporter Stephanie Nieu­woudt of the IPS.

As part of the Sicomines deal, China will build a road net­work stretch­ing for 4,000 km and a rail­way sys­tem span­ning 3,200 km. This is a much needed devel­op­ment in a coun­try the size of West­ern Europe and the sec­ond largest in Africa but with only 200 km of tarred road.

The build­ing of a trans­port net­work is of strate­gic impor­tance to the Chi­nese. It will make it easy to trans­port the cop­per (China has a con­ces­sion to extract 10,6 mil­lion tons) and cobalt (626,619 tons) from mines in the Katanga region. Katanga province is part of the so-called Cop­per­belt and reaches from Angola through the DRC to Zambia.

The Sicomines agree­ment pulls in three Chi­nese com­pa­nies: the China Rail­way Group, Sino­hy­dro Cor­po­ra­tion and the Met­al­lur­gi­cal Group Cor­po­ra­tion. These com­pa­nies will have a con­trol­ling inter­est of 68 per­cent. The Con­golese paras­tatal Gecamines has a 32 per­cent interest.

“It remains to be seen to what extent the agree­ment will bear fruit,” Johanna Jans­son, a researcher at the Cen­tre for Chi­nese Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Stel­len­bosch near Cape Town, told IPS in an inter­view. “Very few of the projects agreed upon have as yet been implemented.”

The deal has not gone down well amongst crit­ics. Jans­son pointed out that one of the major con­tentious issues was the demand by the Chi­nese that the Con­golese state guar­an­tee the repay­ment of infra­struc­ture invest­ments, should the prof­its from the min­ing project not be sufficient.

Jans­son said that this issue was resolved in August this year. This hap­pened only because the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund indi­cated that it was not will­ing to con­tinue a three year poverty reduc­tion and growth pro­gramme in the DRC if the latter’s gov­ern­ment was poten­tially beholden to China in terms of debt.

There has also been crit­i­cism from those who fear that the gov­ern­ment has, through this deal, found a way to line the pock­ets of gov­ern­ment offi­cials. In gen­eral, “African gov­ern­ments have to be care­ful of bilat­eral agree­ments which are only ben­e­fi­cial to a small num­ber of peo­ple in the short term,” Dr Rita Cooma, CEO of a New York-based man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm, told IPS at the recent China-Africa Busi­ness Summit.

Jans­son also raised the issue of Con­golese nego­tia­tors hav­ing the nec­es­sary capac­ity to take on the Chi­nese nego­tia­tors, a peren­nial prob­lem beset­ting African coun­tries in all trade and eco­nomic talks.

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