• by 
Emmanuel Chaco (kinshasa)
• Tuesday, June 21, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Civil society and the government are agreed: the Democratic Republic of Congo must make public the details of all mining, forestry and oil contracts.

Martin Kabwelulu, the DRC's minister for mines and petroleum, told IPS that the country's prime minister, Adolphe Muzito, imposed this requirement in a May 20 decree that sets out an obligation to publish all contracts dealing with concessions to exploit Congo's natural resources.


'This obligation is also found in the international agreements reached by the Congolese goverment with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank with the aim of cleaning up management of natural resources and the revenue they produce', according to the strategic policy document of the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.


'The publication of contracts and of resources comes from the obligation for transparency and sound management of resources in a general context of improving the macroeconomic framework of the country, supported by various development partners,' says Michel Nieukuma, a lawyer and expert in the mining sector at the think tank 'DRC Green', based in the capital, Kinshasa.

The decision to make contracts public was welcomed by Congolese civil society which has however criticised the reluctance of the government to publish details of all agreements as well as the revenue they generate.

'In terms of publication, more than 50 mining contracts remain in the shadows. Among these is the Sicomines agreement and the amendments signed in 2009, as well as many other oil contracts on Lake Graben,' said Elisabeth Caesens, head of the Mining Governance Project of the Jimmy Carter Centre, which specialises in mining issues in DRC and is based in the copper-producing area of Lubumbashi, in the southeastern province of Katanga.

'There is also the Sino-Congolese agreement exchanging infrastructure for minerals, which was signed in 2008 with a value of nine billion dollars, then renegotiated to six billion in 2009 under pressure from

the IMF,' she said.



In a press release published on Jun. 1, the non-governmental organisation Action Against Impunity on Human Rights (known by its French acronym, ACiDH), said that 'even the reports on revenue from these contracts published so far are incomplete and hide certain payments made by investors, including the deposits ['pas de portes'] and royalties coming from the renegotiation of certain mining contracts.'



Kabwelulu told IPS that in line with the agreement with the World Bank, the prime minister's decree requires contracts be made public within 60 days of their approval.

But Gaulois Maheshe, a geologist and mining agent, said the government must do better than restate its obligations. 'It must carry them out. At this point, notwithstanding the publication of some mining contracts, the government has still not carried out its commitment to publish the rest of the contracts nor the details of concessions being exploited, much less, the revenue that they are generating.'



Opposition member of parliament Jean Claude Mvuemba is also critical. 'Elsehwere, the government has agreed with the World Bank pass legislation to make such publication a permanent feature, but nothing has yet been put before parliament other than various decrees of which only the one signed in May 2011 was issued by the prime minister.'


ACIDH recommends that the government go beyond the prime minister's directive and and enshrine, in

law, the obligation to publish the receipts from natural resources on a quarterly basis.


The Jimmy Carter Center says that there has been some positive progress on transparency in the resource extraction sector, demonstrating a will to improve, but it hopes that the government will engage more strongly.

'In particular, it remains to encourage the retroactive application of the decree, meaning to to publish contracts that are already in force, signed before the adoption of the prime ministers decree, the bulk of which have not been published,' said Caesens.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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