DRC’s President Félix Tshisekedi has said that he is tired of seeing his country’s minerals shipped to other parts of the world leaving over 96million Congolese in abject poverty.
“We are tired of seeing our minerals and natural resources leave for other places,” Tshisekedi said during the “Global Africa Business Initiative” (GABI) where he discussed the project to create a factory to produce batteries for electric vehicles between Zambia and the DRC with financial and technological support from the USA.
The Congolese leader badly wishes to industrialise the DRC thus appealing to foreign investors to support his vision of industrializing the DRC, focused on the production of electric batteries.
Tshisekedi said he is pushing for a vision to build a local value chain for its precious minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese and others.
“The first message that I want to send to investors is that the DRC has decided to make the local processing of minerals a priority. That’s our ambitious program. We got tired of always having to serve extraction lands, of seeing our ores and our natural resources leave for other places where they are taken to transform them,” said Félix Tshisekedi.
He added that local processing of ores and other natural resources is now a priority for his government.
According to Félix Tshisekedi, his industrialisation program embodies a paradigm shift in the country’s industrial governance, aims to resolve the unemployment problem and create wealth for African populations.
“We now want to do it locally, by developing value chains and providing work and wealth to our countries and our populations,” he indicated in the presence of numerous foreign industrialists and bankers.
Meanwhile, Tshisekedi had a working session with project leaders for the valorization of Congolese strategic minerals, notably Delphos (a fundraising and investment platform in energy) and Buenassa (integrated metal trading company specializing in national supply).
He thus announced an investment of 350 million US dollars for the installation of a cobalt and copper refinery in the DRC.
