China Built Congo a Toll Road That Led Straight to the Ruling Family

For 250 hot and dusty miles, the two-lane highway cuts through central Africa, its path lined with the carcasses of trucks, buses, and minivans.

But this modest road holds outsize value for global markets, connecting some of the continent’s richest mines to the rest of the world—most notably, China.

Along this route, thousands of flatbed trucks haul sheets of copper and sacks of cobalt hydroxide, essential for electric cars and other 21st century technologies.

Their drivers must pay steep tolls, as much as $900 for a round trip.And for almost a decade, records indicate, a cut of those tolls flowed to the family of one politician: Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The toll payments illustrate how Kabila blurred the lines between state and private business, documents reviewed by Bloomberg News suggest.

By striking such deals with his regime, Chinese companies over the past 15 years came to dominate Congo’s mining industry, down to the roads the country’s minerals travel for export.

The relationship with Kabila has been of strategic benefit to China in its economic rivalry with the U.S. And it has helped Congo, a nation of 105 million, become Africa’s largest producer of copper and the world’s biggest source of cobalt.

Yet, as on much of the continent, a foreign power and a country’s elite, not the general population, have reaped the benefits of natural resources.