US Congo mineral deal in the future?

 Austin Bay, a military strategy writer on StrategyPage, has one of his syndicated columns discussing the story that the DRC asked Trumpieboy to rescue them 

In mid-February, a firm representing a Democratic Republic of the Congo legislator contacted several U.S. officials... . The letter sketched a sub-Saharan version of President Donald Trump's Ukraine minerals peace initiative.

what are they talking about? 

Would the U.S. be interested in acquiring or investing in Congo's enormous and globally unique trove of critical and rare mineral resources? The DRC has gold, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum (coltan), lithium, gold and diamonds. The uranium for America's World War II atom bombs came from the then-Belgian Congo. Mobile phone and computer manufacturers need coltan (columbite-tantalite). Cobalt is a 21st-century treasure. Congo is the world's largest producer of cobalt ore, a must-have for electric vehicles.

so why not ask China to do this? Their propaganda always assures us that they will be the macho guys to stop the bad guys in Africa etc? Well, as any Filipino could tell you, China Lies.

In 2006 and 2007, Chinese front companies began buying DRC cobalt, copper and rare earth mineral operations. In 2008 and 2009, China signed the so-called China Deal of 2008 the DRC's Kabila dictatorship. The overall deal was supposedly worth billions. China was supposed to build roads and other infrastructure. It built ... next to nothing. In 2021, Congo condemned China and began legal proceedings to end Beijing's fraud.

peacekeepers also were no good.

But then the Rwanda connection:

The most effective militia is M23 - the March 23 Movement. Last time I looked, M23 had taken control of North Kivu's capital, Goma. The DRC government calls M23 as a terrorist organization controlled by Rwanda in order to exploit Congolese mineral resources. Rwanda, currently led by a government dominated by the Tutsi tribe, says M23 is a Congolese Tutsi militia defending Tutsi rights.

One of my human rights newsletter points out they are just trying to protect their people, and warned me not to believe the MSM propaganda that they are bad.

Lots of analysis about this in the essay.

One doubts that the US wants to get involved: The mess should be handled by Europe, by France and Belgium and the UK who used to own these countries, not the US. However, China is trying to get rare earth minerals monopoly, and countering them might inspire Trumpiboy to do something.

And as you can see in the Ukraine, Europe is a paper tiger, and except for a small special forces types units are toothless. In contrast, the US has quite a few experienced combat soldiers.

Read the whole thing.

the invisible war

 

Ongoing violence and instability, including fighting by M23 rebels, has forced more than 7 million people to flee their homes in DR Congo.

We map the human toll of the conflict betwen DRC and the M23 rebels https://t.co/Mz5fmiqIlF pic.twitter.com/rjIF7TEzXS

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 29, 2025

MPox in Africa

 LINK

, presently, there are 20,000 suspected Clade I/Clade II mpox cases, including 5,000 confirmed cases and 194 deaths, which have been reported across 15 African countries. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for most confirmed and suspected cases. The outbreak has been most severe in children under 15 years old due to low immunity and malnutrition, with mortality rates reaching up to 10% in this group.

China' causing problems via Nigeria

 From StrategyPage:

March 24, 2025: The government is going after Chinese citizens who continue to use Nigeria as a base for economic crimes throughout Africa. The Chinese ambassador in Nigeria assured the locals that China was cooperating in identifying and prosecuting Chinese citizens based in Nigeria and committing crimes. China is Nigeria’s largest trading partner and that large volume of trade is what brought Chinese gangsters and independent criminal entrepreneurs to Nigeria. China is currently owed over $5 billion by various Nigerian businesses and individuals. Nigeria is the major African exporter of oil and Chine is one of the top ten buyers.

the rest of the article discusses tribal and religious feuds, and the problem of corruption...

pepfar today

two years ago Biden started diverting funding to sex education

CFAM Report:Feb 2023:

“We are concerned that grants from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are used by nongovernmental organizations that promote abortions and push a radical gender ideology abroad. We urge you to ensure that any reauthorization of PEPFAR ensures that taxpayer money is not used for such purposes,” the pro-life groups said.

...The pro-life letter points out how many major PEPFAR grant recipients, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation, “publicly support abortion as a method of family planning” and recently complained about the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade as well as U.S. State laws against transgender bathroom and sports policies.

The letter also points out that the Biden administration has directed all federal agencies “to promote abortion and gender ideology abroad.” ...

The (Mexican city policy that forbad funding abortion) was revoked in the first week of the Biden administration.

For the last ten years, PEPFAR has been mostly focused on providing anti-retroviral drugs in poor countries, which accounts for its exorbitant expense. The drugs have made HIV/AIDS a manageable illness in industrialized countries, but their costliness combined with lack of health infrastructure in poor countries continues to make HIV/AIDS a deadly disease in poor countries in Africa and East Asia.

A report of the Heritage Foundation...argues that the program is bloated and mismanaged, and it questions the effectiveness of funding anti-retroviral drugs instead of more funding for health infrastructure to combat other deadly diseases that aren’t related to risky sexual behavior and that claim many more lives in poor countries.

The Heritage report also sheds light on how Democrats are making PEPFAR into the vehicle of “social priorities like abortion and promotion of LGBTI issues.”

sleeping sickness in Zambesi area

 CDC report.

T.b. rhodesiense is endemic in 13 countries.† Since 2011, reported rhodesiense HAT cases have been steadily declining, with only 24 cases reported in 2023...

Between this patient’s presentation in August 2024 and January 2025 three additional cases of rhodesiense HAT were reported to WHO in persons from nonendemic countries who were bitten by a tsetse fly while traveling in the Zambezi Valley.

The Zambezi Valley spans northern Zimbabwe and southern Zambia, where epidemiologic conditions are similar, and the parasite is endemic. These four cases are the first Zambezi Valley–associated cases reported since 2019, although Zambia has experienced human cases in other areas during this period....

BMC 2021 

In the 1980s and 1990s, great strides were taken towards the elimination of tsetse and animal African trypanosomiasis (AAT) in Zimbabwe. However, advances in recent years have been limited. Previously freed areas have been at risk of reinvasion, and the disease in tsetse-infested areas remains a constraint to food security. article

The patterns of tsetse and AAT distributions in Zimbabwe are shaped by a combination of bioclimatic factors, historical events such as the rinderpest epizootic at the turn of the twentieth century

the rinderpest killed a lot of the wild animals so the flies had nothing to bite; the white settlers kept the wild population down by hunting, and when I lived in Zimbabwe,  there was a fenced off zone to keep animals and flies from migrating south from the Zambesi area, and extensive spraying to control flies was done. PDF.

and extensive and sustained tsetse control that is aimed at progressively eliminating tsetse and trypanosomiasis from the entire country. 

The comprehensive dataset assembled in the atlas will improve the spatial targeting of surveillance and control activities. It will also represent a valuable tool for research, by enabling large-scale geo-spatial analyses....

The tsetse-infested area in Zimbabwe is currently estimated at 30,000 km2, which corresponds to 17% of the 180,000 km2 ecologically suitable area originally infested by tsetse [10]. In particular, tsetse distribution in Zimbabwe has always been restricted to the north, northwest, northeast and southeast of the country with the central highveld being ecologically unsuitable for the fly.

fake cows that smell like cows and attract the flies are one means of control....2001 article BMJ...

the cows were introduced into Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s, when thousands of cattle were infected with nagana, a disease equivalent to sleeping sickness in cattle. Cases of nagana in the country plummeted to almost zero and have remained at this low level for the past five years. A total of 60000 cows are now in use in Zimbabwe...

TED talk about genetically altering cattle to stop the disease

Moral colonialism

 

Rwanda Congo Uganda conflict: money, minerals, and/or human rights?

 I am not sure of what is going on... the western press seems to oppose the rebels, but a local human rights group says the rebels are the good guys.

Here are a few videos:

////

this one is from an India site; a summary and telling the Congolese point of view:

heart of darkness part two and three

 History lesson of the week:

.............,,,,,,,

 

the phrase Heart of Darkness comes from Conrad's book: which is partly based on his own experiences.

the book can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Few westerners were aware of this, until the book King Leopold's Ghost was published in 1998.

I am reading it on Everand which is a subscription book service, and their sistersite Scribd also has it... or you can download a pdf,  from LINK, and I also found the audiobook in chapters  on you tube LINK