Above photo: A concert in Goma for the launch of Notre Terre Sans Pétrole, October 2024. X/Notre Terre Sans Pétrole.
After constant campaigning and mounting global condemnation, the Congolese government has temporarily canceled a dangerous oil and gas auction.
“I was very angry. I was astonished. Everything I saw was stolen,” said François Kamate, an environmental activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. He was describing how it felt to enter the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium for the first time.
The museum was built in a rich suburb of Brussels to showcase the spoils after King Leopold II declared a vast swath of Central Africa, including the entire present day DRC, to be his own private kingdom. What resulted was one of the most vicious and exploitative episodes of European colonial history, and the funneling of 10,000,000 zoological specimens and 120,000 cultural objects into the museum’s collection.
What astonished Kamate was not just the scale of the plunder on display, nor the fact that the Belgian state was still using it to enrich itself through ticket sales. It was the very concept of a museum brazenly displaying the results of such criminality. “I had no idea such places existed,” he said.
Along with a small group of local activists, Kamate stuck notices to the cabinets demanding the return of the stolen objects, as well as the cancellation of historic debts owed by the DRC to Western-controlled institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Not only were these debts amassed by corrupt Congolese regimes propped up by the West, but those same nations have wreaked havoc on the country through their carbon emissions.
The DRC is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. Increasingly erratic rainfall has led to catastrophic floods, mudslides, worsening droughts, declining crop yields, widespread disease and massive financial losses.
Before coming to Brussels, Kamate spoke at a protest outside an Apple Store in Berlin. He explained how the tech giant had “blood on its hands” for sourcing minerals through a Rwanda-backed militia committing genocide along DRC’s eastern border. This same militia, the M23, had forced Kamate to flee his rural home and seek refuge in the nearby city of Goma three years earlier.
But Kamate had primarily come to Europe to deliver a petition to the German government. The petition had been started by activists in Germany in reaction to a major auction of oil reserves underway in the DRC. It called on German ministers to push the Congolese government into protecting their rainforests and peatlands from oil exploration. It attracted 65,000 signatures and birthed the Congo Basin Alliance, a new group focused on linking climate activists in Europe and Central Africa.
Kamate ended up handing the petition to a representative of the German Foreign Minister, who told him that the German government was shocked by the Congolese oil auction, and that “they were working on ending it.”
The auction that lit a climate bomb
For the last 50 years, the DRC’s entire oil and gas industry has consisted of a handful of small onshore and offshore oil wells around Moanda, a region on the DRC’s tiny western coast, operated by the Anglo-French company Perenco.
Decades of colonial plunder, administrative corruption and regional war has kept the DRC severely underdeveloped, and its oil reserves largely inaccessible. Despite being the size of Western Europe, the densely forested country has as much paved road as Luxembourg.
But in 2022, the Congolese government opened an auction for licenses to explore oil and gas in vast parcels of land, known as “blocks,” across the country. Twenty-seven oil blocks and three gas blocks were made available for fossil fuel companies to bid on, promising rights to potentially one of the largest oil reserves in Africa. The Congolese government promised the auction would be transparent, impartial and competitive.
What was shocking about the auction was that just under half of these blocks overlapped with areas of conservation, contravening DRC’s own environmental laws. Three blocks encroached on Virunga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the country’s war-torn east. Even worse, from a planetary perspective, was that three blocks encroached on the Congo Basin.
The Congo Basin is the largest region of tropical peatland in the world, home to around 80 million people, and the only tropical rainforest on Earth still able to absorb more CO2 than it emits. But should that swampy forest be disturbed by, say, exploratory oil drilling — and should the infrastructure built for that drilling open the forest up to loggers and poachers — the ecosystem could easily flip from being a carbon sink to a carbon bomb, emitting more carbon than America does each year.
The situation was so grave that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry flew to Kinshasa and asked the Congolese government to withdraw the Congo Basin and Virunga oil blocks from sale. The Congolese government rejected his request, insisting that the country’s vast natural resources must be tapped to benefit its people. But the impoverished communities of Moanda, surrounded by Perenco’s oil wells for decades, tells a different story.
Farmland in Moanda has become barren, forcing many families to seek an income from cutting trees for charcoal, while local health centers have reported soaring respiratory illnesses and skin rashes. A local NGO found evidence of oil spills, toxic waste dumping and gas flaring, while two French NGOs have now taken Perenco to court for ecological damage. The oil company has denied these claims, blaming the documented pollution on sabotage. Journalists at Investigate Europe found that the firm paid over $1 million to companies linked to the former DRC president Joseph Kabila.
When news broke in 2023 that Perenco had entered the auction, making bids for two oil blocks overlapping more of Moanda’s territory, local people despaired. The blocks included land where desperate farmers had moved their crops to avoid the pollution of the current oil wells. “How are we going to feed ourselves?” asked one.
Pétrole Non Merci
Before war had forced him to flee to Goma, Kamate was living on a small farm in Rutshuru, a mountainous territory that contains a large portion of Virunga National Park. Home to an incredible array of wildlife — including endangered mountain gorillas — the park had been threatened by the oil industry just once before in 2014, when the U.K.-based SOCO International began seismic testing in one of its lakes.
Kamate joined a protest campaign initiated by the park’s wardens, and saw that campaign go global and ultimately succeed in forcing the oil company out. SOCO was so tarnished by the episode — which saw protesting park wardens bribed, tortured and shot — that it decided to change its name.
So when reports of a new oil auction began surfacing in 2021 — and it became clear that the park could again become prey to rapacious oil companies — a huge network of local activist groups were ready to respond. Kamate was by now coordinating XR Rutshuru, a local chapter of Extinction Rebellion, and he was convinced that the movement’s unique brand of nonviolent activism could kick the oil industry out of Virunga for good.
His small group of activists started visiting villages around the park, holding open meetings in community halls and schools to raise awareness about the upcoming auction, and using Moanda as an example of how fossil fuel extraction can devastate communities dependent on the same land. “Legally, the government should have consulted these people about the auction,” he said. “If the park was harmed, their lives would be totally destabilized. But they were astonished. They didn’t know anything about it.”
A dozen villages were visited before a resurgence of war in the region made touring it too difficult. But after those villagers were given the full picture of the auction, they unanimously decided to resist. Village representatives traveled back to Goma with the activists, and marched to the provincial assembly to deliver a memorandum to the governor expressing their rejection of the auction.
The marches were always peaceful, and followed Congolese law, with authorities informed by letter where and when they would be taking place. On one occasion, the governor did meet with some of the protesters and promised to pass their concerns onto the Minister of Hydrocarbons. But otherwise, they were met with repression.
“We would sing songs, wave banners,” Kamate recalled. “When the police came, we would sit down in circles, holding onto each other in a way to make it hard for them to drag us away. They would tell us our protest was not authorized. Sometimes they would beat us.” He has been arrested more times than he can remember, and locked up overnight in both police cells and military camps. After one action, he was charged with terrorism offenses, but the case collapsed due to lack of evidence.
The Extinction Rebellion movement first started in the country in the halls of Goma University. After founding XR Université de Goma, the student activists toured the regions around the city, proselytizing about nonviolent direct action. With the advent of the auction, they started touring the entire country, traveling thousands of miles to visit communities living on proposed oil and gas blocks, and seeding new XR groups as they went.
Their nationwide campaign, called Pétrole Non Merci, even reached as far as the west coast of Moanda, where locals readily adopted the Extinction Rebellion ethos in their battle with the oil company Perenco. Weeks after it was founded, XR Moanda held a synchronized street rally with Extinction Rebellion activists in the U.K. As the Moandan rebels marched along the dirt tracks of the district’s main town (also named Moanda), rebels from London and Bournemouth protested outside Perenco’s London headquarters.
The campaign against Perenco in the U.K. started off personal. The company had a small oil field in Dorset on the English south coast, which had leaked months earlier, restricting the harbor and damaging a nature reserve. When local XR activists realized Perenco was ruining communities in the DRC as well, they reached out to XR Université de Goma, and arranged for one of its coordinators to join them for the Perenco protest in London. Visa problems meant the Congolese activist only made it as far as Paris.
Ralph Doe, an English activist who helped organize the Perenco protest, is still in contact with his Congolese comrades, and is still chasing both Perenco and the U.K. Environment Agency for details on the Dorset oil spill. “First they said it was a major incident,” he explained. “Then they claimed it was a minor incident, and it’s all cleared up. But there’s no specific information about it available anywhere.” Nearly two years on, the U.K. government still hasn’t finished its report on the spill.
Anything but green and peace
Extinction Rebellion wasn’t the only environmental group visiting communities living on the oil and gas blocks. Greenpeace Africa, an organization with deep roots in the DRC, started organizing field trips as soon as the auction launched.
Their forest defenders even reached the remote villages deep in the jungle of the Congo Basin, and they brought the international media with them. Journalists from Al Jazeera, TV5Monde and more, filed reports on the shock and anger of local people as they learned their ancestral lands were up for sale.
Greenpeace Africa also started reaching out to other environmental and civil society groups, creating an informal coalition to lobby the world’s biggest oil companies and insurance firms, warning them through letters and comprehensive reports to stay away from the auction, echoing a leading climate scientist’s claim that the DRC was “the worst place in the world to drill for oil.”
The coalition helped spread a petition addressed to the Congolese president that ended up collecting more than 100,000 signatures, and organized anti-fossil fuel marches through Kinshasa that drew in hundreds of Congolese activists. Patient Muamba, a former Greenpeace forest campaigner who helped lead the campaign against oil and gas for three years, laughs when I ask if it had an effect on the government. “You could see them react. Ministers were on the TV making statements against us.”
The Environment Minister denounced Greenpeace as “anything but green and peace” and claimed its staff were “beneficiaries of imperialist backers.” The Hydrocarbons Minister repeatedly questioned the patriotism of anyone protesting against the auction, and implied activists concerned with Virunga National Park were indifferent to the atrocities committed by the resurgent M23 militia in the region.
The result was death threats to Greenpeace staff from anonymous callers, and a barrage of accusations of treason and further threats of violence towards affiliated environmental activists on social media. The menacing atmosphere only brought the informal coalition of activists closer. Within two years, it would crystallize into a brand new movement, with Muamba as one of its founders.
The red flag that pushed us together
The DRC is the world’s richest country in terms of natural resources, with unrivaled reserves of precious minerals, but its people are some of the poorest. This paradox is a legacy of endemic corruption, fostered by once-colonial powers wanting unbroken access to those resources at minimal cost.
The first elected prime minister of the DRC post independence, Patrice Lumumba, wanted his country to have full control over those resources. He was promptly assassinated in a military coup, led by Congolese army chief Joseph Mobutu but orchestrated by the American and Belgian governments.
Mobutu went on to rule as a dictator for the next 32 years, forcing the country down a path of corruption, exploitation and war that it is still struggling to divert from. The scale of the corruption can be dizzying. Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler made mineral and oil exploration deals with the Congolese government which were so outrageously undervalued that the U.S. Treasury put sanctions on him. In just two years, Gertler fleeced the country of $1.36 billion.
Despite promises to the contrary, it was inevitable that the new oil auction would be tainted by corruption of its own. Last year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that a bid for one of the gas blocks had been rigged in favor of Alfajiri Energy, a company registered to a private house in Canada, days after the auction was announced. The swindle was especially egregious because the gas block was under Lake Kivu, an unusually explosive lake with Goma city on its coastline. If the unknown Alfajiri botched the exploration, millions of lives could be at risk.
Shortly after the scandal broke, Perenco pulled their bid for the two oil blocks in Moanda, and the hydrocarbons minister overseeing the auction was demoted. After a year of dormant bidding, constant campaigning across the country and mounting global condemnation, the government finally canceled the auction in October 2024. The announcement came just days after Kamate returned from his trip to Europe.
Congolese activists have welcomed the cancellation, but they know that this decision marks only a pause in the plunder of their country, not a definite end. The new hydrocarbons minister has promised to relaunch the auction soon, reportedly with the oil blocks redrawn to avoid protected areas. His ministry is also continuing to negotiate discredited bids for the three gas blocks, and lobby for inclusion in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, an ecologically monstrous project that will take heated Ugandan oil all the way to a port in Tanzania for global export.
“Why is the government planning to repeat this auction when it didn’t have good results the first time?” asked Muamba, who is now part of Notre Terre Sans Pétrole, or Our Land Without Oil, a new campaign demanding the complete cancellation of any oil and gas exploration in the DRC. “Lots of organizations are asking this question, and it’s the red flag that has pushed us together.”
The campaign launched two weeks after the auction’s cancellation with press conferences and marches in cities across the country. In Goma, a special music concert drew in hundreds of people. It already has the support of more than 120 environmental and social organizations, including Extinction Rebellion.
Muamba talks excitedly about how this new activist network is sharing expertise to build better outreach tools and forge stronger links with groups around the world. “We want to target any oil and insurance companies making bids in the countries where they are based,” he said. “We have lots planned for these companies, and we invite activists in America, the U.K. and Europe to join us. This campaign is not only for Congolese, this is for the world.”
‘I don’t walk alone at night‘
Kamate now lives in Goma with activist friends, but most who have sought refuge in the city have not been so lucky. In the first half of 2024, more than 940,000 people were displaced by the war in the east, with most refugees crowding into makeshift camps around Goma’s outskirts. Malnutrition, disease and gang violence have become rife.
“Living conditions are extremely bad,” said Kamate, who has visited the camps with other activist groups. “There is no food, no clean water, people are forced to scavenge what they can. Families are sleeping on the ground, crammed into small spaces. I have seen how diseases like monkeypox spread in these camps.”
The situation in Goma city is also deteriorating. “Militias and gangs are attacking people and looting homes,” he added. “We do not know where they come from, but if you resist them, you are shot. Corpses are being left on the shores of Lake Kivu. I no longer walk alone at night.”
Despite the dangers, Kamate is still visiting the camps and villages around the province for as long as the war allows. Rather than lose young people to the gangs and militias that are proliferating across the region, he wants to create a generation that embraces peaceful protest, and understands that security will only come if extractive multinational companies are kept away.
Since returning from his trip across Europe, he is also attending weekly online meetings with his Congo Basin Alliance comrades in Germany. The new group is working on campaigns to pressure Western companies still interested in Congolese oil and gas, and ensure that should the auction return, peaceful resistance to it will flourish on both Congolese and European streets.
The Brussels-based EU recently signed a major minerals supply deal with Rwanda, despite knowing that the country is perpetuating the war in the DRC. The M23 militia is not just being trained and supported by the Rwandan army, soldiers are fighting alongside it, all so Rwanda can pass off stolen Congolese minerals as its own.
The smuggling is blatant. The M23 has seized control of major coltan mines near the border with Rwanda, and now Rwanda is suddenly the world’s largest exporter of coltan despite having one of Africa’s smallest mining industries. Coltan is vital for electronic devices like smartphones and electric car batteries, and global demand has never been higher.
It is not just the EU looking the other way. In 2023, the American and British governments also rewarded Rwanda with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment, while remaining silent on its warmongering. Those same colonial powers who started plundering the DRC over a century ago have found a new regional proxy to perpetuate the plunder, and keep the Congolese people trapped in a cycle of corruption, poverty and war.
“I was born in war, went into primary school and then secondary school during war. We are tired of war,” Kamate said. “Politics is not the best way of change. There are thousands of political parties in the DRC, and they have achieved nothing. Peaceful protest is the last chance for the Congolese people.”