# Gécamines The Congolese state mining company — successor to [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]], counterparty to nearly every foreign mining deal signed in the country since, and the clearest single measure of what happened to Congolese industrial capacity between 1967 and today. ## The nationalisation [[Mobutu Sese Seko]] seized UMHK's operations on **31 December 1966**, creating GECOMIN, renamed **Gécamines in 1971**. The state took 100% ownership. UMHK's commercial subsidiary kept the marketing and service contract — so the asset was nationalised and the sales channel was not, which is a fair summary of what [[Zairianization]] achieved generally. ## The peak, and the collapse Between 1967 and 1985 Gécamines generated **70–80% of Zaire's hard-currency export receipts** and 20–30% of government revenue, averaging around 452,000 tonnes of copper a year, with cobalt peaking near 10,000 tonnes. It employed over 20,000 people and ran their hospitals, schools and food supply. Then the maintenance stopped. The main Kamoto underground mine deteriorated and collapsed by 1990. The Battle of Kolwezi in 1978 had already driven out most of the expatriate technical staff, who never returned. > [!warning] The number that matters > Copper output fell from **468,400 tonnes in 1988 to 33,600 tonnes in 1994** — a **93% collapse in six years.** Whatever one concludes about Mobutu's personal fortune, this is the auditable measure of the period. IMF and World Bank sources documented $300–400 million disappearing from foreign-exchange reserves in a single late-1980s year, chiefly from Gécamines export proceeds. ## The counterparty era From the mid-1990s Gécamines became primarily a **holder of minority stakes and a signer of joint ventures**, and the terms were consistently poor. The 1996 Tenke Fungurume deal with Lundin, signed months before [[Laurent-Désiré Kabila]]'s forces took the mine, was found by World Bank-funded auditors to have been concluded "precipitously... without much discernment" and to have transferred excessively large reserves. In [[Glencore]]'s acquisition of Kamoto Copper Company, a signing bonus owed to Gécamines was reduced from $585 million to $140 million, with [[Dan Gertler]] the intermediary. Today Gécamines is a minority partner across the copper belt — with Glencore at KCC and Mutanda, with [[CMOC]] at Tenke Fungurume, and through its subsidiary **Entreprise Générale du Cobalt** it holds a legal monopoly on buying and marketing artisanal cobalt that it has repeatedly announced and rarely exercised. See [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]]. ## Why it matters here Gécamines is the institution through which every question in this cluster gets asked concretely. Who signs, on what terms, with what parliamentary oversight, at what valuation, with which intermediary taking a cut. The 2026 sale of 40% of Glencore's Congolese assets to a US-backed consortium is the newest instance of a transaction type that runs back to 1906. ## See also [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Zairianization]] · [[Glencore]] · [[CMOC]] · [[Conflict Minerals Ecosystem]]