LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo — After a devastating human toll of 11 dead and several ill due to continued air and river pollution, the village of Kabombwa has definitively disappeared from the map. More than 1,000 residents have found housing elsewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) province of Lualaba, including in the neighboring mining town of Fungurume. Kabombwa’s tranquility had begun fading away in 2020 when lime production began at a nearby plant operated by the Chinese company Tenke Fungurume Mining SA (TFM). According to an official from Fungurume town hall, after over a year of discussions about financial compensation, the inhabitants of Kabombwa received between $3,000 and $5,000 from the government when they were relocated. But for the village’s inhabitants, the amount is far from sufficient. It isn’t enough to buy a house or build a new one in their new villages. One reason for the insufficient compensation is the provincial government’s administrative process, civil society organizations tell Mongabay. More precisely due to the Relocation Commission (Commission de délocalisations), a body created by the provincial government of Lualaba to oversee evictions and relocation. This commission ends up taking a percentage of the total funds owed to relocated people. Mining companies, on their end, rarely get involved in the dispute after paying the sum, leaving the government to manage compensating those affected. Unfair compensation has become a pattern in mining relocations in Lualaba, a province with large deposits of copper and cobalt, two essential minerals for phones,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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