Loading…
Loading…
Loi n° 18/001 is a sweeping amendment to the 2002 Code Minier (Loi n° 007/2002 of 11 July 2002), which had been the foundational mining-rights statute of post-apartheid DRC — vesting custodianship of all mineral and petroleum resources in the State, establishing the Mineral and Petroleum Titles Registration Office (CAMI), and creating the prospecting / mining / exploration / production-rights regime. The 2018 revision is the most significant overhaul since that original enactment.
Strategic-mineral royalty regime (Title IV): The Council of Ministers is empowered to designate specific minerals as "strategic" and to set a separate royalty rate for them (currently 10%). Cobalt, coltan, lithium, and germanium were confirmed in the first strategic-minerals list. This rate-setting power explicitly carves out strategic minerals from the standard mineral-royalty schedule, allowing government to adjust rates without parliamentary legislation — the same delegated-authority architecture used by Indonesia's nickel-royalty escalation playbook.
State participation (Article 71): The state's mandatory free-carry interest in new mining permits rises from 5% to 10%. Additionally, the DRC government or its designated SOE retains a 10% paid-carry option for new permits, creating an effective 20% participation floor. This was the primary trigger for the 2018-2020 renegotiation wave across the major concessions: Glencore / Kamoto Copper, China Molybdenum / Tenke Fungurume, Ivanhoe / Kamoa-Kakula, and ERG / Boss Mining all entered parallel renegotiation processes with Gécamines and provincial authorities to rebalance concession agreements.
Stability-clause curtailment (Article 276): Contract stability guarantees are reduced from 10 to 5 years and existing stabilisation clauses in pre-Code agreements are explicitly invalidated. This was the most contentious provision: international mining companies, including Glencore and CMOC, argued it violated investment-treaty protections (ICSID arbitration clauses) and the prior Code's own stability architecture. In practice, operators chose renegotiation rather than arbitration, given the operational leverage the DRC Ministry of Mines holds over day-to-day permit renewals.
Artisanal mining (Articles 108–126): Artisanal exploitation is formally restricted to adult Congolese nationals belonging to government-approved cooperatives. This provision forms the direct legal basis for the 2025 Arrêté 00964/CAB.MIN/MINES/01/2025 (artisanal copper-cobalt processing suspension): Minister Watum Kabamba's action is an enforcement measure under the artisanal-mining governance framework created by the 2018 Code.
ARECOMS (Autorité de Régulation et de Contrôle des Marchés des Substances stratégiques): Although ARECOMS was formally created by Presidential Decree 19/16 of 5 November 2019, its mandate — regulating strategic-mineral markets for cobalt, coltan, and germanium — flows directly from the strategic-mineral designation mechanism in the 2018 Code. The cobalt export-quota system (Decision 001/ARECOMS/2025 and 005/ARECOMS/2025) operates under this delegated authority, even if the precise scope of ARECOMS' suspension powers has been legally contested.
Implementing decree: Décret n° 18/024 of 8 June 2018 (Règlement Minier) provides the operational rules: permit-category definitions, work programme requirements, local-content thresholds, community-development fund percentages, environmental-certificate procedures, and the royalty-prepayment modalities. The Règlement Minier is the document practitioners and permitting officers use day-to-day; the 2018 Code is the constitutional-level grant of authority.
changes the cost stack for every DRC cobalt, coltan, lithium, and germanium producer. At the $15–25/lb cobalt prices seen in 2021-2022, the increment from 2% to 10% royalty represented a material lift in government take — and sets the floor for what any future price surge delivers to Kinshasa rather than to producer balance sheets.
Fungurume), Ivanhoe (Kamoa-Kakula), and Glencore (Kamoto / Mutanda) all operate with Gécamines or DRC state entities as partners. The 2018 Code codifies the state's right to a floor share, which increases the political capital cost of any expansion that requires a new permit — since each new permit restarts the state-carry clock.
system, which as of 2026 caps DRC exports at 96,600 t/yr, operates under authority traceable to the 2018 Code's strategic-mineral framework. Any downstream modelling of cobalt supply availability must account for the Code's rate-setting and market-regulation delegation architecture.
in new DRC mining projects cannot rely on a 10-year legislative freeze. This pushes the DRC toward a higher sovereign-risk discount in DCF models — offset in practice by the irreplaceable cobalt-concentration argument (≈70% of global supply), which means investors absorb the risk rather than exiting.
to add additional minerals (e.g., tantalum, nickel, or rare earths)? The delegated list-mechanism allows rapid additions without parliamentary action.
Africa, separately filed — have legislative-model parallels with this DRC 2018 Code architecture? Both raise state carry and introduce strategic-mineral royalty escalation, suggesting a convergent EM resource-nationalism template.
been inconsistently enforced; a formal enforcement action or revision decree would be a material follow-on filing.