AfricaMuseum refuses to yield Congo geological archives despite US pressure
vrt.be
vrt.be
> The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren (Flemish Brabant) is refusing to hand over geological archive material on Congo to an American mining company that wants to use the data to map valuable raw materials. ‘We want to digitalise the archives ourselves and not leave it to a private company,’ the museum says. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is increasing pressure through diplomatic channels.
Yeah I'm with Africa Museum on this one. This said, there is a broad problem of getting old records digitized in African libraries. Very often these library and archive building are very old, don't have working climate control, and the records are often irreplaceable cultural artifacts that are rotting on the shelves for lack of funding to rescue them.
I feel like money is not an issue for the museum. Conscientous use of money is another problem.
Wasteful mismanagement of public funds is a plague of Belgian public service.
They could have striken a deal, e.g. let the U.S. company digitize the records on premise and make them public.
They won't - it's a US-EU competition.
The US+UAE is backing the DRC and the EU is backing Rwanda [0][1][2] in order to access critical minerals in Central Africa, most of which are in M23 controlled or adjacent territory [3] whose control is contested between the DRC and Rwanda.
The US under Biden and Trump has backed the DRC but the EU is backing Rwanda and M23.
We're in the midst of a new Scramble for Africa and all countries and blocs are acting unilaterally.
[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/le-monde-africa/article/2024/02/29...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/drc-calls-eu-m...
[2] - https://www.habtoorresearch.com/programmes/drc-minerals-us-e...
[3] - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42461-022-00551-x
Please don't propagate rightwing ideology. There are plenty of public services and servants who do their job very well. I worked in several administrations with them as an IT manager.
Sure there is "corruption" and other things but in my experience, not that much.
Titres-services/dienstencheques is a kind of money that can be used only for household tasks. Think cleaning lady. At the introduction, they costed ~4.70€/hour to the public while designated organisations cashed in 21€/hour. The gap narrowed later, after creating a few nouveau riches, and after several scandals that were mostly about these people disrupting the office space market with their money.
The subsidy, initially at 16,30€ for every hour worked, came from public money, the stated reason was to draw household workers from black market, the second reason was to achieve the goal of +100,000 jobs that the then Prime Minister set, the real reason was to enrich the few insiders, my memory does not serve me well, but IIRC the party affiliated with public service workers profited the most.
The guy who orchestrated this is the Social Security Minister now.
Another case: present government (rightwing) has lowered the taxes (very significantly) you have to pay when buying a new home. Objective: help people with less financial resources to get a home. What happened so far: price of the houses raised to absorb that new purchasing power. Minister's comment: "people now can buy better quality homes".
People really overestimate how much of an impact Trump has had on our grand strategy - it's the same people who worked under Obama, Biden, and Trump. We shifted to a more muscular resources policy during the 2010s due to the US-China rivalry.
We're not that different from the French in that regard [2].
[0] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-goes-angola-beyond-lobit...
[1] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/what-to-k...
[2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/dispatches/how-a-crisis-over...