Congo is rationing the world's cobalt. History says the buyers decide how this ends

In May 1978 rebels crossed from Angola into Zaire's Shaba province and seized Kolwezi, the mining town at the centre of the world's cobalt supply. Zaire produced about half of it. Within a year the open-market price had risen roughly sixfold.

Every commodity producer dreams of setting the price. History keeps a short list of those who managed it.

Then something happened that cobalt producers have not forgotten. The buyers left. Magnet makers switched to ceramics. Engine builders redesigned alloys. By the early 1980s demand had fallen so far that the price was back where it started, and Zaire had lost customers it never recovered.

Zaire is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It mines about three-quarters of the world's cobalt, according to the US Geological Survey. In February 2025, with the price at its lowest in years, it stopped exporting. In October 2025 it replaced the ban with quotas that allow less than half of what it shipped in 2024. The price roughly doubled.

Why Congo can afford to wait

The customs records of Congo's buyers show something the cobalt headlines miss. The world imported $37.6bn of goods from Congo in 2025. Refined copper was $26.4bn of it. Cobalt was $1.9bn, about 5%.

Cobalt is where Congo has power. Copper is where it has income. That matters because holding supply off the market costs money, and Congo is paying with a commodity it barely depends on.

A country that is no longer broke

The second difference from 1978 is the balance sheet. In 2020 Congo's central bank held $0.7bn of reserves. In June 2026 it held $8.2bn. Exports have tripled since 2017. The economy has grown between 6% and 9% a year for five years, and government debt is 20% of GDP.

A country in that position can leave cobalt in a warehouse for a long time.

The cartel that failed, with Congo in it

Congo has tried this before. In 1967 Zaire, Zambia, Chile and Peru formed CIPEC, a copper cartel modelled on OPEC. In 1975 they agreed to cut output by 15%. Members cheated, other producers filled the gap, and scrap copper did the rest. CIPEC faded and was dissolved in 1988.

Côte d'Ivoire's attempt was more dramatic. In 1987 it grew about a third of the world's cocoa, and President Houphouët-Boigny decided the price was an insult. He stopped selling. For two years cocoa piled up in Abidjan while the price kept falling, because Malaysia, Indonesia and Ghana were planting. In 1989 he gave in and halved the price paid to his own farmers. The country had already stopped paying its foreign debts.

Cocoa was Côte d'Ivoire's budget. It could not afford the wait. That is the difference a copper boom makes.

The one that worked

Indonesia is the model Kinshasa has in mind. It banned exports of raw nickel ore in 2020 and told buyers to build smelters on its soil. They did. Its buyers reported importing $16.2bn of Indonesian ferronickel in 2025 and no raw ore at all.

The catch is in what followed. So much Indonesian nickel reached the market that the price fell and mines closed from Australia to New Caledonia. Indonesia won market share and processing jobs. It did not win a high price. And its nickel plants now produce cobalt as a by-product, which makes Indonesia the second-largest supplier of the metal Congo is trying to ration.

How we think this ends

We expect Congo to keep its cobalt quotas in force through the end of 2027. We put that at four in five. It can afford them, they have lifted the price, and the politics of resource control are popular.

We are less confident that the price holds. The 1978 lesson applies in full: most batteries made in China today use a chemistry with no cobalt in it, and every month of high prices moves more buyers that way. A producer can ration supply. It cannot ration substitutes.

The outcome we think most likely is Indonesia's, not OPEC's: more processing inside Congo, a firmer floor under the price, and a market that slowly needs less of it.

What to watch

Power over a commodity lasts as long as buyers have no alternative. OPEC had ten years. Zaire had about three.

• The 2027 quota. Any increase above 96,600 tonnes would signal the stockpile is becoming a burden.
• The share of cobalt-free batteries. The substitute that did not exist in 1978 already exists now.
• Indonesian cobalt output. Every tonne from a nickel plant is one Congo does not control.
• Congo's reserves. As long as they rise, Kinshasa can wait.