America's new Africa envoy is on his second tour of the continent, and the deal his pitch is built on isn't on the itinerary. The omission isn't a snub. It's the clearest available signal of how Washington is actually using the SPA: as a precedent text, not a relationship that still needs tending.
Sibéka was judicially dissolved in Belgium in December 2023. It still holds 20 percent of MIBA, the Congolese state diamond producer. That stake has outlived three owners and one death certificate, and its percentage never changed once.
Alert level: Elevated on institutions and corridors. Not on signature theater.
The first published economics of the Dilolo-Sakania concession settle what the state gets. They leave open who pays for it, and that answer is written in a tariff nobody has seen.
Hours apart, on the same instrument, the two capitals described different corridors. Neither was wrong. The gap between their theories is where the politics of this railway will live.
President Tshisekedi did not send a mining engineer to fix Gécamines. He sent the EY partner who sat on the cell negotiating the US deal, and installed him at the state's most political company the moment Washington started asking where the copper goes. That tells you what the job actually is.
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