Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about the ongoing challenges associated with

cobalt mining and particularly artisanal mining in the DRC.

My guest is Nicholas Nyarkos.

He's a freelance journalist focused primarily on

Africa and a contributing writer for the New Yorker. Last month in July, Nicholas and his Congolese

colleague Jeff Kazadi were arrested and detained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We'll come back to that in a moment, but let's start with the mining itself.

Nicholas, thank you for joining me. Thank you so much, Alexandra. Thanks for having me.

Let me begin with a slightly remedial question. Why is cobalt so important and what is

driving the increased global demand for it? Cobalt is very important because it's a key component in the lithium-ion battery.

What it does is it actually stabilizes the cathode of a lithium-ion battery.

You use a sort of combination of lithium and cobalt and often other metals like nickel

and manganese.

That's basically how you create the positive electrode for a lithium ion

battery. Everybody needs this. Every major industry has an interest in a reliable source of cobalt.

Right. From cell phones to electric cars to, you know, portable devices of any stripe. You know,

you have lithium ion batteries being used. Other types of batteries

have been proposed, but at the moment, lithium-mine batteries are the most efficient for battery

storage and for power, basically. In your excellent, 2021 piece for the New Yorker, the dark side

of Congo's cobalt rush, you describe people quite literally digging in their backyards for

cobalt. The DRC has more than half the world's cobalt. Do I have that right? It has up to 70%

...