Mining royalties and EITI: Makuta ya Maendeleo calls for complete, transparent declarations

The Makuta ya Maendeleo consortium, which brings together several civil society organisations including Resource Matters and the Carter Center, has published an analysis of the DRC’s EITI simplified report covering 2018 to 2020. The study focuses on the mining royalty shares owed to subnational entities, in particular the 15% due to decentralised territorial entities (ETDs) and the 10% due to the Mining Fund (FOMIN). Its aim is to help the EITI Executive Committee improve future declarations and the ongoing thematic study on local royalty collection.

The analysis finds the report neither complete nor sufficiently detailed. It highlights large gaps between what companies say they paid and what the state and ETDs report receiving: in 2018 alone, the administration recorded USD 52 million more than the companies declared. Many firms failed to report their ETD and FOMIN shares — in 2019, only 29 of 45 companies declared payments to ETDs — while the FOMIN columns remained almost empty, a sign of a serious collection problem. Above all, the data is broken down neither by ETD nor by mining project, so citizens cannot tell which locality actually received a company’s royalty, in breach of EITI Requirement 4.7.

The consortium therefore urges the EITI Executive Committee to close these gaps in the forthcoming thematic report: to guarantee complete declarations and explain every discrepancy, to disaggregate payments and revenues by province, ETD and project, to request the missing FOMIN figures, to strengthen ETDs’ capacity, and to press the government to adopt the interministerial order governing how the royalty is shared when projects straddle several entities. Complete, verifiable data, it stresses, is essential if citizens are to monitor how these community funds are collected and spent.