Congo's coltan miners dig for world's tech — and struggle regardless of who is in charge

RUBAYA, Congo (AP) — Nestled in the green hills of Masisi territory in Congo, the artisanal Rubaya mining site hums with the sound of generators, as hundreds of men labor by hand to extract coltan, a key mineral crucial for producing modern electronics and defense technology — and fiercely sought after worldwide.

Rubaya lies in the heart of eastern Congo, a mineral-rich part of the Central African nation which for decades has been ripped apart by violence from government forces and different armed groups, including the Rwanda-backed M23, whose recent resurgence has escalated the conflict, worsening an already acute humanitarian crisis.

As the U.S. spearheads peace talks between Congo and Rwanda, Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi has sought out a deal with the Trump administration, offering mineral access in return for American support in quelling the insurgency and boosting security.

While details of the deal remain unclear, analysts said Rubaya might be one of the mining sites which fall under its scope.

Eastern Congo has been in and out of crisis for decades. The conflict has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises with more than 7 million people displaced, including 100,000 who fled homes this year.

The Rubaya mines have been at the center of the fighting, changing hands between the Congolese government and rebel groups. For over a year now, it has been controlled by the M23 rebels, who earlier this year advanced and seized the strategic city of Goma and Bukavu in a major escalation of the conflict.

Despite the country's exceptional mineral wealth, over 70% of Congolese live on less than $2.15 a day.

For the men working in the Rubaya’s mines, who rely on the mining for their livelihoods, little has changed over decades of violence.

One of them is Jean Baptiste Bigirimana, who has worked in the mines for seven years.

“I earn $40 a month, but that’s not enough," he said. "Children need clothes, education and food. When I divide up the money to see how I will take care of my children, I realize it’s not enough,” he said, adding that he doesn’t know where the minerals he mines go once they leave Rubaya.

The mines produce coltan — short for columbite-tantalite — an ore from which the metals tantalum and niobium are extracted. Both are considered critical raw materials by the United States, the European Union, China and Japan. Tantalum is used in mobile phones, computers and automotive electronics, as well as in aircraft engines, missile components and GPS systems. Niobium is used in pipelines, rockets and jet engines.

Congo produced about 40% of the world’s coltan in 2023, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with Australia, Canada and Brazil being other major suppliers.

The National Energy Emergency executive order, issued by Trump, highlighted the significance of critical minerals — including tantalum and niobium — and called for securing U.S. access to ensure both "modern life and military preparedness.”

According to a U.N. report, since seizing Rubaya in April last year, the M23 has imposed taxes on the monthly trade and transport of 120 tonnes of coltan, generating at least $800,000 a month. The coltan then is exported to Rwanda, U.N. experts said. But even before M23 seized control of the mine, analysts said that the mineral was sold to Rwanda, the only difference being it was done through Congolese intermediaries.

Experts say that it is not easy to trace how coltan arrives in Western countries.

“The global coltan supply chain is pretty murky,” said Guillaume de Brier, a natural resources researcher at the Antwerp-based International Peace Information Service. “From eastern DRC, coltan is bought by traders, mostly Lebanese or Chinese, who will sell it to exporters based in Rwanda. Exporters will then ship it to the UAE or China, where it will be refined into tantalum and niobium, and sold to Western countries as metals from UAE or China.”

The M23 has previously controlled Rubaya for periods of time, and the U.N. asserted that, even before the takeover of Goma, the group was facilitating the smuggling of these minerals to Rwanda. Since M23 took control of the mine, Rwanda’s official coltan exports have doubled, according to Rwandan official figures.

At times the mines were also under control of the Wazalendo, a militia allied with the Congolese army.

Alexis Twagira said he feels some things have improved under M23. “I’ve been working in this mine for 13 years, and I’ve worked under the Wazalendo. When they were here, they would harass us, sometimes taking our minerals and demanding money,” he said.

The U.N. has accused both the Congolese army and the M23 rebels of human rights abuses.

Congo is the world’s largest producer of cobalt, a mineral used to make lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and other products, but U.S. access is complicated by the fact that Chinese companies control 80% of its Congolese production. Congo also produces gold.

In recent weeks, two U.S. companies opened doors to production in the region. Nathan Trotter, a U.S. firm, signed a letter of intent with Rwanda-based Trinity Metals, which owns Rwanda's largest tin mine. And KoBold Metals, which uses Artificial Intelligence to further energy transition and is backed by billionaire Bill Gates, brokered a deal to buy Australia’s AVZ Minerals’ interest in Congo's Manono lithium deposits.

Analysts warn that the implementation of a minerals deal in eastern Congo, if one was to materialize, will face many hurdles — especially with U.S. investors largely abandoning Congo in the last two decades.

“Turning a headline announcement into sustainable progress will require resolving deep suspicions between Rwanda and the DRC,” Chatham House, a research institute, said in a recent report. “A deal will also need to account for complex local political problems of land access and identity, wider security challenges in a region that hosts myriad non-state armed groups, and issues of asset scarcity.”

If the deal were to include Rubaya, where all mining is currently done manually, U.S. companies would have to contend with both security concerns and a severe lack of infrastructure.

“With coltan, you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of miners, and not just M23, but other so-called auto-defense armed groups and individuals who rely on mining for survival," said de Brier from the International Peace Information Service. "You have to build all the infrastructure, you have to start from scratch. You will even have to build the roads.”

Bahati Moïse, a trader who resells coltan from Rubaya’s mines, hopes that, regardless who controls the mines, the workers who labor to extract the minerals will finally be valued as much as the resources themselves.

“The whole country, the whole world knows that phones are made from the coltan mined here, but look at the life we ​​live,” he said. “We can’t continue like this.”

Pronczuk reported from Dakar, Senegal.

The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Motorcyclists ride through thick mud on their way to the mining town of Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

A miner works at the D4 Gakombe coltan quarry in Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

A mine worker holds bits of coltan ore in the mining town of Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

Motorcyclists ride through thick mud on their way to the mining town of Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

Miners work at the D4 Gakombe coltan quarry in Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.

The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.

As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.

Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.

“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."

To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.

“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”

Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.

The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.

“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”

For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.

Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.

During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.

Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.

“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”

A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.

Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.

A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.

“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.

Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.

Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”

Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.

Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.

“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.

When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.

In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.

Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.

Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."

In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.

State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.

Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.

“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”

He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.

Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."

The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.

“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”

FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Rental Ripoff Hearing at Fordham University on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki, File)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)