Pandemic power-grabs: autocrats’ covid opportunism

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Many of the dizzying number of chemical elements in modern electronics are rightly called conflict minerals. We visit mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo where market forces and alleged corruption are driving conflict over cobalt. And as schoolchildren the world over know, the speed of light is truly a universal speed limit. Nothing in the universe can go faster. But what about the speed of sound? We look into new research that puts a theoretical upper bound on that too. But first— At the beginning of this year, protests were roiling India. For 100 days, hundreds of thousands of Indians raged against proposed changes to citizenship laws that would discriminate against Muslims. It was the biggest campaign of civil resistance in decades. But the protests swiftly died out after local curfews were imposed in response to COVID-19. Curfews that were particularly strict in mostly Muslim neighborhoods. To many, these new laws seemed like a calculated move by the Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, quashing dissent under the COVID of the pandemic. In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday, he underscored the dangers of the virus and called for renewed vigilance as the country heads into its festival season. But behind the scenes, there's growing evidence that he's been using the crisis for his own political gain. Partisan ends. Last month, citing the risk of COVID-19 spreading within India's parliament, he announced measures that severely hampered lawmakers questioning the government. The opposition walked out, allowing Mr. Modi to ram through 25 bills in 3 days. These kinds of authoritarian tactics are on the rise around the world. The think tank Freedom House counts 80 countries where the quality of democracy and respect for human rights have deteriorated this year.

The pandemic has been terrible not only for the human body, but also for the body politic.

Robert Guest is The Economist's foreign editor.

With everyone's attention on COVID-19, autocrats and would-be autocrats in many parts of the world have figured out that they can do all kinds of bad things, safe in the knowledge that the rest of the world will barely notice, let alone object.

And where are the countries where this is most worrying?

It's a completely global phenomenon. So, you know, at one end you've got China, which was a dictatorship before the pandemic, but has really cracked down in Hong Kong. The human rights abuses against the Uyghurs have gotten worse this year. What you're finding in a lot of places is that the pandemic gives governments a very reasonable cause for tightening down on civil liberties for reasons of public health. But what then happens is that many of them have taken it further than that. So it's not just that they are restricting public gatherings to stop people spreading the virus, they're also using those rules to prevent demonstrations and protests against their own terrible policies.

And what does that kind of repression look like in practice?

So you take in Uganda, for example, there was an opposition member of parliament called Francis Zake who noticed that his constituents were going hungry because of the recession caused by COVID-19. So he thought he'd give them some help, you know, packages of rice and sugar just to get them through the hard times. The government had said that only the government was allowed to give out food aid. And if anyone else tried it, the government said that they would do it incompetently, that crowds would gather, and that would spread the virus. So the president actually said, you know, we will charge you with murder if you try to hand out food aid when you're not the government. Well, Francis Szake, the opposition member of parliament, he was very careful to do it in a way that wasn't going to spread the virus. He would do up packages and he would have them delivered individually to people's doors on the backs of motorcycles. The day after he did it, the police came to his home, he says, jumped over the fence while he was showering, threw him in a van, dragged him off, put him in prison, tortured him unbelievably horribly. And they said to him while they were doing it, we can do anything we want to you because no one can come out and protest because they're all locked down because of the pandemic. And that's something we're hearing all over the world.

And it seems in a lot of cases, though, that it's— these leaders are kind of doubling down on the kinds of populist attitudes and policies that put them in power in the first place.

That's exactly right. Now, one of the strange things about a panic about a contagious disease, and this is something we can see from academic work that's been done on prior pandemics, is that people become a bit less rational and a bit more xenophobic If your political persona is someone who is going to stand up to external threats, then a pandemic is a great time to double down on that. So you see Narendra Modi, his government in India has always blamed Muslims for many of the problems in India, and now they're blaming them as super spreaders of the virus. In Bulgaria, you're seeing harsher lockdowns on Romani neighborhoods than others. Turkey's religious authorities are blaming gay people for spreading the virus. Malaysian officials are blaming migrant workers, some of whom have been killed contained and deported. So you're seeing lots of this stuff. It's a strangely popular response when people are scared.

And I suppose pandemic conditions make it somewhat easier for autocrats, for governments to control the message.

Well, absolutely. You're seeing a significant increase in the number of restrictions on the press, and it's usually done in the name of public health so that people will pass a law against spreading fake news about the virus, which would of course be dangerous. They use that to criminalize any criticism of the government's response to the virus, which is a completely different thing. So you're seeing it all over the place. So in Zimbabwe, anyone who disseminates what they call false information that impedes the response to the virus can get up to 20 years in prison. And they're arresting people for things like trying to visit in-hospital opposition activists who've been beaten up by the ruling party. In El Salvador, they purged 70 journalists and relaunched a state TV outlet, and the president now said, I am watching a very balanced newscast with a grin, and then adds, I don't know what the opposition will see, because of course what they will see is something that's slavishly pro-ruling party.

But look, in a sense, global freedom was slipping, autocracy in a general sense was rising. I mean, how much of this can we definitively pin on the pandemic?

You're right, global freedom has been declining since probably just about before the financial crisis of 2007 to '08. So this represents an acceleration of a pre-existing trend and with each individual violation of human rights. You can never say, I mean, it's like weather and climate change. You can never say this incident could not have happened without the pandemic. I mean, would China's rulers still have inflicted such horrors on the Uyghurs this year without COVID-19? Would Thailand's king have grabbed nearly absolute powers? Would Egypt have executed 15 political prisoners in a single weekend this month? Maybe they would've done those things, but these outrages would surely have faced stronger opposition if the whole world's attention had not been focused on the pandemic, which is tossing everybody's lives into chaos and sucking up all the attention. It is much easier to get away with these things without the rest of the world looking at what you're doing. So I think we can be pretty confident that it's a significant factor in why things have gotten worse this year.

Robert, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

Cobalt is an essential mineral for making the batteries that power gizmos from smartphones to electric cars. Around 60% of the world's supply is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it used to provide locals with regular, if grueling, work. But when the metal's price collapsed in 2018, life became even tougher for mining communities.

The demand for electric cars is what's really driving the demand for cobalt, because the amount used in a smartphone is just a few grams, whereas an electric car demands about 10 kilograms of cobalt.

Olivia Ackland writes about Central Africa for The Economist.

Carmakers were much slower to design electric vehicles, and the cobalt price plummeted in 2018, largely because so much cobalt flooded the market. They produced much more cobalt in the mines in Congo than they'd anticipated.

So how did that price crash affect the mining communities?

In 2016, when cobalt prices started to soar, lots of hopeful young men from all corners of Congo turned up in Kolwezi, which is a mining city in the south of the country. Some of these young men set up camp in a village called Kawama, some 20 kilometers outside of Kolwezi, and they cobbled houses together with tarpaulins and planks of wood. Sadly, the village today feels far from hopeful. I was there recently and there were children in rags running around smoldering wood which people were burning to make charcoal. It was just generally incredibly impoverished. The people in Kouamah were also grumbling that lots of the land around has been sold to mining firms. One local, Jared Komba, told me that they used to dig freely until the government sold all of the hills. He mentioned various mines which have now been taken over by large mining companies.

And so the days of freewheeling independent mining are over.

So there are still some mining sites where artisanal miners can turn up and dig, but they're obliged to sell to whoever owns the concession. And everybody was grumbling about the prices. So the people in Kwama said a day's work in the sweltering heat might earn you $7. And so people make much more money from stealing from the industrial mines at night. Glencore, which is a commodities giant that has 2 mines in Congo, reckons that around 2,000 people sneak into its pits every day. And other companies have even more robbers to contend with. Last year, soldiers chased thieves out of a mine owned by China Moly, and they reckoned that around that time there was roughly 10,000 people digging illegally. In the site. At some mining sites, the guards invite the thieves in and they demand a cut of the profits. And in other sites, the security is much tougher and people are much more frightened to go in there. So I spoke to Gerard and he said that at certain sites, guards will chase you out with dogs, and so people are much more frightened to go to those sites. Someone I spoke to recently said that on a recent foray into a mine, he made $150. That was even once they'd paid off the guards. These men, then they go and sell their loot to Chinese buyers. And so they took me to this maison d'achat, so these buying houses, and there was one hidden down this dusty road in the bush. And there were all of these Chinese buyers in a corrugated tin hangar, and they were buying up the stolen cobalt.

What happens if the thieves get caught not by guards at the mines, but by the government authorities?

I spoke to lots of former thieves who had spent time in prison. The conditions in the main prison in Kolwezi are terrible. More than 100 people occupy one stinking room. The men have to sit in rows, each sandwiched in front of the other, and they're only allowed to go to the toilet once a day, so people often just have to urinate in their clothes. I spoke to a guy called Sisko Ngoy who spent 6 months in prison last year. He said that the conditions were appalling, that as soon as you leave prison, you go straight to hospital because you're so weak They don't feed you much. They feed you one meal a day. He reasoned it was all a stage of his life and that the suffering would eventually pass. And he was dreaming about what he might be able to do once he got out of the prison.

But the same forces that have driven so many of these miners to stealing should be creating real pressure on the mining firms themselves. I mean, how have they dealt with the price crash?

Last year, Glencore closed its biggest mine to cut output in response to low prices. Cobalt prices are now barely a third of what they were at the peak. Copper prices have also tumbled. The mining companies mine both copper and cobalt. And so the big mining companies complain about the thieves, but they're not exactly angels either. Gécamines, which is the state-owned company, has basically enriched crooked politicians for over half a century. According to an investigation by Global Witness, which is a watchdog, Congo's treasury lost $750 million of mining revenues between 2013 and 2015 alone. Another company which has mines in Congo, ENRC, has also faced allegations of corruption and an investigation by Britain's Serious Fraud Office. It denies wrongdoing. Glencore is also being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. Glencore's worked with a very controversial figure, Dan Gertler, who's an Israeli billionaire, and he's a good friend of former President Joseph Kabila. Dan Gertler is under sanctions for his opaque mining deals in the Congo. Glencore has long denied that it's involved in any improper transactions with Mr. Gertler, and it's cooperating with fraud investigations.

And so how does all of this look as the electric car revolution does seem to be going ahead? I mean, what future for the Congolese mining industry?

Tesla, the electric car-making company, has announced that it's trying to reduce the amount of cobalt in its electric cars. Eventually, it wants to cut cobalt out altogether. And this is largely because of the reputational risks of working in Congo. There's a lot of very bad PR involving the artisanal mines. There's often child labor in artisanal mines. Tunnels collapse regularly onto miners. And so the big mining companies running the industrial mines, where basically machines do the digging instead of people, have tried to sort of position themselves as the ethical choice, which is problematic in itself for the reasons I just talked about with all of the allegations of fraud and corruption. But also the artisanally mined cobalt and the industrially mined cobalt often gets mixed up at the smelters in China, so it's hard to know which cobalt came from which mine. Places like Kawama, as I mentioned, you really notice the poverty. You see shiny Jeeps sliding past children begging on the streets. And so it's a sort of microcosm for the total inequality and unfairness of it all, really, that foreign mining companies are benefiting so much from these materials, as are we in the West with the electric car revolution, whilst Sadly, very little of the wealth trickles down to the local people.

Thanks very much for your time, Olivia.

Thanks very much, Jason.

In 1 second in a vacuum, light travels almost 300 million meters, 7 times around the equator. On the other hand, in 1 second in a vacuum, sound— well, there is no sound. In space, nobody can hear you scream, right? The speed of sound is different in different stuff—slower through gases like the air, faster in liquids, and fastest through solids. But what is its ultimate speed limit?

Whereas the speed of light was seen as this universal constant, the speed of sound was thought to be a sort of technical curiosity, really, limited by the properties of the material it it was traveling through.

Gilad Amit is a science correspondent at The Economist.

And what the new research has now suggested is that there might also be a maximum speed of sound in materials like solids and liquids.

So the notion is that there is an absolute limit, as there is for light, rather than a general one for stuff? Yes, that's right.

Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London did something very simple that nobody else seems to have done before. He asked, does the speed of sound have a theoretical maximum distinct from light? And it It turns out that it did, and that its value was intimately tied to more of the fundamental constants of our universe.

But you specified just solids and liquids.

Yes, that's right. So sound travels by making things vibrate in the same way that a Mexican wave travels through a stadium because the individuals who make up the wave are also vibrating up and down. So to take an example, Jason, if you wouldn't mind humoring me with a note.

You want me to sing a note? If you wouldn't mind.

Your choice. Ah!

Do with that what you will.

Thank you. So, because you're singing in a room full of air and not a swimming pool full of water, you're surrounded by particles that aren't very tightly bound together. And so one particle of air is going to vibrate and is going to bounce into another one eventually, and then those are going to transmit the sound. If you were going to sing underwater, then the particles in a liquid are much more tightly bound together. The people in the Mexican wave are all really close together. So because the speed of sound is dictated by the speed at which these particles jiggle around, the strength of the bond between two neighboring particles dictates that speed. If the particles that are doing the vibrating are very heavy, then they're not going to be able to move very fast. But if they're light, then they're going to be able to carry the speed of sound much faster. And so the trend that Dr. Trotschenko and his colleagues determined was that the lighter the atoms of the material through which the sound is traveling, the faster the speed of sound will be. And this has obviously a hard limit with the lightest atoms we know of, which are the atoms of hydrogen. And because the maximum speed of sound is the speed at which the particles are going to vibrate so fast that they break the bonds with their neighbors, we can only be talking about solid hydrogen. Sound waves traveling through a solid hydrogen would be the fastest sound waves possible through condensed matter.

But, I mean, solid hydrogen is not just the sort of thing that you find at the corner store. That's right.

It's very difficult to manufacture, which means this prediction for the maximum speed of sound has not yet been tested, but the hope is that it will. And the predicted speed that Dr. Trochenko and his colleagues have come up with is 36,000 meters per second. Now that sounds like a lot, that's about 100 times faster than the speed of sound in air, what we ordinarily refer to as Mach 1, but light travels at 300 million meters per second, which is several thousand times faster than that.

How has he gone about calculating that theoretical speed though if this hasn't been done?

The theoretical work really depends on the fundamental constants that hold matter together. You can use theory to predict what the strength of the bond between atoms in a solid or liquid is, and you can work out how fast they would need to travel in order to break that bond. And so really what is quite a beautiful result here is arrived at purely theoretically with the expectation of it being confirmed by future experimental tests.

Khaled, this all sounds Great. Thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. The link link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.