What happened at Tenke Fungurume Mining?

So the job at Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM) in the Democratic Republic of Congo unraveled very quickly. TFM as it is known was managed for a decade by FreeportMcRan, an American mining giant.

However, an ill-timed foray into oil and gas at the peak of the boom left the company laden with debt as oil prices dropped dramatically. The company was in dire financial distress and needed to off-load assets to survive, hence TFM was put on the market and sold to CMOC International, a Chinese company.

The first year went well, the project ran pretty much as it had under expat control and CMOC International remained a good corporate citizen by all accounts. There were however forces at play within the company as the communist party in China was a shareholder and sought to exert control over their shareholding.

We have all seen the events unfold in Hong Kong, the communist party is neither a good global citizen, as the world saw in Tiananmen Square, any form of dissonance is crushed without remorse. The communist Chinese government and their henchmen are pure evil - there is no doubt about that.

The management made a request to the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo to crush the artisen miners and troops were called in. People were displaced, their homes burnt down in what can only be described as human rights abuses in direct contravention of the United Nations resolutions.

The mine maintenance section was under-performing and a new leadership team has brought in to develop a world-class maintenance program. Collectively as a high-performing team, that is what we did but that didn't last long as we internalised maintenance processes and were then retrenched once the handover took place and the maintenance stabalised.