HUNDREDS of people, dressed in tattered rags, crawl ant-like over great mounds of mud. Barefoot children, some as young as 6, burrow deep into the hillside.

Some use shovels and pickaxes, others their hands to pull out great chunks of earth. Others scurry around hauling sacks. As if the earth has swallowed them, they suddenly disappear down small square holes, some 30 metres (100ft) deep, before crawling along narrow, water-soaked tunnels searching for seams of copper and cobalt.

“It is very dangerous. When it rains there are mud slides and flash floods. We have drownings and all manner of other accidents here,” said Jean-Pierre Kabongo, an organiser at Ruashi mine, about eight miles outside Lubumbashi, capital of Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He says that daily output can top 25 tonnes.

Similar scenes are repeated each day across Katanga, Congo’s huge, mineral-rich province — one of Africa’s most naturally rich areas. With the collapse of Congo’s state mining sector after years of corruption, war and mismanagement, there are now an estimated 70,000-90,000 informal miners in the province. Elsewhere in the country, there are thousands more. They mine diamonds, gold, casserite and coltan — a semi-precious metal used in mobile phones.

The miners work in appalling and dangerous conditions, with no health or safety regulations. But in a place where average income is less than 17p a day, the slender pickings offer their only hope of income, often survival. The country’s mortality rate is 40 per cent higher than the average in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Some 75 per cent of the population are malnourished and have no access to drinking water.

Standing waist-high in muddy water, Ekutshu Tshiboma, 20, said that he had worked at the mine for two years since he was forced to leave college because he had no money to pay for his studies. “Here I can earn a dollar, sometimes two, a day,” he said as he sifted through rocks and earth to reveal small stones of green copper.

“I am a graduate of Ruashi, I have the Ruashi diploma,” joked his friend Edia Kasongo, 18. He has been at the mine for six years, since shortly after it opened. Barefoot and wearing a torn T-shirt, he said: “I gave up school and came here. It is good to have some money to buy food and give to my mother.”

In time-honoured Congolese manner, President Kabila has used the area’s abundant natural resources to pay off his closest allies and finance his political ambitions.

He is virtually certain to win national elections which, under an all-party deal ending the country’s devastating civil war in 2002, must be held by the end of June.

The Katanga entourage of his father Laurent, who overthrew the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997 but who was assassinated a few years later, has stripped the state mining company of its most lucrative assets and handed its concessions over to a handful of Lebanese, Indian, Israeli and Belgian business associates.Under President Mobutu, who siphoned off an estimated $4 billion (£2.3 billion) of the country’s wealth, they had little access to the country’s wealth.

Mr Kabila and his friends have been far more generous. In return they have received kickbacks and funds to finance their election campaigns. They think even better days could be coming as the elections will legitimise local warlords and political leaders, removing obstacles to much bigger outside investment.

A report by Fatal Transactions, the international lobby group, says that the state mining giant, once one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt producers, is now a shell. Output is a fraction of the 470,000 tonnes a year of copper and 15,000 tonnes of cobalt it produced until the 1980s. Starved of investment, it has laid off thousands of workers.

There is little else for them to do, except to go into the informal sector. This is now a highly organised business. It brings huge rewards to those at the top, but little benefit to the local population.

“Corruption is rampant. Extraction takes place in a state of anarchy . . . child labour and forced labour are common,” says the report.

It is now estimated that up to $4 million in copper and cobalt exports alone are whisked out of Katanga each day. Much of it is refined over the border in Zambia. A fraction of that which leaves the country is declared thanks to corrupt customs officials.

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