MOBUTU COULD KEEP ON DANCING for a time in the full conviction that his country’s economic recession was only a temporary dip. Copper no longer commanded the price it once had and at the same time oil had become so expensive. But anyone can have a little bad luck, he reasoned, especially with an economy so dependent on a single sector like mining. All right, his country couldn’t pay off all its loans right away, true enough, but soon the international demand for ore would rise again. He turned to his French, American, and also his new Arab allies to ask for a little help.
But Zaïre’s burden of debt was not merely cyclical. In 1977 the deficit had risen to 32 percent of the total budget.24 Year after year, GNP dropped by a few percentage points.25 An annual inflation rate of 60 percent became normal.26 Between 1974 and 1983 prices rose six times over.27 This was no longer just a passing problem, the people knew. In 1984 they had to work two days to pay for a kilo (2.2 pounds) of rice, ten days for a kilo of beef. The unskilled Zairian who wanted to buy a cheap forty-kilo (eighty-eight-pound) bag of manioc for his family had to work eighty days to do so.28 And by the time he could finally afford that bag of manioc, the price had risen again. By 1979, purchasing power had plummeted to 4 percent of that in 1960.29
At first, Western and Japanese banks had had no problem with granting loans to the young Mobutu to carry out his program of industrialization—Zaïre was, after all, rich—but from 1975 on they started worrying about their money. Zaïre’s foreign debt by that point totaled $887 million, spread over ninety-eight banks.30 To consolidate their claims, those banks finally joined forces in the “Paris Club.” They directed a joint appeal to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the financial watchdog of the world economy, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another depression like that in the 1930s. The IMF was asked to provide emergency loans, to make sure Zaïre didn’t go completely off the deep end.
Mobutu, however, had no desire to entertain the busybodies of the IMF. After all, all the power he possessed was founded on the conscientious maintenance of a large group of followers. If he let the IMF come in he would no longer be able to pass out goodies. But if he didn’t, he would have no money left. This latter option would lead to the immediate collapse of his regime; the former still left him with a few possibilities. The trick was to pay lip service to the IMF, to nod amiably in response to all its demands, and then go on plundering the state treasury behind the scenes.
Mobutu, the man who had been so adamant about his country’s “economic independence,” now had to accept the IMF, the Paris Club, and later the World Bank as key players in the domestic economy. In 1976 the IMF launched the first of many stabilization plans for Zaïre. In exchange for a first installment of $47 million, Mobutu had to agree to cut public spending, raise tax revenues, devaluate the currency, stimulate production, enhance infrastructure, and improve the country’s financial management. Only then were the international banks prepared to talk about a possible extension of payment.
Many capital injections and bridge loans would follow but, in the period 1977 to 1979 alone, Mobutu—by the most conservative estimates—siphoned off more than $200 million for himself and his family.31 After the stabilization plans of the 1970s came the much more rigorous, structural adjustment programs of the 1980s, but that didn’t help either. By around 1990 Zaïre’s total national debt had risen to the insane sum of more than $10 billion. Only then did the flow of money stop.
It was, however, not the first time that Mobutu’s creative bookkeeping came to light. The first alarm had been sounded by a meticulous German banker as early as the late 1970s. In 1978 the IMF had charged Erwin Blumenthal, for years a top official with the West Germany Bundesbank, with the onerous task of cleaning up the mess called the National Bank of Zaïre. During this period, the IMF had placed the country’s major financial institutions under receivership. Blumenthal doggedly tried to pick up the pieces at the central bank: time and time again he unearthed shameless examples of corruption. “There is not a single official at the Fund or the World Bank who does not know that all attempts to impose stricter budgetary control here run into major obstacle: the presidency,” he wrote. “Who is going to shout ‘stop the thief!’? It is an impossible task to monitor the financial transactions within the president’s office. Within that office, no distinction is drawn between personal needs and state expenditures. How can it be that international organizations and Western governments blindly trust President Mobutu?”32
The systematic embezzlement of government funds, the discovery of a whole slew of secret bank accounts in Europe, the bald-faced, systematic greed of Mobutu and his clique filled Blumenthal with disgust. After less than two years, he resigned his mission. The confidential report with which he announced that resignation was grimly unambiguous: “New promises will undoubtedly be made by Mobutu and his government, and the payment of the country’s foreign debt, which is accruing apace, will once again be postponed; but there is absolutely no chance, I repeat, absolutely no chance that the foreign creditors will ever see their money again.”33
The Blumenthal Report was so damning for Mobutu and his clan that it had to leak out at some point. Zizi Kabongo still remembered those days: “Mobutu wanted to make absolutely sure that the report didn’t appear here. No one in Zaïre knew about it at first, but circulating in Paris was a text on the subject that had been published by Nguza Karl I Bond. Journalists coming back from abroad were frisked at the airport.” For eight months, Nguza had been Mobutu’s prime minister. After he fell from grace in 1981 he went to Europe, where he continued to fire broadsides at Mobutu’s regime in the form of books and pamphlets. For him, the president-founder was the embodiment of the “Zairian sickness.”34
Blumenthal said aloud what everyone suspected, but his revelations did not lead to a radical turnabout. Zaïre’s national debt was already up to $5 billion by 1981; for the French, however, Mobutu was too important a cultural and economic partner to cross. For the Americans he was too valuable as an ally in an Africa in the throes of socialist and communist experiments (in Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, to mention only the neighboring countries). “Mobutu is a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard,” the CIA reasoned. Secret directives stated that “a negative frame of mind on the part of the IMF, or a negative attitude on the part of the U.S., might cause Mobutu to reconsider our extremely close ties. This could endanger a program that the president [Reagan] considers to be of cardinal importance for U.S. security.”35 Republican presidents in particular, like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. maintained extremely warm contacts with Kinshasa; after Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, relations cooled for a time.
THIS COLD WAR LOGIC formed a considerable encumbrance for the IMF’s recovery plans. Yet the IMF too, was not without sin. Historically speaking, the organization had been set up not to help poor nations back onto their feet, but to avoid global financial crises.36 Even in the 1970s, its genteel staff members tended to know more about macroeconomics than about anthropology. They preferred examining charts in their Washington offices to talking to the people it was really all about. The consequences of that lack of on-the-ground expertise were highly unfortunate.
On Christmas Day 1979, under the watchful eye of the IMF, one of the most remarkable monetary measures in the country’s history took place: the depreciation of the zaïre. To combat inflation, all citizens were summoned to bring their five- and ten-zaïre notes—the highest denominations known till then—to the bank and exchange them for new ones. In late 1976 there were 59,000 five-zaïre notes in circulation; by late 1979 there were 363,000, six times as many. The result was inflation. Currency is to an economy what oil is to a motor: too little of it is not good, but too much is not good either.37 In addition to inflation, hoarding had also become a problem. In a vast country with a shaky economy like Congo’s, almost no one wanted or was able to put money in the bank. People stashed it away in suitcases, pillows, or jugs. Didace Kawang, an a
ctor to whom I once gave a master class in playwriting, told me about his uncle, who had been a successful merchant in Lubumbashi: “He did business with Zambia. The banknotes came in through the big gates. He had piles and piles of them. He bound them together in brikken, bundles the size of a brick, wrapped with a rubber band. He had a mattress made of money. Really! He slept on it!”38
The IMF bankers knew that it is extremely unhealthy for a national economy when there is more money in circulation (in the form of coins and bills) than there is in the banks. They knew the big theories: money in the bank is used to provide new loans; money used as a mattress doesn’t help the economy one little bit. To combat hoarding, therefore, they rolled out a process of currency depreciation. Anyone who turned in his banknotes on Christmas Day 1979 would be given new ones, at least for half the amount brought in. The other half had to be placed in a bank account. It was a clever way to bring a lot of “dead” money back to life and at the same time to deal with inflation. The move was intentionally announced at the last minute and lasted only one day, to keep people from fleeing abroad with their cash. The border crossings were closed and even the country’s airspace was shut down. Zaïre was going to freshen up in a monetary jiffy, in order to reappear spic and span in the international footlights. But the country was far too vast for such a lightning operation.
“My uncle had no choice but to put his savings in the bank too,” Didace said. “But they had reserved only one day for that. There was a huge line. People came in dragging sacks full of money. The sun went down and my uncle still hadn’t been able to turn in his bills. All his piles of banknotes became worthless . . . . In one swoop, he was poor as a church mouse. He died in his native village.” And he was not the only one, not by a long shot. Many of those who lived too far from a bank or who did not understand what the operation was about lost all their savings, while in Mobutu’s circles everyone had been briefed beforehand and had taken steps long before.
Not only was there something awry with the practical side of the IMF measures, but the basic philosophy was skewed as well. After the stock-market crash of 1929, the fund had dealt with the excesses of unbridled market thinking; by 1975, however, the IMF itself had evolved into one of the great heralds of free enterprise. Almost all its officials were firmly convinced that the creation of favorable market conditions was enough to jump-start a national economy, regardless of the local culture, the state of the economy or the governmental structure. Here too, a form of macroeconomic blindness reigned. As long as the government kept its distance, the invisible hand would do its work; that was the institution’s mantra. No one had an eye for the pace and sequence of the needed changes.39 The whole package was imposed at once, in the form of programs for “structural adjustment.” For these zealots of liberalization, all forms of poverty reported to them afterward (for they rarely entered the field themselves) could be blamed on the defective implementation of their infallible, yea, holy formulae.
The Zairian currency was devalued no less than six times: in 1975 it was still worth two dollars, by 1983 only three cents.40 Those devaluations were intended to stimulate international trade. As part of its “structural adjustments” the IMF demanded a drastic reduction in government spending and far-reaching privatizations. Governmental and semigovernmental enterprises had to be slimmed down and operated with greater autonomy. The infrastructure and production had to improve.
In the early 1980s the IMF’s prescription seemed to be taking effect. Inflation was indeed tempered and the economy seemed to be achieving a higher degree of organization. The charts were looking good. The Paris Club creditors breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that perhaps their loans really would be paid back. On nine separate occasions they voted for a program of debt relief. But on the ground, things turned out quite differently. As is often the case with IMF interventions, success was short-lived: inflation resumed after a time, poverty rose. The per capita GNP fell dramatically from six hundred dollars in 1980 to two hundred in 1985.41 People ate less; infant mortality was high. Onions were cut into quarters before they were sold.42
Slim down the public sector? The ranks of the civil service were reduced from 444,000 to 289,000; the number of schoolteachers from 285,000 to 126,000.43 That was, indeed, one way to combat inflation, but it meant that thousands of families ended up with no income. The civil service and the schools had been the country’s last major employers.
Cut back on spending? Government funding for education and health care was reduced, so that those with no money at all suddenly had to pay for their own children’s schooling and their visits to the doctor. The charts didn’t show it, but it was the poorest of the poor who paid most dearly for the IMF’s well-intentioned measures, while the international funding kept Mobutu firmly in the saddle.44
Measures to jump-start foreign trade? As long as Mobutu failed to use the available funding to restore the country’s infrastructure, Zaïre could only become more dependent on imports. The country had all it needed, for example, to again become a major coffee producer, but in the cities people drank only imported instant coffee. Little wonder: of the 140,000 kilometers (about 87,000 miles) of passable roads that had existed in 1960, only 20,000 kilometers (12,400 miles) were left.45 The IMF was out to reorganize the country, but in fact dismantled it. Zaïre became nothing more than a sales outlet and would remained that way for decades to come.
In 2008 I once spent an afternoon beside the Congo River in the old port of Boma. Swallows zigzagged across the water. Fishermen paddled out in the canoes to inspect their nets. It could have been 1890—until a huge cargo ship came sailing past. It was on its way from Matadi to the ocean. The ship rode high on the water. At the back, close to the prop, I could even see the keel. The ship was empty, completely empty. With the exception of a few spare containers, it was carrying nothing at all. I was reminded of Edmund Morel, who had watched a century earlier as the ships entered Antwerp’s harbor loaded with rubber and ivory from Congo, but left again empty. To Morel, the difference between ships riding high or low in the water was proof that the Free State was not engaged in commerce, but in plunder. The difference in draft I noted suggested that free trade, as roundly promulgated for decades by the prophets of the international economic institutions, could be a form of plunder as well.
IN THE 1980s Mobutu became a tired, somber man who seemed to draw little pleasure from his duties. After the deaths of his mother and his first wife, no one in his immediate surroundings had any control over him. His new wife, Bobi Ladawa, and her twin sister, who was also Mobutu’s mistress, never had the same impact as mama Yemo or mama-présidente Marie-Antoinette, his first spouse. Mobutu had been very fond of his old, mettlesome mother. Her death weighed heavily on him. His wife Marie-Antoinette had also been an outspoken character who had stubbornly refused to give up her Christian name. For a long time she had had a restraining effect on her husband’s tomfoolery. But now Mobutu had expelled his cabinet chief, Bisengimana Rwema, and his personal physician, the American William Close, had left the country.
Mobutu became a lonely man who grew more melancholy with each passing day. He seemed to fall prey to the longing for excess that marks all those for whom life holds no more surprises. In Europe he bought one chic property after the other. He owned a dozen castles, storage spaces, and residences in the wealthy Brussels boroughs of Ukkel and Sint-Genesius-Rode. He owned a luxurious, eight-hundred-square-meter (nearly 8,500-square-foot) apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, Savigny Castle close to Lausanne, Switzerland, a palazzo in Venice, a sumptuous villa on the French Riviera, an equestrian estate in the Portuguese Algarve, and a series of hotels in West Africa and South Africa, not to mention his luxury yacht on the Congo.46 But the most incredible of all his residences was, without a doubt, Gbadolite. In the middle of the jungle in his native region, close to the border with the Central African Republic, he had a city built, complete with banks, a post office, a well-equipped hospital, a hypermodern hotel, and a landing strip t
hat could accommodate the Concorde. (Zizi Kabongo: “That’s right, as a journalist I once took the Concorde from Gbadolite to Japan.”) A cathedral was added, with a crypt that was to serve as the family grave, and a Chinese village with pagodas and imported Chinese people. The crowning glory was Mobutu’s opulent, 15,000-square-meter (158,400-square-foot) palace. The mahogany doors were seven meters (nearly twenty-three feet) high and inlaid with malachite. The walls were covered with Carrara marble and silk tapestries. Crystal chandeliers, Venetian mirrors, Empire furniture: no expense was spared, no luxury was too excessive. There were Jacuzzis, massage rooms, a swimming pool, and a beauty parlor. Mrs. Mobutu had a walk-in closet fifty meters (over 160 feet) long where she hung her extensive collective of French couture, some one thousand creations in all. Beneath the building itself, thousands of top French vintages lay gathering dust (if not actually going sour in the tropical climate). There was a discotheque for the children and a bomb shelter for the family.47 The fountains scattered around the grounds splashed around the clock and were lit at night—in a region that had almost no electrical network. Mobutu threw state banquets for thousands of guests where the pink champagne—his favorite beverage—flowed freely and the suckling pigs lay grinning with an orange in their mouths.
“He had the great chefs of France and Belgium flown in,” recalled Kibambi Shintwa, a man who still retained his “authentic” name. Shintwa had worked as a reporter for the présidence from 1982 and was closely acquainted with Mobutu. “After years of hard work, he started taking it a little easier. He enjoyed good food and good restaurants. But he also derived a lot of pleasure from giving to others. He was extremely generous.” That generosity, however, was functional. “He always felt the need to remind others that he was the chief. He wanted to display his power.”48
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