No wonder that by the 1990s, Zaire had more than 600,000 names on its civil service payroll, notionally responsible for tasks the World Bank estimated could be carried out by a mere 50,000. A perfect example of overmanning was the central bank, which by the 1990s had 3,000 people to shuffle paperwork, more than the 2,000 employed in the country’s entire private banking sector.
On top of the flashy cars were the over-generous travelling allowances, the loans from banks that were never—or only partially—repaid, the houses that belonged to the state and were quietly appropriated, the contracts allocated to companies set up by the very officials in charge of ministerial budgets. Mimicking their leader, the Big Vegetables also bought mansions in Brussels and Paris, opened their own Swiss bank accounts, stocked their own cellars with pink champagne. Even those who lambasted Mobutu in public could not resist. For many Zaireans, Cleophas Kamitatu, a vocal critic of the president, set new standards in barefaced cheek when, while serving as ambassador to Japan, he took advantage of high property prices and sold off the Zairean embassy in Tokyo. Kamitatu claimed he made the sale to cover the salaries of unpaid diplomats, but few believed him.
Mobutu turned a blind eye to the accelerating graft. For once the members of an emerging elite had ceded to temptation, once their dirty secrets were logged in the intelligence service’s files and stored in his gargantuan memory, they were effectively neutered. In any case, with such profits to be made, with every ambitious graduate convinced he stood a good chance of a ministerial position or chairmanship of a huge state company at worst, the premiership itself at best, what advantage was to be gained by kicking against the system?
The society’s brightest and best were sucked into his ambit. Delve into the personal history of almost any Zairean player of significance and you will discover that no matter how talented, how insightful, how articulate he may be about the ills of his society, how apparently determined to correct those faults, he at one stage or another was on the Mobutu payroll. ‘I don’t blame those guys,’ said a diplomat who served in Kinshasa. ‘In any society, the most talented people will always go where the money is, whether it’s the City, or the media, or Hollywood. In Zaire, the money came from Mobutu. So that was where they went.’
Mobutu favoured collaborators of mixed blood, men like Bisengimana Rema, of Rwandan origin, Kengo Wa Dondo, the son of a Polish magistrate, Seti Yale. Bereft of tribal constituencies, the ‘métis’ were regarded by many Zaireans as foreigners. Under the constitution, they could never legally aspire to the presidency. They owed everything to Mobutu and he hoped they would remain conscious of the fact. During the early years at least, it was abundantly clear to all supplicants that access to sinecures and favours could be granted by one man alone—the president. This played into another of the great principles on which this admirer of Machiavelli’s writings based his domination over an ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse nation: divide and rule.
Master of the personalised relationship, adept at presenting a different face to each of his interlocutors, Mobutu established intimate links with his subordinates, while working equally hard to ensure they never developed the same rapport with one another. Anything that smacked of a developing cabal was cunningly undermined. Professor Mabi Mulumba made the mistake during his brief stint as premier of inviting the chairmen of four or five state companies to dinner, a gesture judged alarming by a president on the lookout for possible plots. One of his guests was immediately summoned by Mobutu, who told him: ‘I see you’ve been dining with Mabi. Did you know he’s asked for you to be sacked?’
On another occasion, Mobutu left a banquet pleading indisposition, an announcement that set the tongues of the generals and ministers assembled around the table wagging on the subject of who would take over if he fell seriously ill. None of these guests, as it happened, as Mobutu was careful to have every word of the conversation relayed to him by a female attendant sent to cater to his needs. ‘Later on, one by one, they were all fired,’ recalled Mabi. Mobutu loved to be able to embarrass an ambitious apparatchik by bringing up in public some dismissive remark he had made behind the president’s back and watching him squirm. The message was clear: his eyes and ears were everywhere. He owned them.
Rumour had it that the president’s mastery extended into sexual relations, where Mobutu interpreted his African name—sometimes translated as ‘the cock that covers every chicken’—as a licence to help himself to subordinates’ wives. So notorious was the president’s philandering, political officers at the US embassy were given a daily update of which society hostess was filling the influential post of presidential mistress by their local staff.
At the height of his powers, Mobutu was braced to counter any potential challenge. Working the telephones into the early hours—a one o’clock call from this notorious insomniac was de rigueur, call the president’s number at 4 a.m. and you could count on an alert Mobutu picking up the receiver himself—he hoovered up gossip, encouraging members of the political elite to inform on each other. As a result, recalls Mabi, the waiting room outside the office where cabinet meetings were held was always curiously silent. ‘The first time I went I was astonished, because people weren’t talking to each other and they left afterwards without saying a word. They were determined not to provide their colleagues with material that could later be used against them. The system had created its own antibodies. Everyone suspected everyone else.’
Once Mobutu had moved to Gbadolite, group audiences, where Mobutu would have to publicly endorse a viewpoint and a general consensus would emerge, were never held, despite his aides’ pleas. Mobutu liked to receive his supplicants separately. This allowed each player to leave his offices believing he had the president’s blessing and act accordingly. ‘The last person who saw Mobutu was always right,’ remembers Pierre Janssen, Mobutu’s Belgian son-in-law. ‘You would spend all day talking to him, going into details and he would agree with you. You would leave the palace thinking it was all settled and then, if someone came after you, they would win the day.’
Some of this was due to an adaptability that verged on indecisiveness, the lack of confidence of a man who knew, post-Zaireanisation, he would never feature amongst the ranks of Africa’s philosopher leaders. But it was also a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, undermine consensus and thereby prevent the formation of any coherent political movement that might eventually focus on his removal. The subsequent confusion, the furious arguments that followed, would shore up Mobutu’s role as ultimate arbiter, underlining the fact that he was the only player who grasped the whole picture. ‘He hated those around him to reach agreement,’ recalled Honoré Ngbanda. ‘He instinctively set people up against each other.’
‘I am the king,’ he would bluntly tell foreign visitors, drawing a direct line between the absolute control exercised by Belgium’s Leopold and his own autocracy.
Pulling strings of jealousy, rivalry and cupidity, Mobutu prevented the emergence of any dauphin who could be embraced as an alternative by Western allies when they began tiring of his rule. It was the old ‘who else?’ question that was to stymie diplomats in so many African nations. A US State Department official confronted the problem when Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, theoretically bringing a fresh eye to bilateral relations. ‘Someone said: “we have to find a Zairean who hasn’t been tainted by Mobutu.” I burst out laughing and said: “Who?” ’
There was no more striking example of the maxim that every man has his price than Nguz Karl i Bond, a politician who made the mistake of appearing to both the Zairean public and the West as a possible presidential successor in the late 1970s. Accused of harbouring designs on the first lady and helping to plot the invasion of Shaba, the pock-marked former prime minister was jailed, condemned to death and tortured so savagely he was said to have been left impotent.
Pardoned, he went into exile, where he tried to unite the gathering opposition movement, denounced Mobutu and his system in a book as ‘the incarnation
of Zaire’s evil’, testified against the president before a US Congressional hearing and provided the former IMF executive Erwin Blumenthal with incriminating information about the president’s financial misdoings.
Yet by 1985 Nguz had tired of the thankless life of the exile. He returned to Kinshasa to rejoin the MPR fold and Mobutu, who must have revelled in the spectacle of this opposition firebrand defending the very regime he had denounced before a Western audience, named him first foreign minister, and then prime minister—a surrender of personal integrity reported to have cost Mobutu, according to Radio Trottoir, a cool $10 million.
‘There was no opposition in Zaire,’ agreed Nzanga, Mobutu’s son. ‘My father used to say “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer still”. Leaving people in exile was a danger, they were making a lot of noise. The game was to neutralise their capacity to damage him. So they came back and one by one, I saw all those guys up in Gbadolite. My father would laugh about it. He would say “politics is politics”. But he didn’t respect any of them.’ Nor did the Zairean public, aghast at the crassness of betrayals perpetrated without, it seemed, so much as a flicker of embarrassment.
As the years passed, however, the price of loyalty rose. After Nguz came other high-profile exiles, such as maverick Mungul Diaka, who needed to be silenced. Yet the economic crisis was making it difficult for Mobutu to keep buying popularity. As the collapse of the Berlin Wall dissolved the neat Cold War lines drawn across Africa, the Big Vegetables were beginning to look decidedly itchy.
In April 1990, giving in to popular discontent and growing pressure from the West for reform, Mobutu took an enormous gamble. He resigned his position as head of the MPR and declared Zaire a multiparty state. It was a move many observers blithely assumed spelt the beginning of the end for the Leopard. Etienne Tshisekedi, the mulish former interior minister who headed the outlawed Union of Social and Political Democracy, was seen as probable successor. There was a sudden explosion of the printed media, sensationalist rag-sheets which did not mince their words when it came to ridiculing the president. So confident was the political counsellor at the US embassy that an era was ending, he bet the local CIA station chief Mobutu would not last the year. He was six years out. Drawing on his experience of post-independence anarchy, Mobutu was to become as adept at manipulating democracy as he had been at manipulating single party rule.
As a Sovereign National Conference (CNS) convened, mustering politicians and representatives of ‘civil society’ to agree what form the transition to democracy should take, the political scene splintered. Nearly 400 parties formed. Some were dangerous, established by ambitious Big Vegetables who, to Mobutu’s fury, now seized the opportunity to denounce the president and repackage themselves effortlessly as opposition challengers. But many consisted of no more than one loudmouth and his wife. To the farmers’ parties, women’s parties, lawyers’ parties and handicapped parties, a new group was added: the so-called ‘food parties’ (partis alimentaires), ready to sell their CNS votes in return for a little sustenance.
Mobutu bought them as enthusiastically as he had once bought individuals. But in truth, he only needed to apply the odd nudge to ensure events at the CNS went in his favour. The squabbling of the 1960s swiftly resurfaced, fuelled by generous per diems which discouraged delegates from doing today what could be put off till the morrow. The main opposition parties fissured and split as, losing sight of their original ambition—a future without Mobutu—they quarrelled over who got to hold the lucrative post of prime minister. ‘At one stage or another,’ remarked Kitenge Yezu, the aide Mobutu entrusted with the job of undermining his opponents during that period, ‘practically every member of the opposition ate at Mobutu’s table.’
After one major CNS showdown, the country was for a while in the surreal position of boasting two premiers and two cabinets. One, reluctantly recognised by the West as being the real power in the land, was dominated by Mobutu sympathisers who cheerfully allotted themselves monthly salaries of $14,500. The other staged weekly ‘cabinet’ meetings in Tshisekedi’s dusty compound and solemnly issued weekly round-ups of its pointless deliberations.
The country’s political reform process stalled in its tracks. By applying his tried and tested techniques, Mobutu had triumphed once again. Tshisekedi retired to sulk in his compound, his credibility destroyed. Wounded to the core by the hostility displayed at the CNS—which had included proposals to drop the name Zaire and revive the flag and anthem of the Lumumba era—Mobutu nonetheless enjoyed the last laugh. He had demonstrated to a public that demanded democracy just how little they could expect from the men he had corrupted. The CNS, bitter Zaireans now joked, stood for ‘Connerie Nationale Souveraine’—Sovereign National Bullshit.
Promising imminent elections in each New Year’s address, Mobutu at the same time made it clear he had no plans to quit. ‘I must complete my task,’ Mobutu told the nation in 1994. ‘I cannot leave this type of inheritance to posterity. Completing my task means leaving this country something worthwhile.’ The leader who had once sent troops to burn down the printing presses now let the rag-sheets froth at will. They could say what they liked, he realised, as long as one basic principle was observed: he controlled the purse strings and commanded the military elite. Declared obsolete by Western diplomats in 1990, Mobutu was to succeed in stretching Zaire’s so-called transition to democracy out for seven long years, transforming a temporary phase into a near-permanent condition. It was a remarkable achievement, by anyone’s standards.
CHAPTER FIVE
Living above the shop
‘We are partly to blame, but this is the curse of being born with a copper spoon in our mouths.’
—Former President Kenneth Kaunda, commenting on Zambia’s economic plight
On my bathroom shelf, I keep a small rock taken from the edges of an open-cast mine on the outskirts of Lubumbashi. I went there a few months before it was captured by rebels and, not surprisingly, the mood was a little tense. I had spent the previous day at the headquarters of SNIP, the intelligence service, waiting for the local security supremo to spell out just how unwelcome a visit this was.
He had kept me pacing the corridors as long as was feasible, but had not gone so far as to expel me across the border, so by the next day I was peering into a kidney-shaped quarry, listening politely as a Polish engineer enthused over the ore being scooped from the site. The purity of the cobalt here, he explained, was 2.7 per cent, compared with 0.2 per cent in neighbouring Zambia. ‘This place really is a geological scandal,’ he sighed.
Whatever minerals my sample contains, they are clearly present in high concentrations. Around the reddish base rock, which crumbles in the hand with alarming ease, a knobbly blanket of dark green crystals is folded. The crystals have the feathery look of home-made ice-cream, and they twinkle in the light. Every time I pick it up I have to repress a smile. It brings to mind all the upbeat assessments written through the years by Canadian, Australian and South African mining companies trying to raise money for ventures in Congo. The ones that rave about the 50, 100, 200 million tonnes of copper/cobalt/ zinc/tin/nickel just waiting to be extracted from this or that site, pooh-pooh doubts about the government’s reliability and play down the small matter of a rebel uprising in the east.
The minerals are undoubtedly there, in concentrations high enough to make a metals analyst weep. But the rusting factories scarring Katanga’s landscape, the abandoned yards, the stilled conveyor belts and dour expressions of the few technicians still at work are more accurate indicators to the province’s prospects than any number of statistics-laden company reports.
They are all the evidence one needs that Congo has fallen victim to that paradox of sub-Saharan Africa, which dictates that countries with the greatest natural assets are doomed to war and stagnation, while nations with almost nothing somehow prove better at building contented societies. It is as though an impish god has decided to keep the scales of each country’s destiny level: if one na
tion is blessed with oil, it will be cursed with a civil war, if another abounds in diamonds, they shall lie behind rebel lines, if a third is awash with copper, its leadership will prove too inept to organise its extraction. Or maybe the reason is simpler: the richer the nation, the more spoils there are to fight over. Sharing only seems to make sense when there is scarcely enough to go around.
There has never been a better example of the curse of natural riches than Congo. The mineral belt that fans out from Katanga’s dry savannah into neighbouring Zambia contains copper and zinc in concentrations rival nations can only dream about and enough cobalt to corner the global market. Even the slag heaps looming over the decaying colonnaded towns built by the Belgians—Likasi, Kolwezi, Lubumbashi—could yield a fortune if reprocessed with modern techniques, so pure was the original concentrate.
Still waiting to be systematically charted, these were the deposits that made the Belgians so reluctant to lose control of Katanga, they encouraged Moise Tshombe to secede in the post-independence years. Nearly 500 miles to the north-west lies another gift of nature: the dark red gravel banks that trace the winding course of the Kanshi river, second-biggest source of industrial diamonds in the world.
There are other gifts: diamonds at Tshikapa in the south-west and Kisangani in the north, what for a time was the world’s main source of uranium at Shinkolobwe, and from the border with Uganda comes the enticing glitter of gold. Cadmium and cassiterite, manganese and wolframite, beryl, columbo-tantalite and germanium: metals with mysterious, evocative names. No wonder a US ambassador once memorably referred to ‘the Congo caviar’ in a cable back to headquarters.
Such natural wealth haunts the national psyche. Talk to any Congolese and at one stage he will cite his country’s extraordinary attributes. ‘We are a great country. No one has resources like us,’ he boasts. Maybe it is an inheritance from the days when Belgian supervisors deliberately kept their Congolese subordinates away from strategic planning, or the hangover from a culture of slash-and-burn. But the investment, scientific know-how and marketing savvy needed to realise that potential are always glossed over. The mere existence of the assets entitles the nation to status and respect.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Page 11