In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  Diamonds were always going to be the perfect product for Mobutu: tiny, easily smuggled across borders in a briefcase, handbag or pocket and needing none of the clumsy apparatus of electrolysers, smelters and refiners or the messy infrastructure of rickety railways, road haulage and quaysides associated with base metals. He could play the same game as the buyers on Avenue Inga, setting up diamond counters which massively underestimated the value of their wares in official declarations and then unloaded the garimpeiros’ produce onto the Antwerp market. But Mobutu could also go directly to the biggest diamond digger of them all and demand a presidential share. And in Jonas Mukamba, the long-standing government representative running MIBA, Mobutu had a man he could do business with.

  A tall, imposing Luba known for his tendency to speak his mind, Mukamba had been a player on the national scene as long as Mobutu himself. Engraved on the memories of most Congolese is the fact that it was Mukamba who accompanied Lumumba and his two fellow prisoners on their terrible flight down to Elizabethville in 1961, handing the former prime minister over to the men who would take him to his death. As with Mobutu, the oily stain of fratricide has clung to MIBA’s president for more than thirty years, lending him a sinister glamour which has done nothing to blight his progress through the world.

  Maybe this shared complicity made cooperation between the two men easier. For when Gécamines’ top executives stopped being able to deliver, Mukamba stepped in. ‘Mukamba was probably creaming off between $1.5 and $2 million from MIBA for Mobutu each month,’ guessed a former government economist. ‘People often say the advantage of a private company is that it puts a stop to this kind of thing. Well, MIBA’s mixed economy status made not the slightest bit of difference.’ Mukamba obliged Mobutu in other ways. Foreign dignitaries the president wanted to impress were taken to the MIBA building. The company’s security guards would be ordered out, each visitor handed a shovel and sack and invited to help themselves to MIBA’s raw diamonds. If today the company officially refuses to comment on its past, Mukamba’s role as Mobutu’s fund-raiser is quietly acknowledged by staff who took over administration after the president’s departure. ‘But quite honestly, what else could he do?’ asked a MIBA colleague. ‘It’s easy to criticise, but it’s not black and white. Towards the end it was impossible to work with Mobutu if you didn’t play the game. And in the process Mukamba did a lot of good to the town.’

  For, in exchange for the presidential tithe, Mukamba was left to run Mbuji Mayi and its environs largely as he pleased. Filling the space left by the absent government, he turned it into the ultimate company state. MIBA repaired the roads, pumped drinking water, supplied the town with electricity and sold food at subsidised prices. MIBA contributed funds to the nascent university and paid for foreign professors to fly over to teach. A young Kasaian could easily spend his life in MIBA-funded institutions: living in a company house, attending a MIBA school and dying in a hospital supplied with MIBA drugs. ‘I’m a businessman, but I’m also a politician and my job is to look after the population,’ Mukamba told me shortly before his removal. ‘The people are very aware of what MIBA is or isn’t doing and if we don’t do it we are severely criticised.’

  With its own scrip and a company-funded health and education system, bolshy east Kasai enjoyed self-rule of sorts. But it was always autonomy by default, and it never touched great heights. By the late 1990s, despite MIBA’s repair work and its electricity plant, many of the main roads still subsided in the rain and much of the town was plunged into darkness at night. The much-vaunted university was little more than a couple of outhouses and a dusty roomful of books. A MIBA-sponsored orphanage was a bleak, furnitureless shack, where runny-nosed children could recite the catechism but went without shoes. Residents had accepted their half-baked secession as the best deal they were likely to win and got on with the task of making money, an approach that infuriated the more idealistic amongst them. Gaston Muyombo, a Catholic priest, blamed the approach on what he called ‘Bantu philosophy’: ‘People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they will fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.’

  Mukamba’s freedom of movement was curtailed not only by his role as unofficial presidential cash provider, but by the fact that MIBA was still paying cripplingly heavy national taxes in Kinshasa. ‘Our dearest wish would be to spend those taxes locally. But the law obliges us to pay,’ he explained. ‘For more than thirty years, power has been far too centralised in Zaire.’

  Combined, the two depredations helped send MIBA down the same sad route as Gécamines. By 1997, the year of Mobutu’s downfall, output had fallen from 10 million carats a year to 6.4 million. The company had been loss-making for six years, and it too had been put on a specially lightened tax regime. The curse of prosperity had struck again. Yet another thriving national industry, on which another state might have built a vertiginous rise to international prominence, had been sabotaged.

  The shift of focus from Katanga to Kasai, from copper to diamonds, marked another stage in Mobutu’s itinerary. The man who had founded his empire on his ability to distribute sweeteners was now being outstripped by the more enterprising members of the political class he had helped create, who had learned their lesson a little too well. Several of Mobutu’s sons, his personal aides, the generals, were all soon running their own diamond-buying counters on the Avenue Inga. They doubled as conduits for the higher quality gem diamonds being mined by the UNITA rebel movement across the frontier in Angola, which needed legitimate commercial outlets for the stones to fund its military campaign. ‘Mobutu was losing his capacity to rein those guys in,’ said a US Treasury official. ‘The illicit diamond counters were wandering out of his reach and his ability to plunder the various state mechanisms had shrunk enormously.’

  In his role as diamond expert, Larry Devlin tracked the same phenomenon. ‘I heard through my contacts that one of Mobutu’s closest aides was going to Antwerp with $9 million worth of diamonds to sell on the president’s behalf. He’d tell the buyer, “Give me a receipt for six and I’ll take the other three.” In the old days that would never have happened. He would have gone back to Mobutu with nine and waited for the president to give him his share. He would never have dared take his own cut first.’ The kleptocracy was no longer the creation of one man. It had acquired its own unstoppable momentum.

  On one of the main avenues of Kinshasa’s tree-lined Gombe district, home to ambassadorial residences and ministries of the city, a mastodon of a building constructed in the shape of a giant reversed ‘C’ lies behind high walls of concrete and iron. It used to be possible to drive straight past this cement hulk, but ever since a bout of shooting between two rival army units alerted the new authorities to the institution’s vulnerability, traffic has been diverted down narrow side streets. But from this distance you can still spot a curious white sphere high up on one of the building’s corners. This used to be where a mosaic of Mobutu, complete with leopardskin hat and dark glasses, surveyed the scene. It was whitewashed over in the days when Kabila’s rebels walked into town and, in true Vicar of Bray style, the capital’s residents rushed to ‘rebuild their virginities’, in that magnificent French phrase.

  But it is easier to paint over a portrait than to cancel out the past. It was here, at the central bank, that the final scenes in Mobutu’s kleptocratic system were played out. Having reduced Gécamines and MIBA to shadows of their former selves, with no substantial revenues coming in, the president and his increasingly wayward elite were left with the option of last resort: printing money to survive. The presses would be ordered into action, army lorries sent to the central bank and the thick wads of pristine zaire notes quietly unloaded on what Radio Trottoir had dubbed ‘Wall Street’: the alleyways where scores of Kinshasa’s divorcees, widows and single mothers—these feisty moneychangers were nearly always women—would sit with bulky bags of money on their knees, setting the day’s exchange rate. Dumping their notes, still
in the plastic wrappers in which they had been issued, the top officials would hurriedly exchange them for dollars, Belgian francs or French francs, the only stable landmarks in a world of constantly shifting value. But as word spread on Wall Street of yet another mystery delivery, the day’s rate would change and the zaire would fall—and fall.

  Inflation, which had reached double-digit figures sufficient in themselves to bring down an accountable Western government, suddenly rocketed in 1991 to a mind-boggling 4,130 per cent. The next year it fell slightly to 2,990 per cent. But the next year it was back up to 4,650 per cent and in 1994 came the worst of the worst: inflation ballooned to 9,800 per cent.

  For Zaireans paid in local currency, the effect of what was effectively an unofficial tax on every financial transaction was disastrous. In the time it took to drink a coffee, the rate could have changed a couple of times. Dither too long over the bill, and it might have to be altered. Return from a long trip and the store of zaires that had bought a family a meal before you left now scarcely afforded a bar of soap.

  In supermarkets, no one bothered ticketing goods individually any more, so quickly did the prices change. Instead they were classed in categories with a single index, easily updated, giving that day’s price for each category of goods. Each individual note was now worth so little, the banking industry effectively ground to a halt, unable to muster the liquidity needed for major transactions. Sometimes, behind the tellers, you would see hillocks constructed of soiled, strangely aromatic zaire notes, stacked against the wall in brick-like blocks: destined for some small business struggling to pull together the salary for its workforce, perhaps, or to buy a photocopier. There was rarely enough cash for anything more ambitious. Checking the amount could take hours, despite the fact that to simplify counting, notes were split into convenient ‘paquets’ of twenty-five. You trusted your black market moneychanger, in fact you trusted every Zairean you dealt with, not to subvert the entire system by sneaking a couple of notes out of each paquet. Ironically, a crisis created by such top-level dishonesty bred its own moral norms amongst its victims, adhered to with a greater degree of conscientiousness than the rules of a conventional financial system.

  Indeed, it gave birth to an imaginative mutual aid system amongst those still tenacious enough to want to operate in a society where the banks had become irrelevant. Coffee exporters and arms traders, aid organisations and diamond smugglers found themselves strange bedfellows as they established an informal money-trading network. A single phone call would enable a factory boss to locate the zaires needed to pay his work-force, or a Lebanese dealer to find the dollars he needed to buy his diamonds. It was do-it-yourself banking and it worked. ‘I find it quite inspirational,’ a British businessman once confessed. ‘Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of currency will be traded over the phone, the transaction takes seconds to go through, rather than the weeks involved if it were being conducted through banks, everything is done verbally and no one ever welshes on a deal, because they know if they did the whole apparatus would collapse around their ears and everyone would lose out.’

  But even if the process was taking place in graceful slow motion, the system was indeed imploding under the weight of its own eccentricities. Each time a new denomination was issued in a forlorn attempt to keep up with inflation, politicians would wait with bated breath to see if the population would accept it as legal tender or refuse it as inflationary. That was the step that helped push the soldiers to riot in 1993, when they found their wages being refused in shops. One of the last bills issued under Mobutu—the 500,000-zaire note cheekily dubbed the ‘prostate’ in honour of his afflicted organ—was rejected en masse in Kinshasa, providing a few mouvanciers with a wonderful opportunity to exploit. Appropriating notes rendered worthless in Kinshasa, they chartered planes and flew stacks of prostates down south to Lubumbashi, where they dumped them wholesale onto a more amenable black market.

  In Kasai, of course, the new zaires had never been accepted at all, presenting a lucrative opening for officials who hoarded ‘ancien zaires’ instead of burning them as directed, then offloaded them in the Kasaian trading centres of Mbuji Mayi and Kananga. In the far east, new zaires were accepted but traded at a different rate against the dollar from Kinshasa, another opportunity for those lucky enough to travel to make a profit on the spread. One country, at least four separate currency zones: Zaire was beginning to crack at the seams. Mobutu the African nationalist may not have liked all that this implied. But given his own past, what could he do about his entourage’s increasingly reckless freelance activities? Moral sermons would have come across as unacceptable hypocrisy. ‘Since he was taking himself, he could not punish others,’ said Kitenge Yezu.

  None of this world of Alice-in-Wonderland finances, of course, made its way into the monthly and yearly reports issued by the central bank, where accountants and economists painstakingly massaged the figures, constructing a sophisticated simulacrum of financial respectability that might, at a pinch, fool some IMF or World Bank expert still interested enough in Zaire to ask to see the books.

  As Mobutu’s options narrowed, Western governments pinned their hopes of reform on Kengo Wa Dondo, the light-skinned, razor-sharp former attorney-general who had served twice as prime minister during the single-party era, before once again being nominated premier in 1994. The dominant figure in a group of Big Vegetables to emerge in 1990 as pitiless critics of one-man rule, Kengo was, the embassies believed, acute enough to realise the financial mismanagement had to stop. Kengo did enjoy initial success in bringing down inflation. But then came a series of scams so outrageous, so ambitious, they betrayed an utter disdain for the law, the population and the very tenets of a nation state by those involved.

  In the early hours of 2 September 1994, a Boeing 707 belonging to a Liberia-registered company landed at Ndjili airport. The plane, which was inspected before taking off for the interior without authorisation, proved to be carrying an extraordinary load: 30 tonnes of banknotes, amounting to 12–15 billion new zaires. Had a forgery ring been exposed? The truth turned out to be rather more complex.

  So strapped for cash was the Kengo government, it had resorted to entrusting the printing of its new currency bills, carried out in Argentina and Brazil, to Lebanese intermediaries. They would fund the issue and then be paid for services rendered out of the new banknotes that resulted. But the well-connected Lebanese businessmen involved, Naim and Harif Khanafer, went a step further. Exploiting their unique position as agents of the Zairean monetary authorities, they asked the Brazilian and Argentine companies to issue not just one copy of each numbered bill, but two notes, three notes, maybe four. Identical in quality and detail to the original, these were not technically speaking forgeries at all, and were impossible to isolate. Dumped in their tonnes on the black market, their effect was bound to be catastrophic.

  After an emergency cabinet meeting, Kengo’s information minister went on national television to explain and denounce the scandal, relieved, one suspects, to be able to attribute inflation to something other than money-printing authorised by the Treasury and the central bank. The air company’s licence was revoked, the Lebanese brothers detained for questioning, Interpol’s help was requested and a top-level legal inquiry was launched, with government investigators dispatched to Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and France. One month later, a second cargo of 14 tonnes of banknotes was discovered in the riverside town of Mbandaka, and this time the government managed to confiscate the load.

  No one will ever know who was behind the action taken by the Khanafer brothers, but what is certain is that as Lebanese nationals reliant on their contacts to work and live in Zaire, they would never have launched an operation of this criminal grandeur without high-level patronage. Asked to name those responsible, Kengo cited certain ‘civilian and military individuals’ but declined to go into any detail ‘so as not to prejudice the legal investigation’, he said.

  With weary predictability, the inquiry was quietly a
llowed to subside. Legal charges were never filed against any of those responsible and in December of that year the government, perennially short of cash, actually ordered the freeze on the 14 tonnes of Mbandaka banknotes to be lifted so it could pump the ‘forged’ bills into the money system. Kengo had underestimated the strength of the ‘subterranean forces’ behind the scam. Confronted by the powerful lobbies involved, he had preferred political survival to a showdown that might lose him his premiership.

  The ugly face of a regime that was sucking the lifeblood from its own citizens had been publicly exposed. If they were slightly taken aback at the sheer depth of the greed exposed, Zaireans were certainly not shocked by the motives themselves. They had grown accustomed to the notion of state as ravaging predator. What mattered was knowing how to cope with the outcome.

  CHAPTER SIX