In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  The transfer was made too late for the IMF deadline and, to the annoyance of the officials on the ground who had engineered it, headquarters decided to suspend the programme. A furious Mobutu, who clearly felt he had made a major personal sacrifice, accused the IMF of having lied to him. When it relented and tried to put a new deal together, he told the Fund, to general amazement, to take a running jump. ‘One thing the Fund does not like is to be told to go to hell. It was seen as an insult,’ remembered Goreux. So a face-saving solution was put together, whereby funds granted under the new programme would quietly be deposited into a special account established on Zaire’s behalf in Washington. But Mobutu continued to sulk. Goreux searched around desperately for politicians friendly enough with Mobutu to mollify him. It was only when Jacques Chirac, French Prime Minister at the time, agreed to put in a personal telephone call that the president relented. He could present himself to the Zairean people as the man who had defied the international institutions, while still benefiting from an aid programme.

  The image of the Fund going on bended knee to beg one of the world’s most corrupt leaders to take its money is not an attractive one. It may help explain why in 1987 David Finch, an Australian economist heading the IMF trade and finance department, resigned over the granting of a new loan, claiming the US had applied undue pressure. The programme staggered along, although it was now a tattered, pitiful scrap of a thing. Kengo had been sacked, and trust in Mobutu’s good intentions had shrivelled.

  The IMF and World Bank were not the only institutions falling victim to Mobutu’s tricks. In 1988, for example, Zaire negotiated a $120 million loan from the African Development Bank. The sum was earmarked for petroleum imports to help the country weather a fuel crisis, and it was granted largely because Cleophas Kamitatu, Finance Minister at the time, was one of the bank’s founding members.

  Soon after the deal was signed, Kamitatu remembers being summoned by the central bank governor, who told him the president wanted a $40 million cut to cover ‘the needs of sovereignty’. Both men’s signatures were legally required to authorise the transfer, so when Kamitatu refused, Mobutu telexed over a presidential edict ruling that in future, only the governor’s signature would be necessary. Kamitatu was dismissed soon after. ‘My successor signed everything,’ he wryly recalled.

  But the game could not go on for ever. As the economy shrank, the huge bite being taken out by the presidency became more and more painfully obvious. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika transforming the Soviet Union, the old Cold War imperatives were fading. Democracy was sweeping across Africa and Mobutu was moving from irreplaceable ally to embarrassment.

  In early 1989, another hole in state finances appeared and this time it was too big to ignore: $600–700 million. Jaycox held one last meeting with Mobutu. Previously, their encounters had been conducted before the cameras. Now that relations had turned sour, the president preferred the presidential yacht. This was the only place Mobutu felt safe. Casting off the moorings, he would float midstream, armed guards scouring the horizon, helicopter at the ready.

  It was a stand-off Jaycox was scarcely in a state to dominate, having previously caught the tropical disease, giardia. ‘I was sick as a dog. I’d been losing weight and had to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes. We were out on that boat and he was making fun of my discomfort. Occasionally he would threaten to throw me to the crocodiles, in a joking way.’

  Confronted with the massive financial anomaly, Mobutu’s approach—perhaps not surprising given past indulgence—was unapologetic. ‘He wanted us to just get over it,’ recalled Jaycox with a bemused laugh. ‘We were expected to fix it. We documented the gap. He kept talking about his “soldier’s word”. I indicated that I thought his word was totally worthless—that was the level of discussion we were having—as far as I was concerned his credibility had completely evaporated, the only question now was whether we were going to allow our credibility to follow his down the tubes.’

  Mobutu had been given a last warning—but once again he might have been forgiven for assuming his interlocutors were bluffing. In June 1989, US voters elected George Bush, a former CIA chief and long-standing Mobutu supporter, as their new president. The Zairean leader was, amazingly, the first African head of state invited to stroll the lawns with Bush.

  The slippages continued. Mobutu was turning sixty, an event he planned to mark by hosting a Francophone summit and major festivities. He was taking the cash he needed for the event from the export receipts of Gécamines, whose restructuring the World Bank was funding. A World Bank letter highlighting these discrepancies triggered an outraged response from Mobutu, who forbade its officials from communicating with Gécamines without government permission. In March 1990, the weary World Bank decided to call it a day and Jerome Chevallier, its resident representative, was asked to act as messenger. ‘I went to deliver the letter to Mobutu in the town of Kindu. We’d always had very cordial relations—he would usually address me with the familiar “tu”,’ he remembered. ‘But now he used “vous”. “Vous faites du très mauvais travail ici,” (“you are doing very bad work here”) he told me.’ Soon after, Chevallier asked to be transferred, feeling ‘anything’ could now happen in a country on the verge of an economic precipice.

  If the funding of small projects sputtered on, structural adjustment was over, the first time in World Bank history a programme had been suspended with a functioning African government. Even after a series of experiences that could be expected to leave the Bretton Woods institutions allergic to the very mention of Mobutu, there were to be spasmodic attempts to relaunch the aid programme. As foolish an example, surely, of institutional inertia as it is possible to find, they were this time quashed by officials who had, somewhat belatedly, decided to act on Erwin Blumenthal’s advice.

  Give or take a few doubts about timing, the overriding tenor of my interviews with IMF and World Bank veterans was simple: ‘I regret nothing.’ Was it really an acceptable answer?

  The pragmatic line of argument is that, unappetising as the experience was to prove, Western self-interest made indulging Mobutu worthwhile. ‘If we had tried to attach 1990s governance conditionalities to Mobutu, we would have been calling for his overthrow,’ says Chester Crocker. ‘If we had asked him to turn off the taps, his own people would have toppled him. We would, in effect, have been calling for a coup. I’m sure of that.’

  But a military putsch in Zaire was only a disastrous prospect if you accepted the premise that there was no better alternative to Mobutu. Many would argue that the West was always overly ready to accept Mobutu’s assessment of himself as sole performer on a puzzlingly empty political stage, an impression he conveyed by either scaring his rivals into exile or buying their loyalties. By supporting Mobutu so openly, the West helped bring about that scenario. Sitting in Washington, the economists and politicians never registered how fundamentally their support shored up the domestic image of Mobutu as a kind of malign demi-god, foisted on Zaire by inscrutable alien powers. Dulled since Leopold to the notion of outside forces determining their fate, a defeatist population became convinced he could only be ousted by external intervention.

  ‘When are the Americans going to take Mobutu away?’ a parliamentary deputy once asked me as the sun was setting over the People’s Palace in Kinshasa at the end of yet another day of pointless wrangling. ‘Why can’t they come in with their helicopters, like they did in Panama?’ The idea that, as a member of the political establishment, it was up to him and his peers to take responsibility for Mobutu’s removal had clearly never occurred to him.

  Idealists take a different tack, arguing that however faulty the record of Western aid, engaging with Mobutu was a moral obligation. Dictators, supporters of this argument say, thrive in isolation and although much may be stolen on the way, cajoling autocratic leaders to liberalise their economies, open their countries to world trade and set up the institutions associated with accountable government can end up weakening them more dram
atically than any amount of foreign disapproval. And what, after all, is the alternative?

  ‘Do we watch a generation of Zaireans go down the drain?’ asks Kim Jaycox. ‘Is that the smart option? Does that resonate as being wise? Not to me. Looking back, these were good gambles, these were the kind of gambles these institutions were designed to take.’

  The problem is that a generation of Zaireans was effectively lost, notwithstanding all that goodwill. To cite just a few World Bank statistics, Congo’s economy has now shrunk to the level of 1958, while the population has tripled. Average life expectancy is fifty-two, 80 per cent of the population is employed in ‘subsistence activities’; illiteracy is growing; AIDS is rife and such diseases as bubonic plague and sleeping sickness are enjoying a vibrant comeback. By the end of the century the government’s annual operating budget for what is potentially one of Africa’s richest states was dipping below the daily takings of the US superstore Wal-Mart. It is hard to see how, if the World Bank and IMF had boycotted Zaire early on, the situation could have been more disastrous. As debt campaigners in the West point out, the Congolese can now rightly question why they should be asked to repay a penny of the loans made to a man notorious for his dishonesty, which so signally failed to deliver any of the benefits they were promised.

  Whether undertaken for hard-headed or high-minded reasons, intervention did no more than fix the country in a kind of purulent agar. True, the country did not fall apart as it had threatened to do after independence. The succession of uprisings, military coups and secession attempts that would have probably followed Mobutu’s ousting was averted. But it is from just such ghastly experiences that political maturity, inspirational leadership and a sense of direction are eventually born.

  Deprived of the chance to learn the lessons of its own history, Zaire’s population was kept in a state of infantilism by a more insidious form of colonialism. Instead of the roller-coaster of war, destruction and eventual rebirth, the intervention of the US, France and Belgium, of the World Bank and IMF, locked the society into one slow-motion economic collapse. Balked of expression, unable to advance, mindsets froze over somewhere in the 1960s, leaving the country’s leadership at the turn of the century stuck in an ideological time-warp.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A folly in the jungle

  ‘Anyone wishing to maintain among men the name of liberal is obliged to avoid no attribute of magnificence; so that a prince thus inclined will consume in such acts all his property, and will be compelled in the end, if he wish to maintain the name of liberal, to unduly weigh down his people, and tax them, and do everything he can to get money. This will soon make him odious to his subjects and becoming poor he will be little valued by anyone; thus, with his liberality, having offended many and rewarded few, he is affected by the very first trouble and imperilled by whatever may be the first danger.

  ‘There is nothing wastes so rapidly as liberality, for even whilst you exercise it you lose the power to do so, and so become either poor or despised, or else, in avoiding poverty, rapacious and hated.’

  The Prince

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  A travel writer of lurid brilliance, Henry Morton Stanley claimed never to have forgotten the horror of his march through the dank forests of eastern Congo, searching for the fabled river he hoped would carry him smoothly through the jungle. ‘The trees kept shedding their dew upon us like rain in great round drops,’ he recalled in Through the Dark Continent. ‘Every leaf seemed weeping. Down the boles and branches, creepers and vegetable cords, the moisture trickled and fell on us. Overhead the wide-spreading branches in many interlaced strata, each branch heavy with broad thick leaves, absolutely shut out the daylight. We knew not whether it was a sunshiny day or a dull, foggy, gloomy day; for we marched in a feeble solemn twilight.

  ‘We had certainly seen forests before,’ Stanley concluded. ‘But this scene was an epoch in our lives ever to be remembered for its bitterness; the gloom enhanced the dismal misery of our life; the slopping moisture, the unhealthy reeking atmosphere, and the monotony of the scenes; nothing but the eternal interlaced branches, the tall aspiring stems, rising from a tangle through which we had to burrow and crawl like wild animals, on hands and feet.’

  But if it seemed terrifying to this Briton-turned-American, this verdure, one of the largest expanses of rainforest left in the world, was where Mobutu felt most relaxed. Looking out over the tree tops, an undulating expanse of giant broccoli heads, or driving through the simple villages with their thatched huts, the burden of office seemed less heavy, his spirits quietly lifted and he breathed more easily. He was, after all, a Ngbandi, and this was home.

  It was here that, in the late 1970s, Mobutu ordered work to start on a palace. At first this was part of a larger plan to bring development to Gbadolite, the home town he tried, like many an African leader, to transform into a state capital with a simple wave of the presidential wand. But as the years passed and Kinshasa’s urban elite showed little inclination to move 700 miles north-east into the depths of the jungle, the president focused his energies on building a citadel fit for a king.

  Jumbo jets came and went, ferrying in construction materials, Israeli paratroopers to train the DSP contingent stationed here, hundreds of Chinese workers to build a Chinese village and rare animals, from chimpanzees to Zaire’s famous okapi—a curious cross between an antelope, giraffe and zebra—for the private zoo. If he could not force the Big Vegetables to up sticks, he could create a marvel they would discuss over their Kinshasa dinner parties.

  Envoys brought Italian marble for a vast mausoleum and chapel, French antiques for the rooms, glassware from Venice. Ironically, the author of authenticity, who had campaigned for the rediscovery of African cultural values, fell for every arriviste cliché in the book. ‘I want a marquee for the garden, and I want it now,’ the petulant president would tell aides. So the marquee would be brought in by plane, at vast expense.

  The airstrip was specially extended to be able to receive Concorde, which Mobutu routinely chartered from Air France and was often to be glimpsed idling on the tarmac. When asked to justify leasing such an expensive plane by a journalist from Der Spiegel, Mobutu was unapologetic. ‘I cannot sleep at all on a plane and I am terribly scared of sleeping pills,’ he explained. ‘To accuse me of wasting money—no, I am sorry. Just think of the time I save.’

  Initially Gbadolite was a paradise with no Adam and Eve to gambol in it. A restless Mobutu would fly in four or five times a year, his 100-member entourage piling into three aircraft, then touring the grounds in twenty-car convoys. He would stay a few days and be off. But after Mobutu ceded to domestic and international pressure for political reform in 1990 and announced the end of the one-party state, Gbadolite really came into its own. Mobutu abandoned his base in Kinshasa and spent his time shuttling between his equatorial retreat, the three-storey riverboat moored on the Zaire river and his villas abroad.

  The land of his ancestors, Gbadolite was always bound to be of enormous symbolic and spiritual importance to him. But this remote site at Africa’s very heart boasted another major attraction, although one rarely mentioned in public. Situated on the Ubangi river, Gbadolite lay only a short hop away from the frontier with Central African Republic, a key selling-point for a man who now had to constantly bear in mind the possibility of an eventual exile. Every hour he spent flying over the rolling forests, away from a capital plagued by protests, was an hour closer to safety. Mobutu left the city a frightened man, having been warned by his generals he ran the risk of assassination if he stayed in Kinshasa. He was also in a state of high dudgeon. In the wake of a brutal security crackdown on Lubumbashi university, staged, awkwardly, a matter of weeks after his groundbreaking political liberalisation speech, foreign allies had started cold-shouldering him. Domestically, the politicians he had showered with riches, nurtured and built up were seizing the opportunity presented by the Sovereign National Conference to turn on their former mentor.

&n
bsp; Mobutu always tried not to dwell on his acolytes’ hypocrisy. Politicians who denounced him abroad would be welcomed back like prodigal sons. No matter how rude the newspaper article, he never sued. ‘He did a lot of forgiving, because there were a lot of betrayals,’ said son Nzanga. ‘He would say, “Never forget but never take revenge. Because your judgement is not good when you’re harbouring hard feelings.” ’ But the treachery rankled nonetheless.

  If Mobutu had read Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better for a leader to be feared than loved by his subjects, he had not taken it to heart. Remembering an era when he was fêted in the streets, hailed as the man who had saved Congo from anarchy, Mobutu could not get used to being hated. ‘Something died in him from that moment on,’ judged his closest former aide, Honoré Ngbanda. He noted how the president would interrupt important audiences aboard his yacht to rush on deck and acknowledge the chants of praise from passengers on passing ships, so desperate had he become for applause.

  In a fury of ‘I’ll show them’, he decided to leave his ungrateful countrymen to the multi-party democracy they wanted, taking bitter satisfaction from the ease with which he sabotaged the process with the gift of a Mercedes here, a bank deposit there. His revenge was to live in style. Nothing pleased him more than to invite a group of Western VIPs up to what had been nicknamed ‘Versailles in the Jungle’ by the press and watch them gawp. ‘It was so incongruous your mouth fell open,’ remembered one regular US visitor. ‘There was this big golden pagoda at the airport. The reception area was so enormous if someone was sitting on the other side you couldn’t recognise them. Then you’d drive past thatched huts and untouched, indigenous villages and there would be this palace like the Louvre. It was indescribable.’

  The VIPs came, duly gasped over the musical fountains, the swans gliding over ornamental lakes, the model farm with its 500 Argentine sheep, and Mobutu’s heart swelled with proprietorial pride. But he was blind to the true nature of their amazement. It was not astonishment at a job well done. Mingled with the patronising contempt of the Old World sophisticate for the tackiness of the nouveau riche was shock at Mobutu’s insensitivity, disbelief that the leader of a country in such desperate straits should have permitted himself such extravagance without registering the message such crassness carried to the outside world, and, underlying it all, the horrified realisation that this was where large amounts of Western aid had ended up.