In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  It is that impression Ngbanda had set out to dismantle with his account of Mobutu’s last moments, written from comfortable exile in South Africa. While talking of his beloved ‘Marshal’ with intimacy and affection, the Terminator nonetheless delivers a series of killer punches. Painting a pitiful picture of a vacillating president, surprisingly naïve and often in floods of tears, Ngbanda’s message is clear. Despite his key position as presidential confidant, he would never do more than recommend. His advice was often ignored or applied only after the moment had passed by a head of state overtaken by events. The ensuing débâcle could be blamed on the family, the generals, the West, but not, repeat not, on the president’s security adviser.

  It is a stance that infuriates many members of the former elite, including Mobutu’s own family. ‘It is just too easy for the former aides to keep saying: “We gave Mobutu good advice but he never followed it,” fulminated son Nzanga, proud of the fact that he has had no contact with the Terminator since leaving Kinshasa. ‘If a president doesn’t listen to your advice for ten years, you should resign. I think a bit of mea culpa would have been appropriate from people like Ngbanda.’

  And there are moments in Ngbanda’s narrative when the rewriting of history to ensure he emerges unscathed becomes a little too blatant. Given how close he was to the pulsating heart of power, it is surprising how often the Terminator is taken by surprise, how frequently foreign ambassadors or heads of state have to spell out to this insider facts all Kinshasa has already suspected. Yet put to one side all the carefully paraded innocence, all the self-justification, and the powers of analysis that so impressed Mobutu make themselves felt. The Terminator’s critique of the Zairean armed forces—that body that turned on its own society and tore at its own entrails like some rabid animal—is too well-argued for even his worst enemies to do much more than nod in glum agreement.

  For Honoré Ngbanda, the problem could be traced back to the management technique on which Mobutu had founded his regime. Pursued through the decades, the tactic of divide and rule emerged as little more than inaction turned into an art form, a vacuum where decision-making should be. Yes, it offered stability of a sort, but this was the stability of a taut elastic, the calm at the heart of a hundred forces tugging in different directions. To really achieve something, to build a bridge, pave a road or win a war, such forces must, however briefly, pull in the same direction. Just as he made concerted action impossible at a political level, Mobutu, the two-time coup-maker, was careful to ensure the armed forces never boasted a unified command structure that could be exploited by a popular rival.

  His attitude to the army underwent a fundamental change in the late 1970s, when he woke to the danger represented by a disciplined, motivated force. In 1975 a group of officers from the central Tetela region were arrested on charges of plotting a takeover. Three years later another alleged coup attempt was foiled. Thirteen people were executed and more than 200 officers from Kasai, Bandundu and Shaba purged.

  Mobutu had already been pushing into retirement older officers who had helped him seize power. Now the army lost a huge swathe of its brightest and best-trained. Kasaians were regarded as untrustworthy, hailing as they did from the province of Tshisekedi. But Bandundu and Shaba were also declared off-limits in recruitment drives as the armed forces acquired an increasingly equatorial tinge. The tribalisation of the armed forces was not new. Like all colonial masters, Belgium had tended to classify Congolese ethnic groups into ‘war-like’ and ‘non-war-like’ categories. Mobutu’s tribesmen had been labelled natural warriors and, as a result, already held a disproportionate number of army posts. Mobutu now took that principle to new extremes as he ensured the security forces’ top echelons were ethnically predisposed to his rule.

  The West kept pouring funding, equipment and experts into Zaire in an attempt to establish a respectable army. But it served little purpose. Increasingly, experience and professionalism were regarded as irrelevant when it came to doling out top jobs, allotted to people from northern Haut Zaire or Equateur province. Soon, even that limited recruitment pool narrowed to the North Ubangi region from which the Ngbandi hailed. With the Special Presidential Division (DSP), recruited overwhelmingly from the Ngbandi, the principle was taken to its logical extreme. Outsiders in Kinshasa, regarded with fear by the local population, their loyalty was virtually guaranteed. While publicly preaching Zairean nationhood, Mobutu only trusted his own tribe, it was clear, with his safety.

  Amongst the Ngbandi, members of Mobutu’s family did best, with general’s stars doled out generously to cousins and brothers-in-law. But Mobutu knew his own relatives too well to feel entirely at home even with that arrangement. To distract the generals, he kept them uncertain of their positions, constantly bickering amongst themselves. Using a method perfected by Adolf Hitler, Mobutu would give similar responsibilities to bitter opponents, then sit back and watch the sparks fly. ‘Each defence minister or general had, at the head of the army or in Mobutu’s entourage, an “opponent” against whom he had to defend himself: Bumba was attacked by Molongya, Singa was assailed by Lomponda; Likulia insulted Eluki; Mahele put Eluki through the hoops while Singa, back at Defence, was targeted by those who had nominated Likulia as his secretary of state…and so it went on,’ recalled the Terminator. Such rivalry, he stressed, was not a regrettable accident, it was the very basis on which the armed forces were run.

  As the generals jousted, myriad elite forces sprang up, each answering directly to Mobutu. Every general sought to shore up his position by recruiting as many young men from his own village as possible and pressing for repeated upgrades. Promotion came at a stratospheric pace. By 1997 the armed forces had become ludicrously top-heavy, boasting fifty generals and over 600 colonels.

  Riding the tiger, Mobutu’s role was more that of a Mafia ‘capo dei capi’, focal point of several highly tribalised gangs, than supreme commander of the armed forces. He allowed one elite to be built up, then, when it seemed in danger of posing a real challenge, switched resources and patronage to another. Hence the multiplication of special units and security organisations, often vying for identical duties: the DSP, the Garde Civile, SARM, the Kamanyola division, the paracommandos, the 21st brigade, the 31st brigade, SNIP, and, bringing up the rear, the gendarmerie, police and regular Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ). Despite the sheer size of the country, most of these elites were kept close to Kinshasa, rather than patrolling the borders. Their positioning reflected their role. The Zairean army was not aimed at resisting external attack. It was an internal security machine whose sole raison d’être was protecting the president.

  If the elites at least enjoyed high pay, decent equipment and the social respect born of fear, the regular army was treated like dirt. The Ngbandi generals could never muster much military experience between them, but they knew how to make money. And the simplest method was to appropriate the contents of the trucks which arrived with the troops’ salaries each month. The practice explained the curious fact that no one ever knew how many men in uniform Zaire actually boasted. The generals demanded pay for 140,000 men, almost double the 80,000 estimate of most experts. The government knew it was being cheated. But when Ngbanda, as newly appointed Defence Minister, tried to organise a head count to end the double-billing, he discovered what formidable opponents the generals could be. The generals told their troops the new minister had suspended their pay for indiscipline, then warned Mobutu a mutiny was about to explode. Mobutu begged Ngbanda to abandon the idea.

  With weapons but derisory levels of pay, the soldiers behaved as could only be expected. They emerged from their barracks to prey on their own citizens, building on a tradition firmly established by the Force Publique. Encouraged by its president to ‘live off the land’, the FAZ gradually disintegrated into a force adept at hijacking cars and stealing beer but utterly unskilled in the business of war. For those who have not lived in a country fallen victim to a rogue army, the extent to which the phenomenon transforms a society is
impossible to imagine. The heart of a white, middle-class Westerner does not automatically miss a beat at the sight of a military uniform. After my time in Kinshasa, mine did. I had made the necessary mental leap, from viewing an army as a society’s shield to regarding it as a testosterone-charged time-bomb, primed to blow apart its own community.

  These angry young men in their pimps’ sunglasses, Kalashnikov cartridge clips Scotch-taped together, trousers held up with bootlace, infiltrated every aspect of life—Article 15 at its ugliest. At ‘roadblocks’ consisting of a frayed piece of string stretched across the tarmac they lounged drunk, levying ‘taxes’ on traders taking goods to market. In bars they ordered customers to buy them beers, at taxi stops they clambered fully armed into cabs, forcing ‘protection’ on frightened passengers.

  Each month, tension would rise as the troops’ paltry salaries were exhausted and the scrounging became more blatant. Then came an uncertain few weeks of rumours. So-and-so knew for certain the army had been paid. But so-and-so said the troops were unhappy over the amount. All it took was a power cut, and panicking businessmen would be on the Telecel, warning that another round of pillaging had begun.

  Like a surly adolescent who bullies his own parents, the army held Zaire hostage. And the Zaireans, so proud of their tradition of non-violence, so steeped in passivity, tolerated it. ‘The Zaireans must take a large part of the blame,’ said a doctor who worked sixteen years in Kinshasa. ‘If just a few of those soldiers swaggering around the Cité had had their throats cut in the night, it would have made a difference. Instead, the Zaireans let the soldiers live amongst them.’

  But Mobutu also eventually paid a price for such sabotage. He was like a poker player with a worthless hand, hoping no challenger would be gutsy enough to call his bluff. His own courage was never in doubt. An expatriate who accompanied him to several war zones remembers him standing broad-shouldered as the bullets whizzed around, shaming quaking soldiers into action. But in the list of the FAZ’s military engagements, victories take some finding. So rare was the event, in fact, that when it did occur, it was commemorated with nauseating frequency. The presidential yacht, an army division and Kinshasa’s sports stadium were all named after the eastern town of Kamanyola, where in 1964 Mobutu and his men captured a rebel-held bridge.

  He rendered the FAZ so incompetent, he had to rely on outsiders to do his real fighting. Moise Tshombe, who recruited ‘les affreux’ (the terrible ones) to back up his post-independence Katangan secession attempt, set a precedent Mobutu was happy to follow. When the going got tough, US, French, Belgian, Cuban, South African and Rhodesian mercenaries got going. Know-how was not the only thing Mobutu was after when he signed up the likes of Colonel Bob Denard and Jean Schramme. He was also hiring a myth, a concept of ruthlessness, because he believed the colonial experience had left most African troops imbued with a colossal inferiority complex, convinced a white man with a gun would always be the equivalent of twenty home-grown fighters.

  But renting mercenaries was only necessary when Mobutu’s foreign friends could not be counted on to win his wars for him. And most of the time they obliged. In 1977, when just 1,500 Katangan rebels routed the FAZ in the strategically key south, France flew in Moroccan troops to win the First Shaba War. When a similar attempt was made a year later, it was snuffed out by French foreign legionnaires and Belgian paratroopers, followed up by a pan-African peace-keeping force. And when the army itself seemed about to unseat Mobutu in 1991 and 1993, French and Belgian troops once more helped save the regime, with the former patrolling the streets of Kinshasa while the latter lined up along the Brazzaville frontier, sending a message anyone planning to seize the opportunity to topple Mobutu could not misunderstand.

  But the two ‘pillages’ were a sign that the tactic of divide and rule had run its course. The anarchy Mobutu had nurtured in self-protection had reached a point where it risked bringing the whole regime crashing down. It was a message, Ngbanda claimed, Mobutu decided not to hear. Instead of reigning in the generals, he doled out promotions. Rather than discipline the mutinous troops, he granted salary increases—a fairly pointless exercise given that few ever saw their full pay packets.

  His nemesis was to take the shape of a small clique of men sporting generals’ stripes that owed more to links of marriage, friendship and family with the president than professional experience. Popularly referred to as the Inseparable Four, they were in fact a group in which two generals, Nzimbi Ngbale, Mobutu’s cousin and head of the DSP, and Baramoto Kpama Kata, commander of the Garde Civile, were the brightest stars, with General Eluki Monga and Admiral Mavua Mudima as smaller satellites. Once Mobutu was conveniently absent in Gbadolite, the Inseparable Four swiftly emerged as the real powerbrokers in Kinshasa. ‘They went everywhere together, from official appearances to private gatherings,’ commented one general, Ilunga Shamanga, who as a Kasaian remained outside the magic circle. ‘What seemed a wonderful example of solidarity and cohesion was in reality nothing more than a criminal association.’

  In a slip that particularly irked Ngbanda, Mobutu had allowed the generals to wrest control of the intelligence services in 1990. It was an error with enormous long-term consequences, because it meant they could feed the president with misleading data about conditions on the borders and troop morale. From then on, the neutral information the president needed to take sober decisions was tainted. While opposition newspapers obsessed about Mobutu’s motives and even foreign diplomats seemed entranced by the myth of presidential power, the story had already moved on. Rolling around town in jeeps with tinted windows, the generals had their hand in every financial scam, from diamond dealing to the importation of forged zaire notes. They were even pushing for direct political involvement.

  For the Terminator, the moment when he realised it was the Inseparable Four, and not his boss, who now called the shots, came when the generals took umbrage at not being consulted over who should head the central bank and state enterprises, potential sources of illicit income. They sent troops and tanks to surround each building, preventing the new chief executives from reaching their offices. Fuming, Mobutu summoned the generals to his residence. ‘Either you free up those offices or I resign,’ he shouted. They obliged, but the way Mobutu had delivered his ultimatum shocked his entourage into stunned silence. ‘He had not threatened to sack the generals or discipline them for insubordination. Instead he was the one who had threatened to resign,’ recalled Ngbanda. ‘I understood something had changed in his relations with the generals: the balance of power. I had the profound conviction that the death knell had sounded for Marshal Mobutu’s regime.’

  More significant in the grand scheme of things than the generals’ thwarted political ambitions were their commercial interests, particularly the chutzpah they showed in selling off the contents of the national armoury. General Ilunga recorded the near-comic moment in September 1995 when he learned that Zaire’s fleet of Mirage fighter jets, nominally sent to France for maintenance, had been quietly sold a year earlier. When Mobutu asked him to investigate, he was told the Mirages had been surrendered to allow the president’s helicopter fleet to be modernised. The new helicopters never made an appearance.

  But usually, the trade was less ambitious: ammunition and rifles, sold to the guerrilla movements who had established their bases on Zaire’s barely policed frontiers, irrespective of their friendliness or hostility to the Mobutu regime. There is something of the inspired insanity of Catch-22’s Milo Minderbinder—the mess officer so obsessed with a bargain he arranges for American bombers to flatten their own air base on the Germans’ behalf—about the way in which commanders in Kivu, despite clear signs a conflict was looming, happily sold arms to the very AFDL insurgents who would eventually chase them from the area, then set fire to storage warehouses to conceal the hole in supplies. Showing all the far-sightedness of a man handing a neighbouring arsonist a canister of petrol and some matches, the generals could not resist clinching the shady deal, even when it meant j
eopardising their own futures.

  As the AFDL began crossing the country in what was to prove one of the swiftest campaigns in modern African history, the generals called for defence budgets to be upped, then siphoned off the best of deliveries, leaving the FAZ with ammunition that did not match its rifles, second-hand equipment from Eastern Europe long past its prime. Maybe the generals had begun to believe their own reassuring report to Mobutu. Maybe they were too stupid to think through the consequences of their actions. ‘To us that kind of behaviour seems incomprehensible,’ marvelled an ambassador. ‘They were sabotaging their own campaign. But you have to regard these people as gangsters rather than politicians. And a gangster tries to make money until the very last moment.’

  The trade was not only damaging because it emasculated the FAZ. Mobutu’s long-standing support for such guerrilla groups—particularly his close friendship with Angolan rebel chief Jonas Savimbi—had been a sore topic with neighbouring nations for decades. Affected countries assumed that either this arms trade was taking place with Mobutu’s backing, or that the generals were acting on their own behalf, a sign he no longer controlled the situation. Either way, it was time for Mobutu to go.