“There are no opponents in Zaire,
because the notion of opposition has no place in our mental universe. In fact, there are no political problems in
Zaire.” –Mobutu Sese Seko
...Not far from where we sat, a
paraplegic was busy capitalising on the latest twist in market forces. Helped by friends, he was struggling to
balance a pair of giant jerry cans filled with petrol onto the back of his
tricycle. At that moment, the militia
fighting in Brazzaville meant fuel there was scarce. Kinshasa’s petrol, itself in short supply,
should sell for a high price over the river, high enough, in any case, to
justify this polio victim running the risk of becoming a tricycling firebomb if
a cigarette spark went astray. “Thanks
to the war, I should be able to sell the petrol on the other side for twice the
price,” he said. “Then I’ll bring milk
back in the same jerry cans.”
...Depressingly, the people who led
the soldiers to the farm each time were local villagers. Far from regarding the farm as a project
worth encouraging, or at least tolerating, for the investment and employment it
might bring to the area, they monitored the farm through the years like
schoolboys watching a ripening fruit, waiting for the moment when a breakdown
of law and order would provide the cover for some neighbourly
appropriation... [The farmer] appeared
to harbour little rancour, attributing the repeated pillaging to the
hunter-gatherer instincts on which the Congolese relied for survival until so
very recently. But something... appeared
to have snapped [after the third looting], perhaps overwhelmed by the
realization that those around him had never regarded him as anything more than
just another white colonialist to be taken for a ride at worst, deferred to at
best.
...Between the start of the Zairean
economic crisis in 1975 and Mobutu’s departure in 1997, Zaire received a total
of $9.3 billion in foreign aid... The
corruption in Zaire, [Erwin Blumenthal] argues, is not a generalised blight, a
plague without face or source... Yet the
IMF and the World Bank were still giving Mobutu’s reform plans serious
consideration at the start of the 80s...
“There will certainly be new promises from Mobutu and the members of his
government and the ever-growing foreign debt will be rescheduled. But there is no – I repeat no – chance on the
horizon that Zaire’s many creditors will recover their funds.” ...By the time of the report, there had
already been four failed IMF stabilisation plans. But the rescheduling of Zaire’s debt went on
– nine times between 1976 and 1989.
...It was to take eight long years before the two institutions finally
reached the same conclusion as the testy German banker had spelled out in
1982: money was not the answer to
Zaire’s ills, rather, it lay at their very root.
...Mea culpa. Throughout my interviews, I had kept
expecting to find signs of it, only to be constantly surprised by its failure
to make an appearance. There was
precious little from the Washington financiers who granted billions to a known
thief, whose institutions will one day have to explain why the Congolese should
be held accountable for leans made in bad faith. Even less from the US and French officials
who, motivated by strategic reasons, decided with cool cynicism what was best
for this most fragile of post-independence states. There was none at all from the Congolese
aides, ministers and generals who helped mould [Mobutu’s] policies, still
adopting the ‘I was only following orders’ excuse judged insufficient at
Nuremberg. And... the colonial power
that first sent Congo on its wayward course had nimbly succeeded in dismissing
the very notion of blame. To explore the
roles they played – from the raids of the slave traders to the amputations
carried out by the Force Publique and the wishful thinking of the World Bank –
is to move from exasperation at a nation’s fecklessness to wonderment that a
population has come through it all with a sense of humour... Now that the US, France, and Belgium have
distanced themselves, now that Mobutu is dead, the country has lost the last
excuse for its predicament. A population
that has set its sights little higher than survival has to learn to take
responsibility for its own destiny.
‘What do the French want of Congo’
...alternated with the equally infuriating, if equally understandable
‘What do the Americans want?” ...must now become ‘What do the Congolese want?’
-- Wrong, M. (2000). In the
Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. London: Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
