In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (12 page)

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 pres
sure 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.

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 nation 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.

No one fell more thoroughly prey to the asset curse, the get-rich-quick fantasy, than Mobutu. For a president in constant need of ready cash, there could be little doubt where to turn. The 300 kilometre-long, 70 kilometre-wide mining concession Mobutu had forcibly wrested from Belgian control with the 1967 nationalisation of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) and rebaptised Gécamines was the mainstay of the economy, accounting for up to 70 per cent of export receipts.

The Belgians had left behind a supporting network, an empire made up of mines, refineries, hydroelectric installations, factories producing anything from cement to explosives and sulphuric acid; town houses for its employees; schools and hospitals for their families; farms to produce food—even mills to grind flour—for the country's biggest single workforce: all the elements required to ensure Katanga was one of the world's most efficient copper-producing units.

So intrinsic did Gécamines seem to the nation's prosperity, Mobutu hatched the idea of the Inga-Shaba power line as a way of forever tying the mines to Kinshasa. Instead of relying on electricity
from local dams, the plan went, this wonder of the world would render Gécamines—and Shaba—reliant on electricity generated 1,800 kilometres to the north, by the churning waters of the Zaire river. The power could be switched off at the touch of a switch by Kinshasa. The fact that the project, which involved fat commissions from the foreign companies bidding for the contract, resulted in a line which bypassed thousands of electricity-starved villages on its long route south was irrelevant. He wanted no more secession attempts.

In the healthy years of the early 1970s, with copper output hovering at between 400,000 and 470,000 tonnes a year and production of the far more valuable cobalt at between 10,000 and 18,000 tonnes, Gécamines alone could be counted on for annual revenues of between $700 million and $900 million. Until the world copper price collapsed in 1974, it must have seemed like a bottomless Horn of Plenty waiting to be emptied time and time again.

Mobutu's way of taking a cut was blunt in its simplicity. Sozacom, the state-owned subsidiary set up to market minerals abroad, would simply redirect a share of the foreign exchange Gécamines earned selling cobalt, zinc and copper on the international market to numbered presidential accounts held abroad, a practice coyly referred to by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as ‘uncompensated sales' or ‘leakages'.

Another device used, according to officials of the day, was forward selling—mortgaging sales of copper and cobalt that had not yet been extracted. The proceeds went to the presidency, and the government would pay compensation to Gécamines to cover the gap in its accounts. Yet another trick was to exploit the margins between the various market rates for the metals, selling at one rate, logging another as the rate actually used for a transaction, and sending the difference to the presidency.

But often such subtleties were dispensed with. In 1978, an IMF official discovered that the central bank governor had ordered Gécamines to deposit all its export earnings directly into a presidential account. Two years later the practice had been only slightly
modified, according to Steve Askins and Carole Collins, two US researchers who have investigated Mobutu's sources of wealth. Officials were stealing at least $240 million a year from Gécamines. In company reports the missing sums were logged under the wonderfully ambiguous term ‘redressement exceptionnel déficitaire'—‘exceptional deficit recovery'.

Once Zaire had acknowledged its economy was in trouble and promised to follow a route dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, of course, Gécamines came under close scrutiny. The Bretton Woods institutions were paying for the company's rehabilitation. Those in power were obliged to move sums from account to account to camouflage the missing sums. Cleophas Kamitatu, the man who sold the Japanese embassy, stumbled on one such operation in 1982, while serving as cabinet minister. The $100 million withdrawal from Gécamines' foreign exchange accounts threatened to scupper a Paris meeting at which he had hoped to win major promises of foreign aid for Zaire. ‘The chairman of Gécamines told me the money had gone to Mobutu. I knew the $100 million had to be repaid into the Belgolaise bank or the conference would be a failure. So we filled the gap and made it look as though Mobutu had repaid the money when in fact we had simply borrowed the sum from Gécamines itself. So we got our foreign aid, but Mobutu got his money.' In fact a $100 million gap counted as fairly trivial. More typical was the $400 million which disappeared without explanation from Zaire's mineral exports in 1988.

In accordance with the Lord's Resistance Army principle, not all of this was going to Mobutu. Legal charges filed after Kabila's rebels took power give some insight into how well Gécamines' top executives were also doing during those years.

According to an indictment drawn up by the public prosecutor's office, the former head of Gécamines' commercial subsidiary unilaterally boosted his monthly travel allowance from an already hefty $15,000 to $30,000 during his final years in office, granting himself an additional $1,000 for every day spent off base. Setting aside several ‘unjustified withdrawals' which ran into hundreds of thousands of
dollars, this system alone allowed him to pocket 15.5 million Belgian francs in 1991 and 10 million in 1992.

Gécamines' huge network of associated activities also opened it up to abuse. The company acted as guarantor for state debts that went unmet, picked up hospital and hotel bills for its executives' relatives and sent its private planes shuttling across the country at their request. No wonder that by 1990 Zairean copper—so pure, so theoretically easy to process—actually cost nearly twice as much to produce as its foreign equivalent.

With the firm's receipts rarely making their way back to Katanga, there were no funds left over to maintain and renew the infrastructure left behind by the Belgians. Much of the equipment dated back to pre-independence and was constantly either out of service or being repaired. In the general climate of what is known in French as ‘je m'en-foutisme' (‘I don't give a damn'), managers began cutting corners. In the rush to get at the ore, underground tunnels were hurriedly excavated, their roofs held up with a minimum of props. In September 1990, the inevitable happened. The mine of Kamoto caved in, eliminating more than a third of Gécamines' output at a stroke.

The blows came in quick succession: a round of pillaging, echoing the anarchy breaking out up north; the departure of the company's experienced Kasaian workforce, expelled from Katanga in a bout of ethnic cleansing whipped up by the local governor and condoned by Mobutu, who wanted to send a warning signal to Tshisekedi, a Luba from Kasai, of how bad things could get for his tribespeople; and yet another orgy of looting.

But by then the company had already been crippled by a series of liberalisation measures that launched a new smuggling industry by making it legally possible for any Zairean to set himself up as a copper or cobalt dealer. ‘Suddenly, everyone became a copper miner,' a white-haired Belgian manager, remnant of an expatriate workforce that once numbered 3,000, told me on a visit to Likasi's copper installations. ‘The whole population began to steal from us.'

He had been in Katanga since 1960 and was clearly a member of
that school too old to learn new codes of behaviour with the Africans who were once his country's subjects. Sitting in his dark office, he barked at his assistant to bring tea and expanded on the uselessness of post-independence government, which, he said, had not built a single house in the nearby town since the colonial power left. ‘Everything here, the roads, the factories, the schools, was left by the Belgians.' As for the workforce that replaced departing white technicians, his racist contempt ran so deep it was no longer even tinged with anger. ‘Give an African a job and he wants three wives, a nice suit and his status in society,' he said. ‘But there's never anything to go with it. No commitment to the job in hand. Most of our workers have seven or eight children and they all have to be provided for. It's each for himself and devil take the hindmost.'

The corrosive scorn seemed a little more understandable when you considered what it must have been like sitting in that gloomy office year after year, witnessing the systematic cannibalisation of Gécamines by its own workforce. Having watched Mobutu and his cronies thoroughly milk the system, officials in Katanga saw little reason to hold back in the canter to self-enrichment. Lorries loaded with cobalt concentrate, officially labelled as ‘tailings', were dispatched for sale across the nearby Zambian border with the benevolent collusion of local customs men. Vital equipment and spare parts were removed, peddled to operators in Zambia and South Africa who would then cheekily sell them back to Gécamines, the original owners. As one engineer acknowledged: ‘We bought them twice.' But for this man the most outrageous incident came the day staff turning up for work discovered that 30 kilometres of high voltage cable supplying the plants had been snipped from the giant pylons during the night, presumably to be sold as scrap. ‘The thieves had to switch off the power plant to do it, so the security forces must have been involved. It's not a job a small operator could have carried out.' By 1994 around a third of Gécamines' production was being smuggled south of the border.