1.45
1.12
1.00
Ratio (in %)
14.10
6.10
4.50
Source: Prof. Hughes Leclerq, “Commentaire sur la situation économique récente de la RDC et ses implications pour la politique d’aide internationale,” paper prepared for the UN Congo Expert Group Meeting, New York, May 1–3, 1998.
In plain language, the Zairian economy reverted to its precolonial, premonetary existence, but with three major differences. First, the precolonial economy had been a complex affair in which purely economic matters were intimately mixed with ritual, religion, social prestige, and cultural exchanges. These rich precolonial complexities were by now largely dead. Second, the precolonial economy had served a population of probably fewer than ten million, whereas by 2000 there would be over fifty million Congolese. Third, the precolonial economy had operated as a system of peasant autarky supplemented by limited regional trade mostly made up of nonessentials. By now the people had been taught to expect that they could purchase a number of products and services from a circuit of commercial exchanges; thus the shrinking of the money economy turned what had been dignified scarcity into humiliating grinding poverty. The social consequences were enormous. Growing numbers of young people expecting to take part in the worldwide revolution of rising expectations were in fact forced down into a return to an autarkic economy now devoid of any cultural justification or prestige. Many understandably refused to accept it and gladly turned to soldiering when that option was offered. In late 1996 in the Kivus Kabila had no problem recruiting his kadogo. The only limit to enrollment was the available number of AK-47s. Later warlords were to be in the same position.
Faced with that disastrous situation and with the necessity of restarting the foreign aid flow, what was the AFDL government going to do? The first economic initiative was the proposals made for the Friends of the Congo December 1997 meeting in Brussels, the so-called Economic Stabilization and Recovery Program. There were three major objectives:
1. Macroeconomic stabilization, meaning an end to inflation, renewed tax collection, control of public expenditure, and rebuilding the practically dead banking system.
2. Rehabilitation of the transport and energy infrastructures.
3. Reversing the trend in the destruction of human capital by rebuilding the health and education sectors, demobilizing part of the army, and retraining a slimmed-down civil service.77
It was supposed to be a twelve-month program amounting to $1.6 billion, with the foreign donors putting up $575 million.78 But the Friends of the Congo meeting was torpedoed by the refugee issue, and Finance Minister Mawampanga Mwana Nanga, who had prepared the whole plan, was demoted to minister of agriculture in January 1998.
The second initiative was potentially much more ambitious and far-reaching. It was the preparation of a National Conference on Reconstruction, at the behest of Reconstruction Minister Etienne Mbaya. It was supposed to be a sort of national economic forum, with over six hundred delegates from throughout the country coming to debate their needs and priorities. But both Kabila and his Rwandese minders started to panic at the idea, realizing that this would probably turn into a form of national conference where all grievances would be aired, including many noneconomic ones such as the lack of freedom and the overbearing presence of the Rwandese ringmasters.79 The exercise was canceled, and the Ministry of Reconstruction was suppressed during the January 1998 cabinet reshuffle. Etienne Mbaya became the minister of planning, but there was nothing left for him to plan.
He tried anyway and launched a third initiative, called the Three-Year Minimum Program for nine priority areas: transport, agriculture, energy, mining, industry, health, education, security, and justice. The Ministry of Planning was supposed to identify the needs in all those areas, define investment strategies, and then find ways of financing them. The whole exercise was estimated at around $4 billion over three years. It was mostly a wish list, and with the ongoing fight about the Refugee Commission of Inquiry, it did not even begin to get off the ground.
Then, with some World Bank prodding, the government started a fourth project: to identify areas of possible private investment in the DRC. This must have been some kind of joke. Given the general economic, diplomatic, and political situation, only the wildest or the most inexperienced private companies would dare to put any money into the Congo.
To say the least, investors received little encouragement. The first mistake of the AFDL was to nationalize the Sizarail company as soon as they took Lubumbashi in April 1997. Sizarail was a South African—Zairian joint venture created in 1995 to run the railways in the south and east of the country. In August Sizarail’s Belgian managing director, Patrick Claes, was arrested; this absurd move poisoned the AFDL’s relations with Pretoria for many months at a time when the new government needed all the goodwill it could get.80 And there were other acts of arbitrariness: AFDL “commanders” had commandeered the best houses belonging to the Mobutu elite, grabbed the cars, and were camping at the Intercontinental Hotel, where their unpaid bills had reached $8 million within a month of their taking Kinshasa.81 All operations were done in cash, which at times was disbursed (in large quantities) to very bizarre recipients. When Presidential Chief of Staff Aubert Mukendi asked the famous singer Tshala Mwana the reason for the payment he was supposed to make to her, she burst out laughing and answered, “I give very special night concerts for the Chief and that is a very expensive service.” Mukendi grumbled, but the money was disbursed.82 Before the end of 1997 the general impression of the populace in Kinshasa was that the new regime was slowly slipping into the bad old habits of the former elite, but on a much reduced scale because there was much less that could be taken.83
In the absence of aid blocked by the conflict over the UN Commission of Inquiry the government’s financial situation was desperate. The two successive finance ministers, Mawampanga Mwana Nanga and then Fernand Tala Ngai, tried to negotiate the foreign debt situation so that at least new arrears in reimbursement would not continue to accumulate. The new Central Bank director, Jean-Claude Masangu Mulongo, was a U.S.-trained financier of impeccable orthodoxy who quickly managed to arrest inflation.
The U.S. dollar had fallen from NZ 180,000 to NZ 115,000 between May and July, and it kept going lower.84 The failed Friends of the Congo meeting had left the DRC with the consolation prize of a “trust fund,” to which U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had pledged $40 million, with another $85 million promised by the European Union.85 This was woefully inadequate for a state in which the administration’s cash flow had been reduced to the monthly $10 million paid by the Zimbabwean government or to small irregular payments made by Namibia.86 Between March and July 1998 Finance Minister Fernand Tala Ngai kept playing a kind of hide-and-seek game with IMF President Michel Camdessus to try to unlock Congo’s drawing rights without actually repaying accumulated arrears, and he eventually lost. The first semester of 1998 had brought only $65 million in foreign exchange,87 while incompressible expenses amounted to $88.4 million. The government was reduced to paying pressing expenses directly with cash and to fiddle with diamond counter regulations for hand-to-mouth survival.88 The banking system was dying and bankruptcy was looming. Kabila, who simply kept asking for an outright cancellation of the Congolese foreign debt, did not seem to realize that his defiant attitude toward the international community had become increasingly suicidal.89
Curiously, given his “anti-imperialist” fixation, he progressively went back to the old mining industry patterns which he had seemingly wanted to break during his seven-month conquest. In early January 1998 Gécamines canceled AMFI’s miracle “billion-dollar contract” for noncompliance,90 and AMFI countered almost immediately by suing, not the DRC government, but the Anglo-American Corporation. AMFI accused it (probably rightly) of being behind the move and asked for $3 billion in compensation for breach of contract.91 Meanwhile Barrick Gold was beating a prudent retreat by de
ciding to fuse all its African holdings, which consisted mostly of the 81,000 square-kilometer OKIMO concession, into a joint venture with Anglo-Gold, the gold-mining branch of Anglo-American.92 And then, to cap it all, AMFI and Anglo-American finally reached an agreement on the Kolwezi project in July. Thus, barely more than a year after Kabila’s victory, all the grand designs of shifting Congolese mining away from the traditional South African and Belgian predators by using new untried U.S. minors had finally come full circle and the old majors were again in complete control. Of course, their control was over a field of ruins, but for them it did not matter. They had the financial means and the technical wherewithal to sit on temporarily useless concessions and wait for a day when conditions would be ripe for exploitation, something the young mining companies could not afford. The “takeover of the Congolese mining riches” had boiled down to what it had probably been meant to be from the start: a daring speculation designed to squeeze the old majors into buying back their place in the new system. As for the Congolese population, it remained as before, a mute witness to the whole operation. The only result was that its tax burden increased out of all proportion, reaching the punishing rate of 7.5 percent of GNP outside the oil and mining levies.93 But the whole regional political situation was so preoccupying that worries about the economy were soon going to be overshadowed by more pressing concerns.
Between Luanda and Brazzaville: the DRC’s volatile West African environment
In 1996, when the anti-Mobutu crusade started, practically all the countries surrounding what was then Zaire were in a state either of extreme fragility or even of open conflict. The Mobutu war and the period of uncertainty that followed it, up to the explosion of the new conflict, had not changed things fundamentally. But two of Zaire’s neighbors in the west had drifted further into conflicts that were to interlock with Kinshasa’s situation, especially since east and west were now becoming enmeshed.
The relationship between Congo-Rwandese to Congo-Brazzaville antedated the Kabila war by several years. The first Tutsi refugees had arrived in Kinshasa in 1993, at the time of the Masisi war. Given the good relationship between Mobutu and President Juvénal Habyarimana, they were seen as “enemies” by the Mobutist establishment even though they were Zairian nationals. They quickly migrated across the river to Brazzaville, where they were welcomed by the recently elected president Pascal Lissouba.94 The link remained, and when they arrived as victors in Kinshasa they tried to influence Kabila in his favor. This pushed the ex-FAR, who had managed to cross into the Congo-Brazzaville, to seek out an alliance with Sassou-Nguesso. About three hundred of them remained in the capital, while the majority (over five thousand) went north to Likolela, eighty kilometers from Oyo, Sassou’s fief. They were later to play a key role in the Congolese war of June to October 1997. Curiously, this ethnopolitical automatic alliance system tolerated an exception for the ex-DSP troops who had fled to Brazzaville and who were quickly integrated by Lissouba into his militia. The RPF apparently did not feel threatened by that particular alignment.
But the Rwandese-AFDL-Lissouba alliance did not extend to the relationship with Angola. Lissouba had had a long-running relationship with both UNITA and the Cabindan FLEC (Frente de Libertação do Enclave de Cabinda, an anti-MPLA guerrilla group, closely allied to UNITA), several of whose members had been active in his entourage. For his part, Sassou had always been on good terms with the MPLA due to their common Soviet links.
Presidential elections were scheduled to take place on July 27, 1997. The political climate deteriorated very quickly as the election date approached because everybody talked about the democratic process but nobody seemed to trust it. The main political actors (President Pascal Lissouba; his uncertain allies Bernard Kolelas and Jean-Pierre Thystère-Tchikaya; his challenger, Sassou Nguesso) all started to buy weapons and to equip the militias they had discreetly kept since the end of the 1993–1994 war.95 A series of armed incidents (in Owando on May 10, in Oyo on May 14) caused dozens of casualties. According to some sources Kabila indirectly played a role in the final move that triggered the explosion when he warned his “friend” Lissouba that Sassou was planning to overthrow him.96 Lissouba reacted by sending troops and six armored cars to “arrest” his rival in the early hours of June 5. This started major fighting, which was to last until October 15, killing about 8,000 people, turning almost 700,000 into IDPs, destroying a good section of Brazzaville, and costing Lissouba the presidency.97
The conflict was being fought on two fronts: one was a savage house-to-house urban militia war, the other a cutthroat effort to control the oil revenues. Since the end of the 1993–1994 fighting the Lissouba regime had been plagued by recurrent corruption centering on the use of the oil money. A certain degree of corruption would have been unavoidable, as in any poor Third World country with politically controlled access to large centralized amounts of money. But what made it worse in the Congo were three factors: (1) the persistence of a poorly paid but bloated bureaucracy inherited from the days of the PCT “workers’ state”; (2) the highly corrupt practices of the French oil company Elf; and (3) the nature of Nibolek tribalism. Lissouba himself being a Nzabi was not part of it since the Nzabi are considered to be a “Gabonese” tribe and are very few in the Congo; still, he depended on the southerners for his political survival, and their fractious politics had been amply demonstrated by the 1993–1994 fighting between various southern tribes and subtribes. Lissouba was thus forced to grease the wheels of administration beyond what could have been reasonably expected because every nomination of a Teke or a Loumbou had to be balanced by extending the blessings to Bembe, Vili, or Yombe beneficiaries. In a dispatch sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris two years earlier, Ambassador Raymond Césaire had perfectly summed up the situation:
Lissouba is drifting with his country rather than governing… . Democracy remains a completely foreign concept… . The only administrative services of the government which are still working are those which can bring direct financial benefits to those who are in charge… . The incompetence of most politicians is only rivalled by their determination to keep their privileges.98
The IMF had gone into an Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) agreement with Brazzaville, and it was furious to see (in early 1995) that even as the budget showed a 6 billion CFA franc credit, civil servants still would not get their salary arrears paid. Or that the 142 large companies concentrated in Pointe Noire would together pay 2.5 billion CFA francs in taxes for their 104 billion CFA franc turnover, that is, only about 2.4 percent, because they were “well connected.” But it was of course difficult for the IMF to integrate ethnopolitical considerations into ESAF planning.
After the war both Sassou and Lissouba were to accuse Elf of having supported their rival. In fact they were both right. As one analyst wrote,
‘Elf has always had two parallel lines of intervention in Africa with the networks headed by André Tarallo and Jean-Luc Vermeulen respectively… . Now Denis Sassou Nguesso feels “the other fellows” have gone too far in support of the former President. He reproaches Elf for having paid his enemy Lissouba $20m into a FIBA bank account99 on 20th September while he considers that Lissouba stopped being president on 31st August.100
To make sure that it would be on the winning side, Elf had played both camps at the same time. This meant, for example, that at no time during the war was the fighting allowed to disrupt the regular pumping of oil from the coastal and offshore installations.
The RPF Tutsi in Kinshasa tried to help their Brazzaville friends up to the end. When the Angolans decided to intervene it was because they did not want Savimbi to regain on the other side of the river what he had just lost in Kinshasa;101 hence the Rwandese who had taken control of the Agence Nationale de Renseignements managed to block the transfer of military supplies across the river to Sassou’s forces. For a few days it looked as if the war might globalize in a completely crazy cross-alliance way: the Angolan FAA had brought BM-21 multiple
rocket launcher batteries which were firing at Lissouba’s forces from the DRC side of the river while Angolan-supported President Kabila had sent over six hundred kadogo to help Lissouba. In a desperate move Lissouba even ordered his artillery to fire on Kinshasa, hoping to force Kabila into a direct intervention on his side. But the Angolans acted quickly behind the scenes to threaten Kabila, curtail the Rwandese influence, and limit the AFDL’s support for the Congolese government’s camp.102 Sassou’s aide Pierre Oba was then frantically lobbying Angola’s chief of staff, Gen. João Batista de Matos, for a direct intervention, which finally took place on October 11, when over one thousand FAA troops with armored support crossed the border from Cabinda.103 Within five days the Lissouba camp had collapsed and the open phase of the conflict was over.
This short war offered a concentrate of practically all the problems plaguing the contemporary African political scene. In order of decreasing importance these were, first, a completely corrupt and selfish political class: all the various leaders had only one thing in mind, power, so as to grab as much oil money as possible. The claim to defend any sort of national interest beyond that of their own faction was a pure rhetorical device constantly betrayed by hard facts. The second problem was international interference by Western countries: the most guilty party was of course France, which turned a blind eye to Elf’s shenanigans. In a great display of neutrality the oil company dealt with Claudine Munari and Nguila Mougounga for the Lissouba camp and with Rodolphe Adada for the Sassou side. Lissouba still being the legitimate power holder got the government oil revenues, while Sassou received royalties from oil wells in Angola that he had obtained for Elf in the past. Both promptly turned these monies into guns, which could be considered looting of natural resources from the Congolese people’s point of view. Instrumentalized tribalism was a third catastrophe. Of course, the tribal raw material existed independently from the politicians, but as a Congo political observer wrote, “In 1997, all ethnoregional identities were completely restructured”104 through the manipulation of the political leaders. The tribal raw material was explosive, and some of the leaders saw their own houses looted by their own militiamen, many of whom would have agreed with a looter then declaring to a journalist, “Why call it theft? When they push us to kill each other they call it ‘human stupidity’; then they go and they drink champagne together, calling it ‘national reconciliation’; for us, nothing. Did you ever see the son of a leader getting killed in this fighting?”105 Poverty and urban unemployment, more than “tribalism,” made militia recruitment easy. The “tribal” groups that were fighting each other in the streets of Brazzaville had very little in common with their ethnic ancestors whom anthropologists had studied fifty years before. Fourth, mercenary recruitment and weapons trafficking played a major role in the violence. Weapons were bought from the former Warsaw Pact countries, from South Africa, and from Angola. Mercenaries of various nationalities, including U.S., French, Israeli, South African, and Serb, were hired.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 27
