But who was in charge during these turbulent reforms? Who allowed Joseph Kabila to take such drastic steps and reverse his father’s policy?
To a certain extent, during the early days of his presidency, the government was guided by Kabila’s international partners. Western ambassadors came with wish lists of people they would like to see sacked and made decisions that needed to be made to advance the peace process. Both the Angolans and the Zimbabweans were tired of the war and encouraged Kabila to bring an end to the conflict. After all, most of the population saw the various rebel factions—with the possible exception of Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC—as foreign proxies and would not vote for them during elections. “Sign a peace deal, stand for elections, and consolidate your power” was the advice of western and African diplomats alike.
In general, Joseph Kabila seemed much less in charge than his father, who had managed state affairs with an iron fist. Joseph was not often seen on television and rarely took charge in cabinet meetings. Where almost of all his father’s ministers had spent at least a few days in prison, Joseph almost never arrested any collaborators. Instead he slowly marginalized them if they fell out of favor.
Government officials often did not know where they stood with the president, a style of management that kept everyone guessing. When they went to present projects, he would nod at their comments but not say anything. Thinking that he wanted more explanations, they would expound further, only to be met by more silence or a few words. Encouraged by his polite smiles and silence, they would leave thinking they had succeeded in convincing him, only to find out weeks later that he had canceled the project.
This kind of prevarication often shone through in his contacts with international partners as well. “It used to infuriate Kagame and Museveni,” a UN official who attended meetings of the heads of state told me. “Kabila would be silent throughout the meeting; then someone would come and whisper something in his ear, and he would answer.”19
Kabila’s reticence also marked his personal life. He kept out of the limelight, avoiding cocktail parties and other social events. He would wake up at around 6 o’clock in the morning, check the news and his e-mail, and work out in his exercise room, lifting weights and sweating on his stationary bike. Before he assumed the presidency, he lived in a modest townhouse with his common-law wife, Olive Lemba, a light-skinned woman he had met in the eastern Congo during the AFDL. He doted on his young daughter, Sifa, named after his mother.
Surrounded by well-groomed bureaucrats, Joseph was conscious of his modest background. He began French classes soon after he arrived in Kinshasa and enrolled in an online course in international relations at Washington International University, a small outfit based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, from which he obtained a bachelor’s degree after completing ten courses online. His French improved considerably, as did his self-confidence.
Diplomats who met him regularly were often impressed by his knowledge of world affairs and understanding of the region. A favorite rhetorical tool he liked to use was to defend his record by comparing the Congo with western countries. “You criticize democracy here, but our elections turnout was over 80 percent—in the U.S., barely half of the voters show up,” he told an American diplomat.20 When confronted with allegations of corruption, he countered with the Enron scandal in the United States and Silvio Berlusconi’s manipulation of laws to protect himself from prosecution.
He did not have many close friends. His twin sister, Janet, and his younger brother, Zoé, visited frequently, and a Tanzanian friend showed up from time to time. In the evenings, he would relax in front of the television and play video games with his brother, a habit that earned him the nickname “Nintendo” from a skeptical French ambassador.21
He also began to take an interest in designer watches, clothes, and sports cars. On weekends, he relaxed in his Kingakati ranch outside of Kinshasa, drove rally cars around a dirt track, and received a few select diplomats and businessmen. One had the impression of repressed energy, a man looking for a release valve. In Kinshasa, foreigners going for a morning jog along the Congo River—a secluded, leafy area with shady streets and ambassadorial residences—would sometimes be surprised by the young president whizzing by on a motorcycle, followed by a pickup full of sheepish presidential guards. Unfortunately, he could only drive his Maserati around the street outside his presidential house in Kinshasa, and then only up to half its maximum speed; there were too many potholes.
Joseph Kabila’s greatest accomplishment was the peace deal with his rivals. Of course, peace was in his interest, as he was recognized as the incumbent president and controlled the bulk of economic assets and state administration, while his main military rivals were tarnished by their association with Rwanda and Uganda.
In February 2002, after several false starts, Kabila finally met with his main military and political challengers in South Africa for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, peace talks that would result, after ten months, in a comprehensive deal that would unify the country.
The setting for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue was surreal. The South African government had leased part of the Sun City luxury resort, once an entertainment haven for apartheid South Africa elites. The inaugural ceremony took place in the Entertainment Center’s Superbowl area, a stone’s throw away from Jungle Casino and the Bridge of Time, gaudy buildings decorated with stone elephants and artificial waterfalls. Three hundred and thirty Congolese delegates spent their free time trolling the slot machines and racking up tabs at the bars.
After two months of talks, on the eve of the deadline fixed by the facilitators, the government and the MLC shocked the conference. Following late-night meetings in a nearby hotel, the two delegations announced that they had reached a bilateral agreement, making Joseph Kabila president and Jean-Pierre Bemba prime minister in the joint government. The talks collapsed in furor, as Kabila and Bemba went back to their respective headquarters to set up the government, while the RCD went back to the trenches.
The deal was bound to fail. Bemba refused to come to Kinshasa to take up his position, citing security concerns. In the meantime, regional fault lines began to shift. Together with their British counterparts, the American diplomats went on the offensive with Rwanda and Uganda. Washington abstained from a vote to renew the International Monetary Fund’s loans to Rwanda, while London privately made clear to Kampala that it would not extend further loans if it did not withdraw its troops. In June 2002, President Kagame committed to withdrawing all Rwandan troops within three months. Museveni followed suit in November. Journalists lined up at border posts to see a total of 30,000 foreign troops march across, as crowds of Congolese celebrated.
The RCD and MLC, already destabilized by their allies’ withdrawal, further weakened their positions with blunders on the battlefield. In May 2002, RCD commanders brutally put down a mutiny in Kisangani, killing over a hundred sixty civilians. Bodies that had been eviscerated and weighed down with stones floated to the surface in the Congo River in plain sight of journalists and UN investigators. To the north, the MLC launched an attack against a rival faction of the RCD while also deploying troops to support President Patassé in the neighboring Central African Republic. On both fronts, Bemba’s soldiers were guilty of egregious human rights violations.
In November, the delegates trudged back to South Africa. This time President Mbeki, wary of prolonging the Sun City circus, took matters into his own hands. Instead of allowing commissions to develop their own power-sharing proposals, Mbeki presented his plan and gave delegates firm deadlines to come back with counterproposals. “Mbeki had a bash-heads-together philosophy,” one of the organizers commented. “He told the delegates that if they didn’t agree on a solution, he would shut down shop and tell them to go home.”22 Back home, churches and human rights activists demonstrated in streets across the country against their leaders’ turpitude. In Bukavu, women marched bare-breasted through the streets in protest.
Mbeki combined strong-arming with cop
ious incentives. While Kabila obtained the presidency as well as a vice president, the RCD and the MLC garnered vice presidential positions, as did the political opposition. Sixty-one ministries, six hundred twenty parliamentary seats, and over fifty state companies would be split up among the signatories. The former belligerents were attracted by a generous sharing of spoils; impunity and corruption were, to a certain extent, the glue holding the fragile peace together. As opposed to other transitions in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where warlords were not allowed to stand for public office, the transition in the Congo stacked the new government with the very people who had plunged the country into internecine conflict. “It was the only way out,” Philip Winter, the chief of staff of the Facilitation, remarked later. “Did it compromise the future? Yes. But it was the only way out of a difficult situation.”23
On December 16, Mbeki submitted a final proposal to the delegates in the plenary session and gave them half an hour to deliberate. An hour later, as the bewildered delegations were still squabbling over clauses and details, he invited Jean-Luc Kuye, the head of the civil society group, to the podium to sign the deal. Under almost physical pressure from their hosts, the remaining delegation heads solemnly filed up to the podium as applause, at first hesitant, began to crescendo behind them. After an all-night session, at 7:30 in the morning, Mbeki asked the delegates to rise and sing the Congolese national anthem. After five years of war and millions of deaths, the country was unified once again.
Figuring out how power works in Kinshasa is a complicated affair. Foreign businessmen arriving from Europe or China have to spend weeks to get to the right people in government. Connections are everything. Il a un bon carnet d’adresses—“He has a good address book”—is high praise from entrepreneurs in the capital.
This institutional weakness of the courts, whose members are appointed by the government, and political parties, who have no traditional base in Congo, has privileged the emergence of a small clique of power brokers around the president, a kitchen cabinet of roughly a dozen individuals with direct access to the president and who help him rule.
This state of affairs developed slowly, during Joseph Kabila’s tenure in the army, as he traveled through the country and realized that his father’s defiant militarism was going nowhere. He became friends with a group of young, sophisticated Congolese officials, all convinced that Laurent Kabila was on the wrong track, especially in regard to his dismissive attitude of the United States, South Africa, and Europe.
The most important of these Young Turks was Katumba Mwanke. He has since acquired an almost mythical status in Kinshasa court politics as the éminence grise behind the throne. As a young man, he left Zaire to study and work in South Africa as a banker for HSBC Equator Bank. When the war began, he found himself in an ideal position, given his ties with business in South Africa and his family connections. He is married to the sister of Laurent Kabila’s former finance minister, and, importantly, he is also from Kabila’s home province of Katanga, although not from the same tribe.
Katumba arrived on a mission for his bank in the early days of the rebellion and, because of Laurent Kabila’s desperate need for competent officials, was immediately offered a position in the ministry of finance. It was difficult not to like him: He was short, unpretentious, and polite; he spoke with a slight stammer when excited. When the Lunda and Lubakat, the two main ethnic communities in Katanga—both of which claimed Laurent Kabila through his mother and father, respectively—began squabbling over leadership positions in the province in 1998, Kabila asked around for a good Katangan official who was not from either of those communities and had not been a Mobutist. Katumba Mwanke, who is from the minority Zela community, was a perfect fit.
Katumba spent the next three years as the governor of the country’s richest province, endearing himself with Kabila’s family and getting close to the powerful mining corporations active in the province. He was a key player in the transfer of mining concessions to Zimbabwean businessmen, putting his signature on state contracts with executives such as Billy Rautenbach.24
In 2000, when the Rwandan army launched its onslaught on Lubumbashi, and Laurent Kabila sent Joseph to take command of the defense of his home province, Katumba shielded Joseph from the droves of family members who all arrived in the country’s mining capital wanting favors from him. At a time when problems abounded—pay for the soldiers didn’t arrive on time, there was no fuel or spare parts for the vehicles, the satellite phone was out of air time—Katumba had “one great quality,” a UN analyst told me. “As opposed to many others, when he promised something, he would always deliver.”25 He was both business-savvy and very reliable, a prized combination.
When Joseph became president, he brought Katumba to Kinshasa, giving him the broad title of minister of the presidency and state portfolio. Working out of a modest office in the downtown Gombe neighborhood, Katumba was officially in charge of state assets, the various national companies that included the main diamond and copper concessions, as well as steel mills, coffee plantations, and the national water and electricity company.
In practice, however, Katumba was tasked with not just running these companies but milking them for funds to supplement the presidency’s discretionary budget. Bank records, for example, show that he signed orders for the state diamond company to transfer $2.3 million directly to several weapons manufacturers in eastern Europe, without passing through the Central Bank or the Ministry of Finance.26
Katumba was also the point man for bringing in much needed investment to the Congo. In part, this had been made possible through reforms in investment and mining codes, which the World Bank had helped create. But despite the streamlined system set up by the mining code, investors had to obtain approval from the presidency for large investments. This was Katumba’s job—brokering and approving deals with international companies. According to numerous people within the mining industry, Katumba’s office is an unavoidable stop on the way to securing an important contract. A UN investigation called Katumba “a key power broker in mining and diplomatic deals” and recommended him for sanctions; the Financial Times called him “the primus pilus, the Dick Cheney of the Congo.”27
The mining sector, which had remained relatively locked up during the war for lack of interest by investors, suddenly experienced a massive privatization spree, helped along by Katumba. Between February 2004 and November 2005, the government concluded deals for 75 percent of the Congo’s copper reserves.
This fire sale of assets went against all principles of best practice in international mining. Several nonprofit companies got hold of two of these contracts belonging to Dan Gertler and Belgian magnate George Forrest, which had been kept strictly confidential, and gave them to the reputed mining law firm Fasken Martineau DuMoulin for analysis. The lawyers’ conclusion was that the contracts were so poorly structured that the private companies “will have been totally reimbursed in capital and interests of all loan and advances and will have derived substantial benefits from the control exercised on the operations prior to [the DRC partner] receiving any remuneration on its contributions.”28
The World Bank’s top mining expert, who had pushed long and hard for the privatization of the mining sector, cautioned in an internal memo that neither Gertler’s nor Forrest’s company, which now owned some of the world’s largest copper concessions, had any experience in industrial mining. “There has been a complete lack of transparency with respect to the negotiation and approval of these contracts,” he wrote, further worrying that the deals could deeply embarrass the Bank.29
The reason for these rushed and shoddy contracts, diplomats and industry experts indicated, was because of impending elections in 2006. Everybody in the industry I spoke to told me the same thing: Both Gertler and Forrest contributed considerably to Kabila’s campaign coffers, although both deny this.30 It was expensive to canvass such a vast country, set up offices in all of the 145 territories, print hundreds of thousands of T-shirts and posters, and bu
y the loyalty of musicians, customary chiefs, priests, and politicians.
A key word in the Congolese lexicon of corruption is enveloppe. If you want to buy votes in Parliament to squelch the audit of your state-run company, you pass around envelopes. When you want to obtain a lucrative contract to supply the police with beans and rice, you make sure the officials on the procurement board all get envelopes delivered to their home.
The operative verb is usually “to circulate,” and typically used in the passive voice, as if the envelopes were floating around on their own accord. On a fait circuler des enveloppes (envelopes were circulated around). The enveloppe preserves the dignity of the recipient: You avoid the crude embarrassment of receiving naked cash from your benefactor. After all, who can turn down an anonymous envelope whose contents are unknown?
Katumba Mwanke was a master of the envelopperie. An opposition parliamentarian told me that, after being called to a meeting at the presidency to discuss an upcoming vote, Katumba thanked him for coming and gave him a small, white envelope. “It’s for your transport costs,” he said. Inside was $1,000 in crisp hundred-dollar bills.31 Another friend, a lawyer who had to deal with him regularly, told me that Katumba had a Little Red Book with names written in it. Quite in contrast to Mao’s synonymous booklet, this one had names accompanied by a series of arrows, checks, and asterisks. “This was the off-the-books payroll,” my friend told me. The names included judges, generals, ministers, opposition parliamentarians, and journalists. Perform your job well, and Katumba could augment your salary by several thousand dollars; perform poorly, and you could find yourself broke and on the street.32
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 38
