In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  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 mor
e 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.

  In latter years, valiant attempts had been made to brake the thieving, said the Belgian manager. ‘Customs men and generals were moved on and we set up roadblocks to stop lorries loaded with cobalt on their way to the border. But there is top level collusion in Kinshasa which means it continues, even if it’s slightly less obvious.’

  Less obvious, perhaps, because there was little left to steal. It took over thirty years, but by 1994, when copper production had sunk to 30,600 tonnes a year—less than a fifteenth of what it had been at its height—and cobalt output was 3,000 tonnes, the Horn of Plenty had effectively run dry. Revenue was zero. ‘Gécamines,’ in the words of Daniel Simpson, former US ambassador to Kinshasa, ‘was as clean as a whistle. Mobutu had not only killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, he’d eaten the carcass and made fat from the feathers.’ Gécamines was placed on what its chief executives described as ‘a survival programme’ and relieved of its crippling tax obligations. With the exception of the occasional quick-in, quick-out joint venture that barely scratched the surface of Gécamines’ potential or its problems, the concession ground to a virtual standstill, with skeleton crews keeping the facilities ticking over in expectation of some far-off resurrection. In order to restore Gécamines’ production to about 300,000 tonnes a year, the World Bank had estimated, any investor would have to assume debt in excess of $2 billion and invest another $1 billion.

  Driving from one site to another, that figure seemed almost low. This was a landscape of quiet yards, empty skips, mysteriously dripping ceilings; plant after plant that looked as though its sole purpose was to breed rust in industrial quantities. I won’t forget the vision of an overalled worker straddling a grating, pounding slowly with a hammer at a rock too large to go through a giant sieve. It was a job for an industrial crusher, but the crusher was out of order, so with a colleague holding the end of a rope wrapped around his waist to prevent a fall, he was reverting to the oldest mining technique known to man. Watching him sweating, I was reminded of a joke told south across the border. ‘What did Zambia use before candles came along?’ it goes. ‘Electricity.’

  But it was at the Shituri plant that the extent to which Gécamines had lost the fight against its own staff became clear. Against all odds, cobalt was still being processed here, electrolysed on large plates suspended in solution and then noisily ground out—dark granular fragments dropping into a large plastic container that looked suspiciously similar to the kind of sacks normally used for wheat flour. A South African security company had been hired to patrol the grounds and 250 armed guards monitored a plant working, in any case, at a mere 25 per cent of capacity. Yet management had still felt the need to store the sacks of cobalt in a padlocked warehouse, stretch fronds of barbed wire across the roof and plug the whole apparatus into the national grid. ‘That way, if anyone tries to be clever by going in by the roof, they get fried,’ chuckled a Gécamines worker, drawing my attention to the skull and bones sign on the warehouse door. ‘If there was a world competition for breaking and entering, we Zaireans would always win first prize.’

  Many Katangans believe they have been made to pay the price for their autonomous leanings, which simmer on today. ‘They had to make Shaba poor, so that we would be dependent on Kinshasa. The destruction of Gécamines was deliberate,’ insisted a member of a local political party. It is a conviction that leaves an abiding sense of resentment. ‘If the Zairean economy lasted as long as it did, it was thanks to us. For thirty years they bled us dry and in exchange, what did we get? We were colonised a second time, first by the Belgians, then by the Kinshasa regime.’

  But Mobutu’s next stop in the hunt for disposable income was to be made on different terms. When Gécamines, backbone of Zaire’s economy, showed its first sign of faltering, he turned his attention north-westwards, to the rebel province of east Kasai, a region with just as many reasons as Katanga to long for autonomy.

  East Kasai is home to the Luba people. Dubbed the Jews of Congo, the Luba are regarded with suspicion by their fellow nationals as a little too good in business; aggressive wheeler-dealers overly prone to share the fruits of their worldly success exclusively with their tribesmen while ruthlessly boxing out other ethnic groups. ‘Let one Luba into your business, and next thing you know, they’ll be running it,’ Kinshasa residents warn.

  Etienne Tshisekedi, Mobutu’s most formidable challenger until events in Rwanda rendered him irrelevant, hailed from there and having him as their champion always underlined the Lubas’ status as outsiders. Only curmudgeonly Kasai, one feels, could have got away with the step community leaders took in 1993, when they took against a new currency issued by Kinshasa. Deciding, with considerable justification, that this was a monetary scam designed to line the pockets of politicians in the capital and was bound to have an inflationary impact, the local elite simply decided to boycott the new notes and stick with the ‘ancien zaires’ of old.

  For the diplomats in Kinshasa, it was a move which, if left unchecked, would raise the interesting question of whether Zaire was still a state, or simply an empty space defined by nine countries’ frontiers. ‘It was a bit like Yorkshire unilaterally deciding that from now on, it was going to use Monopoly money,’ said one. ‘It raised some fundamental questions about what makes a nation a nation, and what it was exactly that Mobutu thought he was presiding over.’ Yet Kasai was allowed to do its own thing for five long years.

  By this late stage of his regime Mobutu was no longer interested in symbols of sovereignty. He needed cash, and the readiest source, once copper had lost its sheen, was to be found in Mbuji Mayi, the town built where a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the great Congo river meanders lazily across the plain, depositing the tiny stones washed from the green-grey pipes of kimberlite, embedded—in the analogy favoured by mineralogists—like so many giant carrots in the soil.

  As early as 1907, a colonial prospector had taken what looked like an interesting pebble from this site for analysis in Europe. It lay ignored until an engineer preparing another trip started sorting through samples, stumbled upon it and confirmed that yes, this really was a diamond. By now no one could remember where the sample had been collected and it was only in 1913 that Kasai’s status as a diamond region was confirmed. Since then, diamond fever, as dramatic in its social effects as any Klondike Gold Rush, has held the area in its grip. So valued are these deposits, you need special permits to visit the region and at regular intervals the government in Kinshasa, convinced too many outsiders are getting their share of the booty, ejects the Lebanese middlemen who home in on the province like sugar-crazed wasps.

  Mbuji Mayi is a curiously soulless settlement, with no tangible centre, boasting none of the elegant civic buildings left behind elsewhere in Congo by the Belgians. It is a purely functional conurbation, dedicated to making money, with little left over for less focused activities. Its pulsating
artery is the Avenue Inga, the rutted, muddy road on whose white-washed walls have been painted, in garish colours, the names of the buyers within, a promise that only they will offer a fair price and—as an example of what is expected from those crossing the lintel—a sketch of a sparkling, blue-white diamond worthy of a monarch’s crown.

  Inside the carefully guarded compounds, tough young Brits working for the local branch of the South African giant de Beers, homesick Lebanese middlemen who miss their families, and sometimes—but not often—Congolese themselves, sort delicately through piles of what look like coloured sugar crystals. They are searching, in this region where industrial-quality diamonds are the norm, for that rarity: a fault-free, gem-quality crystal structured to slice cleanly under the cutter’s blade and guaranteed to fetch thousands of dollars in Antwerp.

  ‘Fortunes can be made here,’ said Ahmed, a Lebanese buyer. ‘But you really have to know diamonds. And you have to be willing to wait months on end for something special to come along. A lot of people don’t have the patience.’ He displayed his latest cache lovingly on the back of an envelope. ‘These are mostly white stones, which is unusual for here. I spent $30,000 and they should fetch $40,000 in Antwerp. You have to make at least a 10 per cent margin, as you have a lot of expenses to cover.’

  In a perfect world, very few of the sixty-odd diamond comptoirs (counters) in Mbuji Mayi would be operating at all. For the diggers they buy from, ragged men who spend their days waist-high in the Kanshi river, sifting red gravel through crude sieves, taking cover when they hear the sound of approaching voices, are what the Angolans call ‘garimpeiros’, or illegal diggers. These freelancers work land nominally awarded to the Société Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), the company in which the state owns 80 per cent and a Belgian company has the remaining 20 per cent. It is a 5,000-square-kilometre mining concession the company has neither the facilities nor the energy to police. ‘Ninety-five per cent of the diamonds being bought by the comptoirs come from our concession,’ estimated a MIBA official. ‘I don’t think there’s a single legal counter in Mbuji Mayi. But if you crack down on the comptoirs the diggers will just take the stones into Angola and sell them there instead.’ Respecting the regulations, after all, has never been the norm in an industry in which the value of diamonds smuggled out each year far outstrips the $300–400 million going through official, and therefore taxable, channels.