In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  Any expectations I might have been harbouring of self-flagellation were to be disappointed. Liberated by retirement or working as consultants for foreign governments, these men were certainly open. But few of these well-educated, highly intelligent individuals—players still helping to make key decisions on which struggling governments received IMF and World Bank aid—felt they had apologies to make forty-five million Congolese, now landed with an unpayable $14.5 billion in debt. If anything, they felt they had done rather well in standing up to Mobutu as strenuously as they did. ‘You can’t look at it with the values of 1999. You must remember the context in which we were operating at the time,’ was a constant refrain. That context was a network of interests that all combined to play straight into the hands of a master manipulator, the student of Machiavelli who had taken the motto ‘divide and rule’ to heart.

  For the Americans, the Afro-optimism of the 1960s had ebbed away, to be replaced by a pragmatic appreciation that it needed Zaire as an ally in the fight to stem Communism’s spread. Even before Mobutu became head of state, the White House had signalled its regard by inviting the army chief to meet President John Kennedy in Washington. The White House welcome was to be repeated under every American president through the 1970s and 1980s. The US, using Zaire’s bases as the conduit for arms destined for Angola’s rebels, was determined to keep Mobutu on board.

  For the French, the motivation was different, but no less compelling. Despite its Belgian roots, Zaire had come to be regarded as forming part of what Paris had labelled its ‘chasse gardée’—that ‘private hunting ground’ of African allies whose existence allowed France to punch above its weight in the international arena.

  Part of the panoply of French-speaking African countries forming a bulwark against encroaching Anglophone influence, Zaire was a country where French businessmen, shored up by their belief that they—in contrast with the clumsy Anglo-Saxons—understood the African psyche, hoped to do business. The schools and media propagated the French language, culture and values. In return, Paris assured Mobutu, as it assured all its African dinosaur friends, of its undying support.

  For the Belgians, it was a question of maintaining a toehold of influence in a former colony that was still home to several thousand Belgian expatriates. Their safety was of less importance than national prestige: however difficult the scars left by colonisation made the task, Brussels was determined to maintain a historical link that allowed a small, none-too-impressive European nation to count as a significant world player.

  All three nations wanted guaranteed access to Zaire’s mineral reserves—especially, in the case of the US, the cobalt it needed to produce its fighter jets. And all three were counting, as Mobutu launched into his period of white elephant projects, on picking up some fat commercial contracts. Yet, underlying everything was the strategic question. ‘Après moi le déluge,’ Mobutu had told Western nations, echoing Madame de Pompadour and, with memories of the terrible 1960s at the back of their minds, they were ready to believe him. ‘The notion that only Mobutu could hold the country together grew and grew like a wheatfield,’ acknowledged a US official. ‘And Mobutu encouraged it.’ When Chester Crocker, the former US assistant secretary of state for Africa, raised Mobutu’s latest distasteful antics with Alexander Haig and George Shultz, two of the secretaries of state who served under Ronald Reagan, the usual question would surface. ‘They would say “We know he’s evil, but who else is there?” ’

  This troika of Western countries was to demonstrate its commitment to Mobutu over the years in solid military terms. When rebels invaded Shaba in the 1970s from Angola, the US organised a military airlift and France parachuted legionnaires into the southern town of Kolwezi. When, in the 1990s, the army rioted in Zaire’s cities, French and Belgian troops flew in to police the streets. Nominally, they were there to evacuate their citizens, but in the process they saved the Mobutu regime.

  Hand in hand with the military help went the troika’s votes within the World Bank and IMF. And Mobutu knew just how to ensure they kept the pressure up, exploiting the fear each of the three harboured that, should they ever dare to express their disapproval too sternly, Mobutu would be pushed into the arms not so much of the Soviet Union, but their Western rivals. ‘He played us, and his environment, like a Stradivarius,’ recalled a rueful Crocker. ‘He would play us off against the French, the French against the Belgians, the CIA against the State Department. If we dared to mention IMF and World Bank concerns it would be: “Do you really expect me to think you’re asking these questions of Israel and Egypt? Perhaps I should convert to Judaism.” I always looked at a trip to Zaire as hard work, because I knew I’d have to put up with a lot of crap.’

  If one ally proved reluctant, Mobutu could always turn to its rival. When aid showed signs of drying up, he would persuade the US to buy six months’ worth of cobalt to add to its strategic reserves. But that was not usually necessary, thanks to the quiet influence the troika’s representatives enjoyed within the international institutions. Pressure was usually discreetly applied, but on occasions it could be made explicit. When the World Bank was about to cut off relations with Mobutu the then US ambassador to Kinshasa stormed into the Washington office of Kim Jaycox, the organisation’s regional vice-president for Africa. Despite his loathing of the Mobutu regime, the ambassador nonetheless felt obliged to warn Jaycox that Washington opposed what he was doing and there would be ‘consequences’ for the institution if he froze out Zaire. The cut-off went ahead notwithstanding, but the threat helped explain why it was so long in coming.

  Selfish ‘troika’ interests were not the only reason aid continued. Until 1979, when Robert McNamara, the World Bank’s hyperactive president of the day, spelt out the concept of ‘structural adjustment’, in which loans would be made conditional on steps being taken to transform a country’s economy, both institutions felt they had no mandate to dictate economic policy to the countries they loaned to. Now regarded by the World Bank as the key factor in granting aid, ‘governance issues’ were initially viewed as off-limits by officials wary of accusations of neo-imperialism. Even after 1979, macro-economic criteria such as whether a country had a liberalised exchange rate, was keeping its interest rates within the required spectrum or privatising its state sector would take precedence over the question of the head of state’s Swiss bank accounts when it came to granting aid. ‘At the time you couldn’t talk about governance issues or corruption. Our legal department would crack down on you if you tried. It simply wasn’t done,’ maintained a World Bank economist. On paper at least, Zaire was for many years one of the few African countries that met those macro-economic criteria. The fact that Mobutu’s interference made such notional achievements irrelevant was brushed aside. Bretton Woods officials would pay the price for such breathtaking naivety.

  But there is another, more insidious reason why the sick relationship with Zaire lasted as long as it did. Ever since McNamara launched his drive to boost lending in 1970, heedless of the debt problem the frenzied credit boom would bring once interest rates rose, Bretton Woods officials have been assessed on their ability to ‘push money out the door’, to use the World Bank’s own phraseology. Projects launched, programmes got under way are, after all, positive, quantifiable achievements in an individual’s career, suspensions and cut-offs negative sign-posts on a CV, their effects incalculable and unclear.

  In a small local bank, a bad debt comes back to haunt the man who granted it, as someone must eventually cover that loss. With the Bretton Woods institutions, where the lenders are Western governments, bail-out is always assured, a bad debt a sign of good intentions rather than poor assessment. And no one wants to be the official remembered as having ‘lost’ Zaire, Kenya, Zambia or Tanzania. ‘You can never underestimate the inertia of a big institution,’ said a diplomat who served in Kinshasa. ‘Banks are all about cash flow. They exist to lend money. The World Bank and IMF weren’t too bothered where the aid was going or whether it would be repaid.
Just as long as it kept flowing.’

  Postings are fairly short, which contributes to a vacuum where institutional memory should be. One resident representative comes in from Washington, full of enthusiasm, determined to boost lending to what is obviously a desperately poor government. Three years later he is wiser and far more cynical. He has learned to appreciate how deeply ‘governance issues’ sabotage every project and finds himself, poverty or no poverty, advising Washington to toughen lending conditions. At about that stage, the resident representative is replaced by some bouncy newcomer who cannot understand why the lending portfolio is so slim and suspects his predecessor of losing focus. The whole cycle starts again, to the vast amusement of the host president, who has seen it all before and knows just when to strike.

  And so, thanks to this combination of factors, Mobutu got away with the most outrageous behaviour. One thing almost every official agreed upon was how testing their dealings with the Zaireans could be, how relieved they ultimately felt to move on to new dossiers. ‘The Zaireans were the most arrogant people I ever had to deal with’, said a former US official who flew regularly to Kinshasa to meet Mobutu. ‘They were arrogant and condescending unless they wanted something, and then they were obsequious.’ Even Kim Jaycox, not a man who gives the impression of being a soft touch, found the meetings with Mobutu a challenge. ‘He was a very formidable, a very wily adversary and he tended to personalise the confrontation. You really did feel you were mano a mano with this guy.’

  With so much at stake, the famous Mobutu charm could be strikingly absent. He would cajole, bully, threaten and browbeat. His loyalty could never be taken for granted. He liked to show who was boss and was not above demonstrating his independence from his faithful backers with flamboyant gestures of petulance. In 1975, for example, he accused the CIA of plotting his overthrow and expelled US officials. The message was clear: he would not be taken for granted.

  Keeping him onside did not come cheap. Roger Morris, responsible for African affairs at the National Security Council under both presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, once estimated that Mobutu received close to $150 million from the CIA during the first decade or so of his regime. Not all that money would have been originally intended for him. John Stockwell, a CIA man who ran one covert operation to destabilise Angola’s Marxist government through Zaire, logged how Mobutu creamed off part of any consignment destined for Angola, on one occasion in 1976 casually pocketing the $1.4 million given him by the US to pay off the rebels. Ten years later, a state department official was still being confronted with the same problem: ‘We’d mostly stick with equipment as if we sent money we knew it would go missing. But even when we were shipping equipment and gasoline, the Zaireans would steal part of it. I don’t think they knew how to do business normally.’

  Presidential tactics would range from the impish to the thuggish brutality of a Mafia boss. In Washington, IMF and World Bank officials were always aware that their representatives on the ground were putting more than their professional integrity at stake in taking up a Kinshasa posting. Blumenthal’s fear of assassination does not seem absurd when you consider what happened to one Bretton Woods representative who must have displeased the president in the late 1970s. An army unit descended on his home in the normally tranquil diplomatic district and during the prolonged assault that followed, he was beaten up, his wife and daughters raped. Neighbours hearing the fracas called the police, who refused to intervene in what had all the hallmarks of a politically sanctioned raid. ‘There was no doubt in our minds, given the nature of the attack and the police’s refusal to get involved, that it had been condoned by Mobutu,’ recalled a former superior. ‘We shipped the family out, and demanded an apology and reparations from Mobutu if the programme was to continue. And we got them, but the damage had been done, of course.’

  Willi Wapenhans, the World Bank’s regional vice-president for Eastern and Southern Africa from 1976 to 1983, experienced first-hand the strong-arm tactics the president was ready to use. He had gone with his country director to Kinshasa in 1979 to confront the president over $100 million that had suddenly gone missing from Gécamines’ foreign exchange earnings, a shortfall that risked bankrupting the copper giant. The two, who had been told by the central bank governor that the president was personally responsible for the withdrawal, were taken to their lodgings, one of the guesthouses in the residential ‘village’ constructed when Kinshasa hosted an Organisation of African Unity summit. ‘It proved to be rather a hazardous exercise. We were expecting to meet Mobutu. Instead we suddenly had soldiers in battle fatigues moving in and surrounding our house and we were effectively being held hostage. The situation lasted forty-eight hours. The central bank governor and Finance Minister would come and visit us from time to time and finally we drew up a memorandum detailing events and told them that if we were not allowed to meet Mobutu we would order our local representative to release it to the key embassies.’

  The threat did the trick and a meeting was arranged at which Mobutu explained that the soldiers had, of course, been posted around their house for their own safety, and promised to restore the missing $100 million. The money was, in fact, returned, but soon afterwards the Belgian government passed on to the World Bank president a complaint from Mobutu that the bank was showing an ‘inappropriate’ level of financial prudence, a view, it was clear, Brussels shared. ‘Of course, that wasn’t very motivating,’ admitted Wapenhans.

  Another time, Mobutu engineered the reassignment of a World Bank resident representative by complaining about the supposed ‘racist slurs’ he had made during a talk with the president. ‘Everyone who knew the man in question knew it couldn’t be true. I investigated the matter and there was no evidence. But he was removed anyway, as it was clear that all dialogue with Mobutu had become impossible. Those were the kind of tricks he would get up to,’ said Wapenhans.

  Throughout these years, Mobutu would give the impression of movement, reform and change with a series of government reshuffles, ministerial sackings and central bank appointments. The outside world would assume that lessons had been learned, that reform was underway. But the figure at the centre of the spider’s web had not changed, of course.

  Nebulous statistics were another great weapon in the Mobutu armoury. Zaire’s statistics-gathering apparatus was so inadequate that many figures were based on extrapolations of surveys carried out in 1959, when the country was still under colonial rule. Curiously, the partial export records, the multiple counting of government employees, the fact that nobody, not even Mobutu, knew the actual size of either the population or the army, never stopped the World Bank and IMF issuing hefty reports full of sweeping analysis and confident projections. ‘We never really had solid data, because they weren’t willing to provide it,’ admitted a senior World Bank economist. ‘We could never get a good grasp of what was happening.’

  It all made cooking the books that much easier as Mobutu focused on his main task, appropriating his ‘dotation présidentielle’ (presidential endowment). This allowance, which army trucks would regularly be sent to the central bank to collect, irrespective of what the Treasury had officially allocated him, was meant to cover Mobutu’s personal security, the costs of his entourage and travel expenses. Somehow, it regularly accounted for between 15–20 per cent of the government’s operating budget.

  Cleophas Kamitatu, who served as both Agriculture and Finance Minister, acted as unhappy mediator when, in the early 1980s, the Bretton Woods institutions launched one of their periodic attempts to rein in the allowance, which was showing signs of ballooning out of control as work on Gbadolite palace escalated. ‘We decided together that $2 million a month should be enough. When I went to see Mobutu and told him, he said: “You’re pulling my leg. It’s out of the question. I need $10 million. I told him the World Bank and IMF would never agree to that and after a lot of discussion we agreed on $3 million a month, which, after all, added up to $36 million a year.’

  Yet, within
a week of the Zairean delegation returning to Kinshasa, Mobutu asked the central bank governor for $10 million, citing ‘the country’s interests’ as justification. A month later, there was a request for another $10 million. ‘Four months after the IMF and World Bank meeting, he’d already had $36 million, the agreed budget for the year,’ marvelled Kamitatu.

  It was shortly after this that the first structural adjustment programme went into action, at the end of 1982. A new generation of policy-makers had emerged—that institutional inertia at work again—and there was also a feeling in Washington that with national bankruptcy now a concrete threat and his regime unchallenged on the political front, Mobutu might see the need to knuckle down. For three years the calculation seemed the right one as, under the tutelage of Prime Minister Kengo Wa Dondo, Zaire set in place a reform programme regarded as a model of its kind. The currency was devalued, marketing monopolies were broken up, public sector workers laid off and the ‘leakages’ dried up. But debt repayments were so high, net transfers of aid were virtually zero. In 1986 Mobutu kicked over the traces, telling the public: ‘You cannot eat austerity.’

  Predictably enough, holes began to appear in state funds. Playing the part of sleuth, Louis Goreux, the IMF representative of the day, traced the destination of a missing $100–200 million which had been removed from the export receipts of a state-owned company and sent abroad. ‘Somebody had moved the money and that somebody was Mobutu,’ recalled Jaycox. Confronted by Jaycox and Goreux, who threatened to suspend lending, Mobutu agreed in 1986 to transfer $20–30 million from his personal accounts abroad to salvage relations. This triggered a remarkable episode which Mobutu must have regarded, understandably enough, as proof positive the international lenders were putty in his hands.