In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  Mobutu emerged from the meeting incandescent with rage, having finally, belatedly registered how truly exposed he was. Likulia lost no time in telling his subordinates he had replaced Mahele as head of the armed forces. If he had been on his own, Nzanga believes, Mobutu would have stayed in Kinshasa to accept his fate. But he did not want those who cared most for him to pay with their lives for their devotion. He allowed himself to be nagged and bullied by the family into a limousine and they set off on their last trip to Ndjili airport.

  One story goes that as the presidential couple climbed the steps of the aircraft that would take them to Gbadolite, where the generals had assured them they would be safe, Bobi Ladawa turned and said to General Mahele: ‘Donat, we know what you did. After all we have done for you, this is how you thank Papa.’ Within twenty-four hours Mahele was dead, the victim of what most observers believe was an orchestrated plot. At some point in the afternoon of the following day, an army official rang Mahele to tell him the DSP was rioting in Camp Tsha Tshi. Abandoned by General Nzimbi, who had departed notwithstanding his morale-boosting speech to the troops, the DSP was going berserk.

  It was a warning which would have prompted many a lesser man to head in the opposite direction. But Mahele had already drawn up a speech he planned to read over the radio the following morning, recommending a general surrender, and had arranged to fly to the Zambian capital Lusaka to formally recognise Kabila’s authority. A DSP mutiny now would sabotage his plans. He drove immediately up the hill to the barracks, where he was confronted by a crowd of furious soldiers. As he tried to quieten a mob accusing him of selling out, someone walked up and shot him in the head, blowing out his brains.

  The finger of blame has long been pointed at Kongulu Mobutu, the brutal DSP captain, who stayed behind in Kinshasa to hunt down those responsible for his father’s overthrow and would certainly have been well aware of Mahele’s treason. But Nzanga rejected the charge against his brother. ‘Why Kongulu? Put yourself in the shoes of the Zairean soldiers. Nzimbi had gone, they had learned that somehow Mahele was connected to the rebellion. There were thousands of soldiers with thousands of reasons to hate Mahele.’

  One of the two parties to the soft landing was dead. As the news slowly filtered out, journalists kept ringing Simpson for confirmation of the cataclysmic news. But aware that the rebels were now within hours of reaching Kinshasa, the ambassador trod water. ‘I kept saying: “Have you seen the body?” ’ Feeling more than a twinge of responsibility for Mahele’s death, he was desperately hoping that events on the ground would acquire their own irreversible momentum before the news was confirmed.

  Indeed, the rebels were marching in along the railway and, notwithstanding Mahele’s disappearance from the scene, the FAZ was performing their traditional wardrobe change as the hardliners headed across the river. They were leaving so quickly, in fact, that at one stage the British and American embassies became concerned that a dangerous power vacuum was opening up and actually called Kabila to urge him to speed up the exhausted rebel force’s advance. ‘The troops were pouring in,’ remembered Simpson. ‘By the time Washington rang me to say: “Mahele is dead, does that mean the soft landing is off?” I could say: “No. It doesn’t matter. It’s done.” ’

  As for the Mobutu family, they had come face to face with the extent to which the generals had betrayed them on leaving Kinshasa. Taking off for Gbadolite, a DSP colonel travelling with them told the pilot not to head out from Ndjili airport in the normal direction, heading east over the marshes. On his instructions, the plane headed west instead, then looped around in a wide circle. The reason for this manoeuvre? Before his departure, the colonel claimed, General Nzimbi had arranged for a jeep with a surface-to-air missile to be stationed under the route a Gbadolite-bound aircraft would normally take. In a rerun of the downing of the jet carrying Rwanda and Burundi’s presidents, Mobutu’s own cousin planned to wipe out the family in one clean sweep, then blame the crime conveniently on the AFDL. ‘I’ll never forgive Nzimbi. Never,’ said Nzanga.

  The treachery did not stop there. Arriving in Gbadolite, the family realised they were no safer there than in Kinshasa. The years of neglect, all those unpaid salaries of the local DSP, now came home to roost. Retreating before the rebels, the loyal elite was on the brink of turning against the Mobutu clan. It was time to go. But a practical problem presented itself. The family had dispatched their plane back to Kinshasa to pick up the remaining members of the entourage. And so the family that once hired Concordes without a second thought was reduced to borrowing a vast Russian cargo plane owned by UNITA head Jonas Savimbi. Braving what Nzanga remembers as ‘a very, very hostile group of DSP’ at the airport, the president, his family and a handful of loyal soldiers piled helter-skelter into the Ilyushin and took off.

  Just in time. As the plane gathered height, the DSP men opened fire, their bullets ripping into the bodywork of the unpressurised aircraft, whose simple design probably saved the passengers’ lives. ‘God’s hand was on us that day,’ remembers Nzanga. ‘It was lucky it was a Russian plane. If it had been a Boeing it would have exploded. From that moment on, my faith strengthened. I could never have seen my son again, my daughter would never have existed. For the first time in my life I stared death in the face.’

  They landed on friendly soil in the West African state of Togo, to be met by an astonished Ngbanda and General Ilunga, who had gone to Lomé in a last-ditch attempt to try and activate Nigerian and Togolese promises of military help. Penetrating inside the interior of the bullet-pocked Ilyushin, Ngbanda helped his president extricate himself from the Mercedes that had been driven into the hold and scramble through a heap of suitcases and personal belongings. The first couple made their way shakily down the steps, to where an official motorcade had been hurriedly mustered by a surprised Togolese prime minister. Before allowing the car to drive off, Mobutu lowered the passenger window and addressed his security aide in a voice that was barely audible. ‘Ngbanda, do you realise that even Nzimbi abandoned and betrayed me?’ the president said in disbelief. Then he burst into tears.

  In most diseases, psychological factors play a role in accelerating or delaying the illness’s advance. Having lost his nation, with the fate of a people no longer resting on his shoulders and abandoned by those he trusted, Mobutu gave up his struggle against prostate cancer. Five days after the dramatic flight to Togo, the family began a new life as guests of King Hassan of Morocco. If the monarch remained a loyal friend to the end, Mobutu’s exile was accompanied by a concerted washing of hands by former Western allies, timing to the second his transition from Helmsman to has-been. In his Rabat residence, Mobutu swiftly succumbed to bitterness and depression. ‘It was very, very difficult. He began thinking about all the people he trusted who had abandoned him. And seeing the country he’d fought for all his life ending up in such a mess hurt him,’ said Nzanga. ‘At one point he talked a lot about the situation, then he stopped mentioning it and silence set in. He had begun to internalise it and his physical state deteriorated.’

  In September 1997, less than four months after fleeing Kinshasa, Mobutu died. Far from his beloved forests and vast river, a sick leopard fading away in the arid dryness of Morocco, he had lived just long enough to see his achievements discredited, his reputation besmirched, his name vilified. There was a quiet funeral in Rabat’s Christian cemetery. Ngbanda, who flew in for the event, was amid the group of former aides, personal doctors and bodyguards who stood at the grave after the family had withdrawn. Stricken by a sense of collective guilt, military and civilian alike sobbed aloud, begging their late master for forgiveness.

  Nothing could have been more merciless than this interment in exile. In an African society only recently touched by urbanisation, where the spirits of the dead vie with the living for respect, burial outside the land of one’s ancestors is worse than unnatural. For the man who had created the very nation of Zaire, with all its warts and blemishes, it could never constitute a laying to rest.


  Crueller still was the final glimpse the Congolese public caught of the leader who so dominated their existence for thirty-two years. When the first AFDL rebels warily entered Camp Tsha Tshi, where DSP soldiers too old or low down in the hierarchy to bother fleeing were waiting to surrender, they found the looters had beaten them to it.

  On the lawns and patio where a haggard president had allowed himself to be badgered by the press one last time, paperwork lay scattered. There were used cheque books for numbered presidential accounts in Belgium, scattered correspondence and, most poignantly, a letter sent to Zaire’s consul in France by a Monaco-based intermediary purporting to have had contacts with the South African mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes. Dated 15 March, the day the city of Kisangani fell to the AFDL, the letter suggested an urgent meeting between Mobutu and Executive Outcomes bosses ‘so that Executive Outcomes can do for Zaire what it has already done for Sierra Leone and Angola’. Did Executive Outcomes set too high a price for its intervention? Had the Zaireans dithered until it was too late? None of it mattered now.

  In the presidential couple’s villa, where Richardson and his team had delivered their ultimatum, the looters had been through all the rooms, opening every drawer, ripping apart every package, removing anything that could be easily carried. In the stainless steel kitchen, they had stolen the taps. From the headless pipes, water was pouring in a steady stream across the ground floor. On the spreading lake bobbed the contents of the boxes left behind in the family’s rush, evidence of a dying man’s physical collapse exposed for the world to see. Hundreds of adult incontinence nappies lay four or five layers thick, floating on the water.

  If no one is a hero to his valet, every man is an object of ridicule to the burglar rifling through his bathroom. The image is hard to erase: a group of ragged looters, practitioners par excellence of Article 15, laughing and jeering as they throw the symbols of their toppled president’s humiliation into the air.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ill-gotten gains

  ‘The elephant is dead, but its tusks and hair remain.’

  Bas-Congo proverb

  For an African millionaire who liked to be near water, the northern banks of Lake Leman might have seemed a natural place to invest in real estate. From these vertiginous slopes, divided into a patchwork of vineyards, the view across the dark blue expanse to the brooding Alpine range separating Switzerland from France is Byronic in its drama.

  ‘L’homme du fleuve’, the man of the river, was not insensible to such charms. While Mobutu was being treated for the cancer that killed him, he caused a bit of a stir by booking two entire floors of Lausanne’s appropriately named Beau Rivage Hotel. From here he could look directly out onto the water, across whose surface the currents trace silvery snail’s trails.

  But when it came to buying his own place, the president turned his back on Leman and headed higher up into the plateaux of the Canton de Vaud, where the gradient levels out, the road undulates gently through apple orchards and the locals enjoy a reputation for rustic ponderousness. He chose the village of Savigny, some 40 kilometres from Lausanne. Popular with celebrities because of a microclimate that remains dry and clear while a thick blanket of winter fog settles on the valleys, it was a convenient vantage point from which to monitor Yoshad, the ‘import-export’ business Kongulu Mobutu had opened in the town of Martigny, a perfect cover for transfers of money from Zaire to Europe. More important for his father, however, was the fact that Les Miguettes, the converted farmhouse he bought on Savigny’s outskirts, was entirely hidden from public view by a thick screen of firs. The trees prevented any appreciation of the panorama, thereby removing, some might think, much of the point of living here. But personal security had become the priority in the latter part of Mobutu’s life.

  The five-hectare, thirty-room piece of real estate, valued, it is said, at $5 million, is easy to locate. On a country road where the Swiss flag flaps proudly over carefully clipped hedges, it is the only property that reeks of neglect. Beyond the wrought-iron railing running the length of the grounds, a neat lawn has grown wild. There are cobwebs on the large metal gates, left carelessly ajar despite an ‘Entrée Interdite’ sign. An intercom flickers into life just long enough for a suspicious Congolese voice—belonging to one of two homesick sentinels—to inform the curious this is strictly private property.

  Nearly three years after Mobutu’s flight into exile, Les Miguettes is stuck in limbo. Sequestered under a legal order that has been renewed, challenged by Mobutu’s family, and renewed again, it can neither be used nor sold, belonging to neither the Mobutus, the new Kinshasa government nor the Swiss state. With its fate hanging in the balance, this prime piece of real estate looks doomed to slow disintegration. It is just one of the many properties in Mobutu’s European real estate portfolio whose state of abandon attests to the abject failure of the institution established with much fanfare in Kinshasa in the months that followed Kabila’s takeover: the quaintly baptised Office of Ill-Gotten Gains (OBMA), symbol of a new administrative drive to break with the past.

  Nestling in the quiet lanes behind the Hotel Intercontinental, its windows opening onto nodding palm fronds and fragrant magnolia, the white-washed villa converted into OBMA’s headquarters was a gift from Mobutu to the late Marie Antoinette. As such, it is almost certainly itself an ill-gotten gain. A fitting venue, then, for an organisation the AFDL promised would eliminate the tainted instincts the Congolese had inherited from the Leopard.

  With a parking lot full of repossessed cars as an example of what it could do and its salons milling with chit-waving supplicants, OBMA set about a sweeping anticorruption campaign in mid-1997. ‘We have a historical duty, to show generations to come just why we are underdeveloped,’ explained Jean-Baptiste Mulemba, the nightclub owner turned guerrilla fighter, turned first OBMA director, a man whose commitment to the job in hand seemed to verge on the fanatical. A key aim was to secure the return of $14 billion that Mobutu had allegedly salted away in Swiss bank accounts, foreign corporations and luxury real estate.

  European and American lawyers specialising in the stratagems Third World dictators used to conceal capital flight were lending their expertise, he claimed. He clearly envisioned a repeat of the legal campaign launched to reimburse the Philippines for Ferdinand Marcos’s depredations. ‘We’d love to recover all Mobutu’s money. But recapturing even 60 per cent wouldn’t be bad. If we can evaluate with our own methods the size of that fortune, I don’t think any country will refuse to hand over the funds in the end.’

  In the meantime, there was plenty of work OBMA could carry out unaided at home, tracking down government properties taken over by mouvanciers, ministry cars appropriated, bank loans never repaid. To squawks of outrage, OBMA’s agents toured the villas of Binza and knocked on the doors of Kinshasa businesses. They challenged residents for proof of ownership, demanded explanations for the mysterious ‘commissions’ registered in company accounts and queried tax concessions granted in exchange for seats on the board. Flats, homes and shops were seized as OBMA officials struggled to prepare the paperwork required for hundreds of planned court cases. ‘We will spend as long as it takes to expose what went on: ten years, twenty years, a century if necessary,’ swore Mulemba. If OBMA aimed to become Congo’s equivalent of the Truth Commission in South Africa—an institution spearheading the moral reawakening of a population—it would differ in one key respect: no amnesties were on offer. ‘There will be no pardons,’ he barked. ‘If we forgive, those who come tomorrow will also steal. Once is enough. There won’t be a second time in our country.’

  Confronted with the AFDL’s legal and moral crusade, the silence from France, Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend, was deafening. But stricken, perhaps, with retrospective guilt, other countries signalled their readiness to co-operate. They blocked the assets of over eighty exiled mouvanciers and sequestered presidential properties. In Belgium, where many of the Big Vegetables held their accounts, enthusiasm was hig
h enough for a pipe-smoking magistrate to fly to Kinshasa with his legal team in December 1997 to garner evidence of misappropriation.

  No country was swifter in offering to help than Switzerland. Under media fire for their role as bankers to the world’s undesirables, from the Nazis to Russia’s mobsters, the Swiss had actually taken the risk of ordering Mobutu’s assets to be frozen the day before the president was toppled. Determined to prove the efficacy of new legislation curbing the banking secrecy that drew a third of the world’s offshore funds to Switzerland, they ordered the country’s 406 banks to search for accounts in Mobutu’s name. The outcome was anticlimactic. Instead of the $8 billion nest egg denounced by the AFDL’s new justice minister, the Swiss banks located just six million Swiss francs ($4 million) belonging to Mobutu.

  By late 1999, even that disappointing sum showed no signs of being repatriated to a needy Democratic Congo. Letters sent to Kinshasa by the Swiss police, keen to expedite the matter, received no response. ‘We need more information and it has never come from Kinshasa,’ explained Folco Galli, spokesman for the Federal Police Office. ‘They must at least show us there is some link between these assets and supposed crimes, a suspicion, if not actual proof, for the dossier to go any further.’

  It was the same story in Belgium. After a year spent waiting in vain for Kinshasa to prove the mouvanciers’ frozen bank accounts contained stolen proceeds, the Belgian authorities reluctantly lifted the measure. ‘Oh, I did have some problems at the start, but now everything has been sorted out,’ was the refrain from the Congolese exiles who liked to take tea in Brussels’ Conrad Hotel, a venue chosen, perhaps, for its passing resemblance to Kinshasa’s Hotel Intercontinental. ‘They couldn’t prove anything.’

  The sudden waning of government interest in the issue of Mobutu’s stolen billions reflected, I discovered on returning to Kinshasa, dramatic changes back in Congo.