Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  'I know my people. They like grandeur,' (2) Mobutu once said.

  'They want us to have respect abroad in the eyes of foreign countries.'

  'Versailles in the Jungle' operated to the very end as a parody of a Western capital. Fred Rake, the European Union ambassador, a maverick Dutchman with a keen eye for the absurd, was summoned there for a meeting in the last month of Mobutu's long rule. He was met at Gbadolite airstrip by Honore Ngbanda,

  Mobutu's security advisor, in a flowing pink silk suit, at the head of a fleet of limousines, which swept him to his audience.

  'It was completely ridiculous,' he recalled when he was returned safely to the Intercontinental. 'Everyone was springing to attention and jumping around and saying "Yes Monsieur Ambassador. This way, Monsieur Ambassador." But it was all a facade. You have ordinary states, weak states, strong states, welfare states and then you have pretend states ...'

  Mobutu's technique was childishly simple: Zaire was his personal bank account to be debited at will. His favourite source of revenue was Zaire's fabulous mineral reserves. At one stage he was estimated to have pillaged more than a hundred million pounds a year from the copper mines alone. A Zairean banker explained to me that when Mobutu ran short of ready cash he would send a minion with a chit to the Bank of Zaire. 'Mobutu would ask for such and such a sum of dollars, the minion would take his cut by raising the amount on the slip, the bank manager would do the same, and so on until the bank had dished out more than twice the original amount.'

  The difficulties that Mobutu's elite faced in managing their financial affairs once they had fled to exile showed just how easy life had been for those in his clique. Several of his generals fled to South Africa with a fortune in cobalt in their suitcases. Soon after arriving, General Baramoto Kpama, one of Mobutu's right-hand men, telephoned a prominent Zairean emigre with a sheepish request. 'He was terribly embarrassed,' Dennis Kadima, a Zairean academic in Johannesburg, told me. 'He was looking for a stockbroker but he did not know how to go about it. He had never needed to invest anything before.'

  Mobutuists trotted out a weary old defence and claimed that their Western critics did not understand Zaire. One of Mobutu's close allies from his early days, Kithima bin Ramazani, a former secretary general of the ruling Movement for the Popular Revolution, lived two floors above my room in the Intercontinental Hotel. Every day he stomped through the hotel coffee shop, Zaire's political and financial nerve centre, in a tailored charcoal grey suit, barking at the waitresses and moaning about the service. He invited me to his suite and defended his master's record with the inevitable non sequiturs. 'In the village we have one chief, only one. We have big differences, us as black men and you as white men, and we have to respect the chief. I've known President Mobutu for many years. He's a generous man. He's a good man.'

  There was a time when most Zaireans lapped up such vapourings. After the exploitation of the Belgians and the confusion of independence, when the Congo was driven by civil war, the people were desperate for a father figure who would restore hope and pride. The 'Great Helmsman', as Mobutu - then the dashing army commander- later styled himself, brilliantly read the prevailing mood. He would lead them from the abyss, and, initially at least, he did by restoring peace with the aid of his Western allies, and then kindling a national spirit with his authenticite drive. But it was no coincidence that Kithima seldom set foot outside the hotel. If he had dared to broadcast his views in the bustling Cite, the heart of Kinshasa, where thousands of unemployed youths lounged on the street comers, he would have been lynched. Years of official exploitation and disdain have bred anger and despair in the capital that just need a spark to explode.

  By the mid-Seventies it had become all too apparent that the country was spiralling relentlessly downhill. World Bank figures show that by the mid-Nineties the economy had shrunk to its pre-independence level, while in the same period the population had tripled to more than forty million. The figures also suggested that if the country had sustained its pre-independence growth rate the GDP would have been about $1400 a head. As it was, by the end of Mobutu's reign the figure was about $100. It came as no surprise to hear that even the Belgians were remembered with star-struck eyes.

  Martin Ilunga, who was born in 1934, the same year as Mobutu, spent twenty years at UTEX Africa, one of Zaire's largest cloth emporiums, cutting the material adorned with his president's face which was worn by everyone from aides to street vendors. Much of that time Ilunga had accepted without question that the chief deserved a special lifestyle. But on the eve of Mobutu's return from his French villa, where he was convalescing from cancer treatment, Ilunga could barely curb his disdain for the presidential cloth.

  'No one is buying this now. And let me tell you, none of us will be out there when he comes in the streets. We will stay at home and block our ears and shut our doors.' He followed me to the car. His lined face was shaking with rage and also, I suspect, with the agony of having to admit what he was about to say. 'It is a sick joke. We had everything under the Belgians. Now we have nothing.'

  As the rebels quickened their advance, the West became more strident in its calls for Mobutu to step down. A spokesman for the White House called him 'a creature of history'. Even Belgium disowned its old ally. The official statements brimmed with outrage and disdain. Chagrin, however, would have been more appropriate. For years the West funded Mobutu as its Cold War ally to stop Soviet expansion in Africa, even when it was clear that all but a fraction of the aid was going into his pocket. Mobutu may personify the follies of the independence leaders, but so, too, was his Zaire a monument to the super powers' selfishness in the world's poorest continent.

  *

  One of the more redundant expatriates in Kinshasa in the closing days of Mobutu's rule was a charming Bulgarian United Nations official called Gabriel Milev. We met on the Intercontinental tennis court on one of the dog days of the conflict when the rebels were bogged down in the jungle. He could be found on the court most evenings, and as I came to know him better I began to wonder why he was not out there swinging his racket on mornings and afternoons too.

  Milev was a high-flier from the UN's head office in New York, charged with helping to organize the elections, which had been scheduled in a political programme negotiated by the West with Mobutu. There was just one problem: Mobutu had no intention of keeping to his word. Foreign donors had promised to put $100 million into an election fund provided Zaire contributed the same amount. To the surprise of no one in Kinshasa, Zaire's contribution somehow never appeared.

  Unlike some of the European diplomats who were earnestly talking up his undertaking, Milev understood the absurdity of his mission. 'I know, I know, I was a journalist once. Elections in Zaire go on to the comics page.' But New York's bureaucracy was, as ever, running at its own pace and with its own agenda, and seemingly no one was listening to their man in Africa. Election was the buzzword and reality was ignored. The only consolation was that the world had finally learned its lesson and Mobutu was not, for once, allowed to dip his hand in the pot.

  The history of Zaire is one of the worst possible advertisements for foreign aid. Money was showered on Mobutu throughout the Seventies from the West, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with minimal preconditions and no forethought. Even as living conditions plummeted year after year, the bonanza continued, encouraging Mobutu to ever greater excesses.

  Inevitably he fell prey to 'Big Dam' syndrome; dictators revel in engineering projects, the bigger the better. Not only are they symbols of prestige, but they also require massive amounts of foreign capital, creating endless opportunities for kickbacks. A classic case was the Trowel Gorge Dam in Kenya, whose construction was eagerly promoted by the government of President Daniel rap Moi despite an environmental outcry and allegations of massive corruption. Mobutu was no better. Ever ambitious for glory and money, he commissioned two giant dams and a double-level suspension bridge over the Congo - one level of which was for a railway that did no
t exist. By 1980 Zaire's foreign debt was estimated at four billion dollars, but the state had nothing but fripperies to show for it.

  America was the most willing accomplice. In the late Seventies Zaire received nearly half President Carter's aid budget for black Africa. The bonanza peaked in the Eighties when foreign powers funded 90 per cent of Mobutu's army. As one American diplomat explained later with a wry smile, 'It was one big freebie.' At one stage, on paper at least, the army resembled a unit of the United Nations. In a mark of Mobutu's political genius, America, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Israel, China and North Korea were all financing different units. Yet all this largesse was despite clear evidence of systematic embezzlement by the Zairean government.

  The most damning testimony came in September 1981 when Nguza Karl I Bond, a former prime minister and foreign minister, testified in Washington against his old master. He charged that Hercules C-130 transport planes given by America were routinely used by state black-marketeers, pointing out that the air force, like everything else in Zaire, was used by Mobutu and his relatives as a private company. One C-130 crashed, the committee heard, when landing at an airport in the interior because it carried an excessive cargo of rice for officers.3 In the last days of Mobutu's rule the Financial Times revealed that the loans continued despite a warning from a senior IMF official to Western powers that Zaire was endemically corrupt. It is estimated that Zaire was loaned nearly four billion dollars between 1982 and 1991 when Mobutu finally fell from grace.

  The West justified its disbursements, if only to itself, with Cold War realpolitik. Ever the opportunist, Mobutu brilliantly played on America's fears of Soviet expansionism in Africa. As the world's most important non-Soviet supplier of cobalt he was a valued client. He also provided a conduit for the CIA to smuggle arms to its principal African puppet, Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader. In the Eighties, when the Angolan war was at its height, the American embassy in Kinshasa was one of the largest CIA stations in the world.

  For the Zaireans, however, the Cold War merely prolonged the agony of life under Mobutu. Half-hearted attempts in the Eighties to tighten up the conditions for loans did nothing to improve the lot of the suffering people. In December 1988 Belgian newspapers indicated that Mobutu embezzled the £70 million of aid given to Zaire each year. As Mobutu feigned outrage and announced he was halting repayments on his massive debt to Belgium, Brussels declared it would stop funding development projects in its former colony. It was a moment of truth, but in the time-honoured tradition of Western governments towards their old protégés, Belgium failed to stand up for its principles; commerce came first. In July 1989 Belgium agreed to cancel Zaire's public debt. Mobutu had won again.

  For Mobutu and his acolytes, Western aid was a tap, which occasionally needed a refit but would never be turned off. It was, in their deluded minds, a divine right. Whenever a loan was withheld Mobutu fulminated about Western neo-colonialism. In a telling indication of how accustomed his aides were to duping the West, long after the eastern provinces of Zaire had been lost to Kabila's rebel alliance, the EU was petitioned to help uplift the region with agricultural grants. A month before the fall of Kinshasa, the prime minister, General Likulia Bolongo, summoned Rake, the EU ambassador, to an urgent meeting.

  'I thought, this is it,' Rake said. 'He is finally seeing sense.

  He wants to discuss a way out of the crisis. He sat me down and said: "I have something very important to ask you." And I nodded and said, "Yes, Monsieur Premier Ministre ..." But I should have known better. All he wanted was a grant to help chlorinate Kinshasa's water supply …'

  The West's gullibility and culpability in Zaire are echoed across sub-Saharan Africa where tyrants have been indulged with billions of pounds of aid. But this of course does not excuse the kleptocratic king and his court, who went on pilfering the tattered remains of the economy to the very end.

  *

  Alexis Thambwe, Minister of Public Works, former ambassador in Rome, and veteran of four Mobutu cabinets, was clearly not used to being interrupted. He gazed through his billowing silk curtains over the garden of his residence as his butler scuttled in and out serving drinks. Vivaldi's Four Seasons tinkled in the background from the latest Japanese hi-fi. Glasses of pink Laurent Perrier sparkled on the blue marble coffee table. Naive Zairean art depicting idyllic African sunsets and heroic peasants lined the pillars on either side of the doorway leading to the swimming pool. After a suitable pause and a muttered aside to the business partner against whom he had just played a needle game of tennis, the minister resumed his discussion on the 'new' Zaire.

  Smooth, sycophantic and utterly implausible, not to say loathsome, Thambwe was one of the hundred-odd toadies who danced attendance on Mobutu to secure a place in the government. His record in office was dismal even by the standards of Zaire. Barely a road in Kinshasa was not potholed; barely a sewer was not suppurating. The stench of palm oil cloaked the air. On our way to Thambwe's villa we passed several freelance road-workers who were filling holes in return for tips from drivers. Thambwe, however, was calmly convinced the rebels would need him in the next era. He would, he said on reflection, be willing to offer his services.

  Kinshasa in the last months of Mobutu's regime brought to mind accounts of the Roman Republic in its dying days, as senators talked precedent and procedure over their fishponds even as the old order fell apart. One evening, as the rebels were encircling Kisangani, I attended a soiree in the Salon Zaire, the Intercontinental's banquet hall. The party was in full swing by the time I arrived, a sweaty swirl of dinner jackets, flowing West African gowns and shiny faces. Waiters in royal blue tunics with black trousers handed round trays of champagne, bottles of Beaujolais and chilled Belgian beer. Models paraded along a catwalk in the latest French collections. Madame Diallo Djeinabu, the organizer, was handing out pink raffle tickets at the entrance. In her shimmering ball gown she could have been the hostess of a London charity dance.

  At $25 a head, hundreds of thick-jowled bankers, government officials, diplomats and other luminaries had come to raise funds for refugees displaced by the fighting in the east. The army was in headlong retreat, but the war was still half a continent away from Kinshasa, and barely a distraction from the social whirl. A Zairean journalist was hovering outside, unwilling to disturb the elite at play. I muttered that the fall of Kisangani would shatter their complacency. He looked at me as if I were mad. 'You don't understand. The government is planning a counter-offensive. We have mercenaries. We will drive the rebels back. You'll see.'

  A few days later I listened to the Prime Minister, Kengo wa Dondo, making a ringing speech in which he claimed Kisangani 'ne tombera pas'. The city fell, as widely expected, three days later. I left Kengo's press conference imagining the prime minister would return home that night chuckling at his attempt to bamboozle us. But on reflection I suspect I was wrong. The oligarchs of the inner circle were trapped in a fantasy world and none more so than Mobutu himself.

  No one should ever underestimate a dictator's powers of self-delusion. To an outsider the shambolic state of Camp Tshatshi, Mobutu's Kinshasa residence, was a mirror of Zaire's decay. The stone perimeter walls were moss-covered and crumbling. Scruffily dressed soldiers scoured the grounds for kindling and the early evening smoke from their campfires wreathed the rear entrance. Brambles poked through the railings as at a long abandoned country house. But from his balcony Mobutu saw only what he wanted to see. His sentries wore plumed helmets and green liveried uniforms. Peacocks strutted in his front garden. Behind them, through the spray of a magnificent stone fountain, the Congo boiled through a series of rapids on its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Reassured by the apparent normality of his surroundings, Mobutu summoned his commanders and moved non-existent armies on the map. He had, after all, always managed to buy or blackmail his way out of trouble before. The last time I saw him in the flesh was in the Tshatshi grounds as the rebels closed on the capital. He was wearing a glorious turquoise an
d gold jacket buttoned to the neck, his usual thick-rimmed square glasses and his leopard-skin hat. He could have been at the height of his powers. The only indication that he was aware of the gravity of the situation was that he had decided to forgo the enigmatic silence, which he traditionally used to wrong foot, his opponents.

  'I am Mobutu,' he declared, jabbing his finger over our heads as if to say, 'Do you know who I am?' A few minutes later he waved us away and stepped back inside. After all, was he not Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu wa za Banga? The official translation is 'the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake'. But Zairean wags interpret it more loosely as the 'cockerel who squires all the chickens'.

  All the most successful Big Men collected preposterous titles. Partly this was to entrance and mystify their largely uneducated subjects, partly this was for childish fun and partly it reflected the cultural confusion of the post-colonial age. Few carried off the act with the elan of Mobutu.

  *

  I was at N'djili when he returned to Kinshasa for the last time from the Riviera villa where he was recovering from treatment for his prostate cancer. More than a hundred dignitaries, including Prime Minister Kengo and the army high command, were waiting on the runway when his rented DC8 jet touched down. A red carpet was rolled out of the tumbledown terminal. A black stretch limousine drew up beside the stairwell. Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. Then an aide appeared at the gangplank, summoned an official and suddenly secret policemen were everywhere ordering everyone to leave. The 'Guide' did not want to be seen.