Congo (92 page)

Katanga became home to a rough capitalism reminiscent of that in the 1920s but the 2008 banking crisis caused forty of these private firms to pack up and leave. The copper price fell from almost $9,000 to $3,600 a metric ton (about $9,900 to $3,960 a U.S. ton) and the province imposed stricter conditions. Tens of thousands of artisanal diggers were left without work. Suddenly, Katanga was looking more like it did in the 1930s.
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Chinese state-owned companies started moving in; not hit-and-run fortune hunters but mammoth concerns with virtually unlimited funding. The road from Kinshasa to Matadi was rebuilt, as was the road from Lubumbashi to the Zambian border, raced along now by trucks filled with ore. CCT, a Chinese telecom company, became one of the country’s major cell-phone operators. And yet another Chinese company began laying a 5,600-kilometer-long (3,500-mile-long) glass-fiber cable to open up Congo to the digital revolution.
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Relations between Mobutu and Mao had been hearty even as early as the 1970s; in those days, the focus was on cultivating ideological comradeship (the single-party state, the
abacost
, and the parades in Congo were the result—no mean feat for a pro-American country), but now it was about business. Congo became one of China’s newest trading partners. In 2006, President Hu Jintao organized a crucial Sino-African summit in Beijing attended by no less than forty-eight African heads of state. During that meeting, $2 billion in contracts were signed and China promised up to $5 billion in loans and a doubling of its aid efforts by 2009, while purging the countries’ outstanding debts and lifting a whole slew of import duties on African products. With an eye to trade relations, Chinese dignitaries visited almost every country in Africa. Beijing stuck rigorously to its policy of noninterference in domestic affairs and championed the principle of fraternal South-South cooperation, as opposed to paternalistic North-South meddling. It all sounded lovely, but the gist was also that China apparently had no objections to doing business with unsavory characters like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan. The new China was businesslike, efficient, and pragmatic. All it asked in return from its new trading partner was that it state the opinion—once each year, during the UN General Assembly meeting—that Taiwan actually belonged to mainland China.

In September 2007 Minister of Infrastructure, Public Works and Reconstruction Pierre Lumbi announced that Congo had closed a megadeal with China. The country would set up a joint venture under Congolese law with three Chinese state-owned enterprises (a bank, a road-building company, and a general contractor). Through Gécamines, Congo would maintain a 32 percent share in the enterprise; the remaining 68 percent would be Chinese. The joint venture would be allowed to excavate 10 million metric tons (11 million U.S. tons) of copper and six hundred thousand metric tons (660,000 U.S. tons) of cobalt in Katanga—gigantic volumes, when one realizes that only eight million metric tons (about 8.8 million U.S. tons) of copper were mined during the entire colonial period and that the country’s total reserves were estimated at 70 million metric tons (77 million U.S. tons).
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In return, the new partnership would invest $3 billion in restoring the country’s mining infrastructure, and $6 billion in the construction of paved roads (34,000 kilometers, or 21,000 miles), unpaved roads (2,738 kilometers, or 1,700 miles), railroads (3,215 kilometers, 2,000 miles), houses (5,000), polyclinics (145), hospitals (31), hydroelectric plants (2) and universities (2). Investments, all in all, of $9 billion. And because the joint venture had no revenues as of yet, the People’s Republic of China would advance the funding for these major works: the venture would simply pay it back over time. Kabila was elated: “For the first time in our history, the Congolese people will see the usefulness of all its copper, its nickel, and its cobalt!”
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It was, indeed, an impressive agreement. Only seven pages long, shorter than a normal rental contract, it was the most important document concerning Congo since the ten-year plan of 1949. Congo would become a construction site unlike anything seen there since the 1950s. In the Western press the deal was often depicted as a “loan” from China, while in fact it was a tradeoff: ore for infrastructure. An exchange of that sort did not imply a return to a precolonial economy, but was a handy way to skirt around corruption: a hospital, after all, is not easy to slip into one’s pocket. But it was very much a tradeoff, with a crucial clause attached. Should the deposits fail to produce the quantity of ore hoped for, Congo would be obliged to meet the terms of contract by other means.

As soon as the announcement was made, the West began screaming bloody murder. Neocolonialism! A new scramble for Africa! Rapacity disguised as win-win gobbledygook! To some, the contract seemed a twenty-first-century variation on the agreements Stanley had asked the village chieftains to sign. The Congolese had let themselves be hosed! It hadn’t even been discussed in parliament! It wouldn’t generate any jobs! Rumor had it that the Chinese were flying in their prisoners to do the work! Et cetera, et cetera.

Some of these reservations were justified, but others were pure panic; panic in the face of this complex, up-and-coming world order, a world in which China was rapidly acquiring superpower status. It reminded one of the skittishness at the time of the Berlin Conference or at the start of the Cold War. Congo has been drawing the attention of foreign powers for a century and a half, and that has often led to tensions—between European and Arab traders around 1870, between European nation-states after that, between America and Russia during the Cold War, and now between China and the West. Every time a newcomer claims a position on the Central African chessboard, it results at first in suspicion and nervousness.

But was it true, had the Congolese government been taken for a ride? It is hard to say. Inherently, there is no objective standard in trade by barter other than the mutual satisfaction of the trading partners. China was pleased to gain access to raw materials; Kabila was pleased with the promised reconstruction of his country. In any case, the contract had not been forced down his throat, but followed upon two months of vigorous negotiations in Beijing.
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Attempts to nevertheless quantify the fairness of the deal are doomed to fail as well. Whether 10 million metric tons (11 million U.S. tons) of copper for $9 billion in investments is a fair deal depends, after all, on the international price of copper. In light of the pronounced fluctuations on world markets in recent years, it may amount to $14 billion, but it could amount to $80 billion. Yet one thingis clear: China is not out to plunder the Katangan substrate in the short term, for the simple reason that China’s economic policy is characterized by gradualness and planning. Beijing had absolutely nothing to win by depleting and destabilizing Africa. On the contrary. The view of China as a quack physician offering a deathly ill patient a family pack of vitamin C in exchange for, say, a kidney and a lung, does not apply. China has started on a long, structural presence in Africa that will change the face of the world in the century to come.

How democratic that presence will turn out to be is, of course, still very much the question. The Sino-Congolese contract was negotiated behind closed doors, without consulting parliament. And even though the Congolese parliament has, by now, had the opportunity to comment on it, its say in the matter has remained very limited. What’s more, the generous trade relations that China maintains with Zimbabwe and Sudan demonstrate that for Beijing human rights are no sacred criterion; no more, after all, than in China itself. For China, commercial interests currently take precedence over humanitarian ones. Although a permanent member of the UN Security Council—which gives it a great deal of power—China is, for example, too dependent on high-grade Sudanese oil to take exception there to al-Bashir’s regime. That sounds opportunistic, but it is no more or less opportunistic than the way France, Belgium, and the United States kept Mobutu in the saddle in the 1980s. Among Western regimes, respect for human rights dates only from the 1990s. And even then . . .

The most stubborn opponents to the Sino-Congolese contract were the international financial institutions. The IMF and the World Bank were not pleased with the clause that stipulated that, should there be too little copper or cobalt in the ground, Congo would have to meet its obligations by different means. By putting up such collateral, Congo ran the risk of accumulating even greater debts . . . and it already had such a staggeringly huge pile. There was something to that. The country still drags along behind it the debts acquired during the Mobutu era, and by 2010 the deferred payments and interest accrued on them totaled an astronomical $13 billion. That equaled one-quarter of the country’s spending each year, more than 90 percent of its GNP, 150 percent of all exports, and more than 500 percent of government revenues (not including foreign aid).
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The horse trading with China now added a potentially huge slab of debt on top of all that.

What the IMF and the World Bank did not say, however, was that they were in a position to do something about that burden. Year after year they continued to insist that it be repaid, even though Erwin Blumenthal had roundly stated in the 1980s that it would never happen. The unfairness of weighing down a newly elected government with the twenty- or thirty-year-old squandermania of a former dictator dawned only gradually on the Bretton Woods institutions. It was, to be sure, a huge sum of money and it would set a bad example to erase outstanding liabilities all too readily, but $13 billion effectively crippled all attempts at reconstruction. It was as though the new inhabitants of a tenement apartment were being charged for the exorbitant phone bills of the former tenants, who had hung on the line all the time. Rigobert Minani, a Congolese intellectual, once rightly claimed that the international financial institutions were “holding the national economy hostage.”
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The reason the IMF clung to its demand that the debts be repaid was that the obligation was the only thing still providing the rich Western countries with a toehold in Congo. The IMF is international by name, yet it awards votes according to the financial contributions from member countries. That means that the United States and the European Union, as the major contributors, control almost half the votes; China, home to one-quarter of the world population, has only a 4 percent vote.
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Diplomatically speaking, the West had little voice in Congo’s affairs once the elections were over; the IMF, however, whose president is by statute always a European, acted as the ultimate big stick in posing conditions regarding anticorruption measures, fiscal matters, and monetary and economic policies. The debt might be allowed to dwindle, but not to disappear completely.

As part of a large-scale aid program for “heavily indebted countries,” the IMF stated its willingness to forgo claims on $9 billion out of the total of $13 billion if Congo complied with a series of strict conditions. Those conditions included a revision of the contract with China. At first Kabila was unwilling but in early 2009 the government found itself so strapped for cash—due to the war against Nkunda and the low price of copper as a result of the world economic crisis—that it had hardly enough funds to finance two or three days of imports. Scattered across the bottom of the state coffers was only a measly $30 million. The IMF and the World Bank reacted with lightning speed and a donation of $300 million. Since then, the authorities in Kinshasa realize that it is prudent to continue the dialogue with those institutions and that China is not the country’s sole source of redemption. It is better for them to make sure their bread is buttered on both sides.

In December 2009, after months of renewed negotiations, a deal was struck: the collateral clause was scrapped and in return China would lower its investments from $9 billionto $6 billion. The IMF promptly coughed up $150 million and announced that Congo was now much closer to remitting its debts: of the original $13 billion, the country now had to pay back “only” $4 billion.

Meanwhile, India too is poised to enter into a business partnership with Congo, a cooperative arrangement on which the IMF is sure to keep a close eye.
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B
EHIND THE HIGH WHITE WALL
I could see the colossal machines for mixing asphalt: on October 17, 2008, I drove around the perimeters of the Chinese Railway Engineering Company (CREC) in Kinshasa’s outlying riverine district of Kinsuka. The CREC is one of the Chinese state-owned companies in the consortium with Congo and one of the biggest construction concerns in Asia, with one hundred thousand workers on its payroll. Kabila had given the company a huge terrain close to the riverside quarries and two other concessions in the city. Rumor had it that the CREC fired Congolese workers if they refused to obey orders, even when those orders were given in Mandarin. Their monthly wages of $150 are paid out at an extremely low rate of exchange, which means they actually take home only $70.
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But there was no way I would be allowed in, I soon discovered, let alone carry out interviews on the grounds. All I got to see were those high white walls around the concession, hundreds of meters long. Driving around them to the rear, I saw that the concession bordered on a working-class neighborhood. There was only a sandy path leading to it. As I climbed toward the houses, a little boy of about four came running up to me. He looked at me, pointed his finger and said, loud and clear, because children like to name the things they know: “Chinois!”

A generation is growing up in Kinshasa today for whom a European is more exotic than a Chinese. In Congo there are once again children, just as there were in the late nineteenth century, who have never seen a white man in real life. One finds them even in the working-class neighborhoods of Kinshasa. On any number of occasions I have noticed toddlers running away and shrieking at my monstrous appearance as I walked through their alleyways.