In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (14 page)

Mukamba's freedom of movement was curtailed not only by his role as unofficial presidential cash provider, but by the fact that MIBA was still paying cripplingly heavy national taxes in Kinshasa. ‘Our dearest wish would be to spend those taxes locally. But the law obliges us to pay,' he explained. ‘For more than thirty years, power has been far too centralised in Zaire.'

Combined, the two depredations helped send MIBA down the same sad route as Gécamines. By 1997, the year of Mobutu's downfall, output had fallen from 10 million carats a year to 6.4 million. The company had been loss-making for six years, and it too had been put on a specially lightened tax regime. The curse of prosperity had struck again. Yet another thriving national industry, on which another state might have built a vertiginous rise to international prominence, had been sabotaged.

The shift of focus from Katanga to Kasai, from copper to diamonds, marked another stage in Mobutu's itinerary. The man who
had founded his empire on his ability to distribute sweeteners was now being outstripped by the more enterprising members of the political class he had helped create, who had learned their lesson a little too well. Several of Mobutu's sons, his personal aides, the generals, were all soon running their own diamond-buying counters on the Avenue Inga. They doubled as conduits for the higher quality gem diamonds being mined by the UNITA rebel movement across the frontier in Angola, which needed legitimate commercial outlets for the stones to fund its military campaign. ‘Mobutu was losing his capacity to rein those guys in,' said a US Treasury official. ‘The illicit diamond counters were wandering out of his reach and his ability to plunder the various state mechanisms had shrunk enormously.'

In his role as diamond expert, Larry Devlin tracked the same phenomenon. ‘I heard through my contacts that one of Mobutu's closest aides was going to Antwerp with $9 million worth of diamonds to sell on the president's behalf. He'd tell the buyer, “Give me a receipt for six and I'll take the other three.” In the old days that would never have happened. He would have gone back to Mobutu with nine and waited for the president to give him his share. He would never have dared take his own cut first.' The kleptocracy was no longer the creation of one man. It had acquired its own unstoppable momentum.

 

On one of the main avenues
of Kinshasa's tree-lined Gombe district, home to ambassadorial residences and ministries of the city, a mastodon of a building constructed in the shape of a giant reversed ‘C' lies behind high walls of concrete and iron. It used to be possible to drive straight past this cement hulk, but ever since a bout of shooting between two rival army units alerted the new authorities to the institution's vulnerability, traffic has been diverted down narrow side streets. But from this distance you can still spot a curious white sphere high up on one of the building's corners. This used to be where a mosaic of Mobutu, complete with leopardskin hat and dark glasses, surveyed the scene. It was whitewashed over in the days
when Kabila's rebels walked into town and, in true Vicar of Bray style, the capital's residents rushed to ‘rebuild their virginities', in that magnificent French phrase.

But it is easier to paint over a portrait than to cancel out the past. It was here, at the central bank, that the final scenes in Mobutu's kleptocratic system were played out. Having reduced Gécamines and MIBA to shadows of their former selves, with no substantial revenues coming in, the president and his increasingly wayward elite were left with the option of last resort: printing money to survive. The presses would be ordered into action, army lorries sent to the central bank and the thick wads of pristine zaire notes quietly unloaded on what Radio Trottoir had dubbed ‘Wall Street': the alleyways where scores of Kinshasa's divorcees, widows and single mothers—these feisty moneychangers were nearly always women—would sit with bulky bags of money on their knees, setting the day's exchange rate. Dumping their notes, still in the plastic wrappers in which they had been issued, the top officials would hurriedly exchange them for dollars, Belgian francs or French francs, the only stable landmarks in a world of constantly shifting value. But as word spread on Wall Street of yet another mystery delivery, the day's rate would change and the zaire would fall—and fall.

Inflation, which had reached double-digit figures sufficient in themselves to bring down an accountable Western government, suddenly rocketed in 1991 to a mind-boggling 4,130 per cent. The next year it fell slightly to 2,990 per cent. But the next year it was back up to 4,650 per cent and in 1994 came the worst of the worst: inflation ballooned to 9,800 per cent.

For Zaireans paid in local currency, the effect of what was effectively an unofficial tax on every financial transaction was disastrous. In the time it took to drink a coffee, the rate could have changed a couple of times. Dither too long over the bill, and it might have to be altered. Return from a long trip and the store of zaires that had bought a family a meal before you left now scarcely afforded a bar of soap.

In supermarkets, no one bothered ticketing goods individually any more, so quickly did the prices change. Instead they were classed in categories with a single index, easily updated, giving that day's price for each category of goods. Each individual note was now worth so little, the banking industry effectively ground to a halt, unable to muster the liquidity needed for major transactions. Sometimes, behind the tellers, you would see hillocks constructed of soiled, strangely aromatic zaire notes, stacked against the wall in brick-like blocks: destined for some small business struggling to pull together the salary for its workforce, perhaps, or to buy a photocopier. There was rarely enough cash for anything more ambitious. Checking the amount could take hours, despite the fact that to simplify counting, notes were split into convenient ‘paquets' of twenty-five. You trusted your black market moneychanger, in fact you trusted every Zairean you dealt with, not to subvert the entire system by sneaking a couple of notes out of each paquet. Ironically, a crisis created by such top-level dishonesty bred its own moral norms amongst its victims, adhered to with a greater degree of conscientiousness than the rules of a conventional financial system.

Indeed, it gave birth to an imaginative mutual aid system amongst those still tenacious enough to want to operate in a society where the banks had become irrelevant. Coffee exporters and arms traders, aid organisations and diamond smugglers found themselves strange bedfellows as they established an informal money-trading network. A single phone call would enable a factory boss to locate the zaires needed to pay his work-force, or a Lebanese dealer to find the dollars he needed to buy his diamonds. It was do-it-yourself banking and it worked. ‘I find it quite inspirational,' a British businessman once confessed. ‘Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of currency will be traded over the phone, the transaction takes seconds to go through, rather than the weeks involved if it were being conducted through banks, everything is done verbally and no one ever welshes on a deal, because they know if they did the whole apparatus would collapse around their ears and everyone would lose out.'

But even if the process was taking place in graceful slow motion, the system was indeed imploding under the weight of its own eccentricities. Each time a new denomination was issued in a forlorn attempt to keep up with inflation, politicians would wait with bated breath to see if the population would accept it as legal tender or refuse it as inflationary. That was the step that helped push the soldiers to riot in 1993, when they found their wages being refused in shops. One of the last bills issued under Mobutu—the 500,000-zaire note cheekily dubbed the ‘prostate' in honour of his afflicted organ—was rejected
en masse
in Kinshasa, providing a few mouvanciers with a wonderful opportunity to exploit. Appropriating notes rendered worthless in Kinshasa, they chartered planes and flew stacks of prostates down south to Lubumbashi, where they dumped them wholesale onto a more amenable black market.

In Kasai, of course, the new zaires had never been accepted at all, presenting a lucrative opening for officials who hoarded ‘ancien zaires' instead of burning them as directed, then offloaded them in the Kasaian trading centres of Mbuji Mayi and Kananga. In the far east, new zaires were accepted but traded at a different rate against the dollar from Kinshasa, another opportunity for those lucky enough to travel to make a profit on the spread. One country, at least four separate currency zones: Zaire was beginning to crack at the seams. Mobutu the African nationalist may not have liked all that this implied. But given his own past, what could he do about his entourage's increasingly reckless freelance activities? Moral sermons would have come across as unacceptable hypocrisy. ‘Since he was taking himself, he could not punish others,' said Kitenge Yezu.

None of this world of Alice-in-Wonderland finances, of course, made its way into the monthly and yearly reports issued by the central bank, where accountants and economists painstakingly massaged the figures, constructing a sophisticated simulacrum of financial respectability that might, at a pinch, fool some IMF or World Bank expert still interested enough in Zaire to ask to see the books.

As Mobutu's options narrowed, Western governments pinned their hopes of reform on Kengo Wa Dondo, the light-skinned, razor-
sharp former attorney-general who had served twice as prime minister during the single-party era, before once again being nominated premier in 1994. The dominant figure in a group of Big Vegetables to emerge in 1990 as pitiless critics of one-man rule, Kengo was, the embassies believed, acute enough to realise the financial mismanagement had to stop. Kengo did enjoy initial success in bringing down inflation. But then came a series of scams so outrageous, so ambitious, they betrayed an utter disdain for the law, the population and the very tenets of a nation state by those involved.

In the early hours of 2 September 1994, a Boeing 707 belonging to a Liberia-registered company landed at Ndjili airport. The plane, which was inspected before taking off for the interior without authorisation, proved to be carrying an extraordinary load: 30 tonnes of banknotes, amounting to 12–15 billion new zaires. Had a forgery ring been exposed? The truth turned out to be rather more complex.

So strapped for cash was the Kengo government, it had resorted to entrusting the printing of its new currency bills, carried out in Argentina and Brazil, to Lebanese intermediaries. They would fund the issue and then be paid for services rendered out of the new banknotes that resulted. But the well-connected Lebanese businessmen involved, Naim and Harif Khanafer, went a step further. Exploiting their unique position as agents of the Zairean monetary authorities, they asked the Brazilian and Argentine companies to issue not just one copy of each numbered bill, but two notes, three notes, maybe four. Identical in quality and detail to the original, these were not technically speaking forgeries at all, and were impossible to isolate. Dumped in their tonnes on the black market, their effect was bound to be catastrophic.

After an emergency cabinet meeting, Kengo's information minister went on national television to explain and denounce the scandal, relieved, one suspects, to be able to attribute inflation to something other than money-printing authorised by the Treasury and the central bank. The air company's licence was revoked, the Lebanese brothers detained for questioning, Interpol's help was requested and a top-level legal inquiry was launched, with government investigators
dispatched to Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and France. One month later, a second cargo of 14 tonnes of banknotes was discovered in the riverside town of Mbandaka, and this time the government managed to confiscate the load.

No one will ever know who was behind the action taken by the Khanafer brothers, but what is certain is that as Lebanese nationals reliant on their contacts to work and live in Zaire, they would never have launched an operation of this criminal grandeur without high-level patronage. Asked to name those responsible, Kengo cited certain ‘civilian and military individuals' but declined to go into any detail ‘so as not to prejudice the legal investigation', he said.

With weary predictability, the inquiry was quietly allowed to subside. Legal charges were never filed against any of those responsible and in December of that year the government, perennially short of cash, actually ordered the freeze on the 14 tonnes of Mbandaka banknotes to be lifted so it could pump the ‘forged' bills into the money system. Kengo had underestimated the strength of the ‘subterranean forces' behind the scam. Confronted by the powerful lobbies involved, he had preferred political survival to a showdown that might lose him his premiership.

The ugly face of a regime that was sucking the lifeblood from its own citizens had been publicly exposed. If they were slightly taken aback at the sheer depth of the greed exposed, Zaireans were certainly not shocked by the motives themselves. They had grown accustomed to the notion of state as ravaging predator. What mattered was knowing how to cope with the outcome.

By the mid-1980s,
Zaire's Belgian-installed telephone network had disintegrated to a point where communications—both internal and international—were becoming impossible. It was then that a young American who had recently lost his job at an airline office came up with the bright idea of issuing Kinshasa's movers and shakers with Motorola radio sets which allowed them to keep in touch with each other within the city limits.

Not long afterwards a private cellular telephone system was set up and the Motorolas were replaced by chunky mobile phones. And so Telecel was born, an example of how a collapsing state structure could be sidestepped or simply substituted when the needs of the elite became acute. Road non-existent? Buy a four-wheel drive. National television on the blink? Install a satellite dish in your back garden and tune in to CNN. Phone out of order? Hire a Telecel. As Zaire crumbled, one community, at least, could afford to buy its way out of anarchy.

Customers might moan about the crippling seven dollars a minute the company at one point charged for international calls, but they were careful not to be cut off. Long before mobile phones became the rage in the West, owning a Telecel in Zaire was the ultimate prestige symbol, the difference between being a player and remaining on the periphery. For the new arrival, whether diplomat or journalist, it was a convenient way of sorting out the sheep from the
goats. If, at the end of your meeting, you discovered that your interlocutor did not own a Telecel, you knew that no matter how worthy or articulate, he bore the unmistakable stamp of irrelevance. In contrast, I knew I was in the presence of greatness when I watched Bemba Saolona, Zaire's leading businessman, juggling a row of Telecels lined neatly up on the coffee table in front of him as they trilled in swift succession.

As with all things in Zaire, the Telecel and its idiosyncrasies became part of the language. One of the problems with a Telecel was the speed with which its rechargeable batteries would expire. As they ran down, the words ‘Low Batt' would flash up on the display, accompanied by a two-tone bleep that would become more and more insistent until the line went completely dead. ‘Je te rappelle, je suis Low Batt' (‘I'll ring you back. I'm Low Batt') users would warn their callers. As time went by, the phrase took on something of a symbolic meaning. By the 1990s, the entire nation seemed stuck in a permanent state of ‘Low Batt', surviving rather than living, ticking over without ever flaring into life.

The Zaireans had developed their own language to deal with this depressing reality, ironic word games replete with scepticism, the only form of quiet rebellion on offer in a system seemingly impervious to change. Cock-ups were attributed to ‘Facteur Z', the Zairean factor, delays to ‘Heure Zairoise', the lethargic local timescale. The capital once known as ‘Kin-la-belle' was now dubbed ‘Kin-lapoubelle' (Kinshasa, the rubbish dump), testimony to the mountains of garbage collected but never taken away. The men who sold stolen petrol on the roadside were known as ‘Khadafis', in tribute to Libya's oil-rich president, while the urchins who slept on the streets were called ‘phaseurs' (Lingala slang for ‘sleepers') because, a friend joked, ‘they were in phase with life'. The unemployed young men with nothing to do but stand on street corners discussing topical issues were scornfully dismissed as ‘parlementaires debouts' (standing parliamentarians). Ask one of these how he was doing and the answer would never be the automatic ‘bien'. ‘Au rythme du pays', (in time
with the country) he would reply, with a shrug, or ‘au taux du jour' (at the day's rate), a reference to the national currency's unstoppable decline.

Returning from trips abroad, I never ceased to be amazed by how much further batteries I had assumed to be already near-exhaustion had sunk. I could measure it in the state of the taxi I hired on a daily basis and the mood of its owner François, the grumpiest, if most resourceful, driver in town. When I first arrived, his eighteen-year-old Fiat, a cast-off from a grateful Neapolitan businessman, was already nearing the end of its natural life. Too often, it needed to be push-started to coax it into action. The triumph of determination over logic, its seats had been eviscerated, its windscreen cracked in two places. Long gone were side mirrors, indicator lights, horn and windscreen wipers, which made driving in the rain particularly exciting. The electrically powered windows had to be manually heaved from their slots, the engine only started when three wires were twined together. At puddle level, the rusting bodywork was developing the delicate texture of lace. Front doors had a disconcerting tendency to fly open at high speed and sometimes had to be tied to the chassis with a rope made from knotted plastic bags.

Never light, François's spirits deteriorated in tandem with his car. Aware that an extra scratch or dent would now make little difference to the Fiat's roadworthiness, he paid only lip service to traffic regulations. His response to criticisms of his careless habits had become so aggressive, shocked bystanders would come to complain when I got in. As we clattered along at thirty miles per hour, the exhaust pipe occasionally trailing along the ground, François, who was plagued by stomach ulcers, would sit muttering darkly to himself: ‘This country is screwed,' shaking his head. ‘Who would want to buy it? Not even the Japanese. If I'd had any sense I'd have left long ago.'

The extent to which the nation was running on empty really came home to me during my regular trips to the Ministry of Information. The ministry was located on the nineteenth floor of a concave tower built, during the sweet days of international cooperation,
by a company run by the then French President Valéry Giscard D'Estaing's cousin. Across the continent, I have trudged, cursing, up the urine-scented stairs of such high-rise monoliths, dreamed up by men who modelled Africa's itinerary on their nation's own. Seemingly incapable of conceiving of a future worse than their hopeful present, the foreign engineers could not imagine the day when electricity would be spasmodic, spare parts impossible to find, maintenance a joke. But so it proved and there the hulking anomalies sit: twenty-storey cement monstrosities caught out by history; designed for air-conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting and smoothly operating lifts; marooned in countries heading back to pre-colonial times.

At the Ministry of Information it was always worth sending a scout ahead of time to find out whether the lifts were working that day. In any other country, you might also call ahead to find out if the man handling your documents was at his desk. But as a low-ranking Zairean official he did not boast a Telecel. One option was to stand at the bottom of the building and shout upwards until someone above heard your calls and established that your man was there. If you were unlucky, you then faced a painful climb up the dark stairwell, which doubled as a male lavatory. If you were lucky, tapping on the first-floor metal doors with a pair of keys would alert someone at the top to your presence, and they would send the lift down to collect you. Occasionally, the lift would be working but the lights were not. The solution on such days was a workman's lamp, solemnly handed from one passenger to another as they entered and left the lift.

At the top of the Ministry, there was always a refreshing breeziness. The air-conditioning did not work, but the windows were kept open and the air wafted through the building. Here you got a bird's eye view of the world. Toy cars could be seen driving along the Avenue 24 Novembre, people had become the size of tiny dolls and the layout of the nearby military barracks, the People's Palace and the modernistic sports stadium—two more foreign architectural gifts to a grateful President Mobutu—took on a new dimension.

But the detail that always stuck in my mind was a mundane one.
From up there what went virtually unnoticed at ground floor level emerged: a pattern of neat squares carved into the red earth. For kilometres around, all open spaces had been divided into carefully watered plots. On road verges, traffic islands, what should have been the lawns of the ministry itself, the distinctive spiky leaves of the cassava plant grew. This was a green city, but it was not greenery aimed at pleasing the eye. While Mobutu amused himself landscape gardening in Gbadolite, a nation on permanent Low Batt had no time for lawns. Preoccupied with the immediate problem of getting enough to eat, the residents had turned Kinshasa into one massive vegetable allotment.

To the north-east, the outline of a walled institution on the edge of the city centre could just be glimpsed. Constructed by the Belgians, it was a low-lying building whose main entrance was guarded by two men in beige uniforms. At street level their task seemed a tedious one—opening and closing the heavy metal gates with mind-numbing frequency. But closer investigation revealed the two to be armed with the kind of black rubber truncheons used by riot police. Their gaze was watchful and they scanned the crowd filtering through the entrance with care, on the lookout for inmates making a break for freedom.

These were no watchmen on duty at Kinshasa's Makala prison. This was the hospital once known as Mama Yemo and now called Kinshasa General Hospital. Their task was to physically restrain patients foolhardy enough to try and abscond without meeting their bills. For the cash-starved administration of the city's main hospital, non-payment was a luxury it simply could not afford. ‘We call it impounding the ill (‘séquestration des malades'),' explained Dr Henri Kasongo, head of emergency surgery at Mama Yemo. ‘All the hospitals do it, although they'll never admit to it. The guards have to be very alert, sorting out those who have been sick from those who are well. Often people will try to blend amongst the public at visiting time. There are lots of escapes because, to be honest, these hospitals have become like prisons.'

Equipped with 2,000 beds, Mama Yemo for a long time claimed the proud title of central Africa's biggest hospital. Mobutu clearly had a glorious future in mind when he named it after his mother and ordered a bronze bust of her to be placed on one of the paths running between the blue and white painted pavilions. As the ‘people's hospital', it was supposed to receive almost 50 per cent of the health budget, but the money never followed the good intentions. Supplies dwindled. Salaries, on the rare occasions when they were paid, fell to laughable levels. Sick mouvanciers would check into private clinics or, following Mobutu's example, fly to Switzerland in their private jets for treatment. Mama Yemo was left to fend for itself.

It was a situation, said Dr Kasongo, a tall man whose prominent jaw hinted at a certain pugnaciousness, that had led ineluctably to a condition not covered by the traditional medical textbooks: an overall hardening of the heart. ‘In the popular press we are portrayed as butchers, coldhearted and utterly ruthless. But without the crumbs we get from the patients the hospital would close down completely. So what is the alternative?'

From the outside, the situation did not look too bad. White egrets picked their way across the green lawns, looking for edible rubbish. Washed clothes spread on hedges to dry provided bright patches of colour. There were the usual gaggles of women bringing food in metal containers to their loved ones and signs banning rifles, prompted by one too many incidents involving wounded soldiers demanding priority treatment. A bullet hole in one wall bore witness to how insistent they could become.

But inside the wards, it became clear why even the staff openly referred to Mama Yemo as a ‘mouroir' (death chamber). Doors were splintering, the walls badly needed painting and there was no window netting to ward against malarial mosquitoes. Men and women, soldiers and civilians, suspected AIDS-carriers and the HIV-negative were mixed indiscriminately together, their narrow beds only inches apart. The air was pregnant with that acidic aroma you rarely notice in Western hospitals, where it is swamped by a layer of soap and disinfectant. A mixture of pus, warm flesh, urine, human secretions.
With its promise of possible infection, the sweetish smell clung to the hairs of the nostril, hovering hours after its source had been left far behind.

When it came to emergencies, heaven help those unlucky enough to be admitted
in extremis
, without friends and family on hand to offer instant cash. At one stage, the hospital used to keep a stock of drugs and supplies. But they vanished as patients supposed to reimburse the hospital once the emergency was over proved unequal to the task. ‘Now the doctor is in a dilemma—the patient has no money, the doctor sees that he is dying but he has no drugs or supplies. I probably lose two out of every ten patients admitted with serious problems that way,' admitted Kasongo.

Those with more time at their disposal knew what to expect: scalpels and sewing thread, plaster of Paris and rubber gloves—all must be brought before the doctor would lift a finger. And at the end, the guards at the gate were instructed not to let the patient out until what was delicately termed the ‘service de recouvrement' (recovery service) had ensured costs were covered. ‘A patient may end up owing a couple of thousand dollars. But how can a civil servant who is not being paid his salary afford that? So he will be physically prevented from leaving and usually after a month or so his family will have gathered enough money together to get him out.'

Those most vulnerable to such pressure were young mothers, whose new-born babies could quietly but firmly be kept in their cots till the bill was settled. ‘One woman spent two months here,' recalled Kasongo. ‘She had given birth and couldn't leave. Everyone was laughing about it.' A rival hospital, he said, had gone so far as to set up a special room for patients with outstanding debts as a way of streamlining the problem. ‘It's more convenient, as it frees up space. As a doctor, I don't want to have wards full of healthy people.'

Nothing could be taken on trust. At times the hospital acted as a pawnbroker, confiscating radios, watches or televisions as surety. ‘Patients will often claim they have nothing, that they are destitute. In that case, they will be asked if they have any possessions. If
one admits, say, that he has a television, we'll say, “OK then, bring that in.” '