In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (23 page)

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.

The transfer was made too late for the IMF deadline and, to the annoyance of the officials on the ground who had engineered it, headquarters decided to suspend the programme. A furious Mobutu, who clearly felt he had made a major personal sacrifice, accused the IMF of having lied to him. When it relented and tried to put a new deal together, he told the Fund, to general amazement, to take a running jump. ‘One thing the Fund does not like is to be told to go to hell. It was seen as an insult,' remembered Goreux. So a face-saving solution was put together, whereby funds granted under the new programme would quietly be deposited into a special account established on Zaire's behalf in Washington. But Mobutu continued to
sulk. Goreux searched around desperately for politicians friendly enough with Mobutu to mollify him. It was only when Jacques Chirac, French Prime Minister at the time, agreed to put in a personal telephone call that the president relented. He could present himself to the Zairean people as the man who had defied the international institutions, while still benefiting from an aid programme.

The image of the Fund going on bended knee to beg one of the world's most corrupt leaders to take its money is not an attractive one. It may help explain why in 1987 David Finch, an Australian economist heading the IMF trade and finance department, resigned over the granting of a new loan, claiming the US had applied undue pressure. The programme staggered along, although it was now a tattered, pitiful scrap of a thing. Kengo had been sacked, and trust in Mobutu's good intentions had shrivelled.

The IMF and World Bank were not the only institutions falling victim to Mobutu's tricks. In 1988, for example, Zaire negotiated a $120 million loan from the African Development Bank. The sum was earmarked for petroleum imports to help the country weather a fuel crisis, and it was granted largely because Cleophas Kamitatu, Finance Minister at the time, was one of the bank's founding members.

Soon after the deal was signed, Kamitatu remembers being summoned by the central bank governor, who told him the president wanted a $40 million cut to cover ‘the needs of sovereignty'. Both men's signatures were legally required to authorise the transfer, so when Kamitatu refused, Mobutu telexed over a presidential edict ruling that in future, only the governor's signature would be necessary. Kamitatu was dismissed soon after. ‘My successor signed everything,' he wryly recalled.

But the game could not go on for ever. As the economy shrank, the huge bite being taken out by the presidency became more and more painfully obvious. With Mikhail Gorbachev's
perestroika
transforming the Soviet Union, the old Cold War imperatives were fading. Democracy was sweeping across Africa and Mobutu was moving from irreplaceable ally to embarrassment.

In early 1989, another hole in state finances appeared and this time it was too big to ignore: $600–700 million. Jaycox held one last meeting with Mobutu. Previously, their encounters had been conducted before the cameras. Now that relations had turned sour, the president preferred the presidential yacht. This was the only place Mobutu felt safe. Casting off the moorings, he would float midstream, armed guards scouring the horizon, helicopter at the ready.

It was a stand-off Jaycox was scarcely in a state to dominate, having previously caught the tropical disease, giardia. ‘I was sick as a dog. I'd been losing weight and had to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes. We were out on that boat and he was making fun of my discomfort. Occasionally he would threaten to throw me to the crocodiles, in a joking way.'

Confronted with the massive financial anomaly, Mobutu's approach—perhaps not surprising given past indulgence—was unapologetic. ‘He wanted us to just get over it,' recalled Jaycox with a bemused laugh. ‘We were expected to fix it. We documented the gap. He kept talking about his “soldier's word”. I indicated that I thought his word was totally worthless—that was the level of discussion we were having—as far as I was concerned his credibility had completely evaporated, the only question now was whether we were going to allow our credibility to follow his down the tubes.'

Mobutu had been given a last warning—but once again he might have been forgiven for assuming his interlocutors were bluffing. In June 1989, US voters elected George Bush, a former CIA chief and long-standing Mobutu supporter, as their new president. The Zairean leader was, amazingly, the first African head of state invited to stroll the lawns with Bush.

The slippages continued. Mobutu was turning sixty, an event he planned to mark by hosting a Francophone summit and major festivities. He was taking the cash he needed for the event from the export receipts of Gécamines, whose restructuring the World Bank was funding. A World Bank letter highlighting these discrepancies triggered an outraged response from Mobutu, who forbade its officials
from communicating with Gécamines without government permission. In March 1990, the weary World Bank decided to call it a day and Jerome Chevallier, its resident representative, was asked to act as messenger. ‘I went to deliver the letter to Mobutu in the town of Kindu. We'd always had very cordial relations—he would usually address me with the familiar “tu”,' he remembered. ‘But now he used “vous”. “Vous faites du très mauvais travail ici,” (“you are doing very bad work here”) he told me.' Soon after, Chevallier asked to be transferred, feeling ‘anything' could now happen in a country on the verge of an economic precipice.

If the funding of small projects sputtered on, structural adjustment was over, the first time in World Bank history a programme had been suspended with a functioning African government. Even after a series of experiences that could be expected to leave the Bretton Woods institutions allergic to the very mention of Mobutu, there were to be spasmodic attempts to relaunch the aid programme. As foolish an example, surely, of institutional inertia as it is possible to find, they were this time quashed by officials who had, somewhat belatedly, decided to act on Erwin Blumenthal's advice.

 

Give or take
a few doubts about timing, the overriding tenor of my interviews with IMF and World Bank veterans was simple: ‘I regret nothing.' Was it really an acceptable answer?

The pragmatic line of argument is that, unappetising as the experience was to prove, Western self-interest made indulging Mobutu worthwhile. ‘If we had tried to attach 1990s governance conditionalities to Mobutu, we would have been calling for his overthrow,' says Chester Crocker. ‘If we had asked him to turn off the taps, his own people would have toppled him. We would, in effect, have been calling for a
coup
. I'm sure of that.'

But a military putsch in Zaire was only a disastrous prospect if you accepted the premise that there was no better alternative to Mobutu. Many would argue that the West was always overly ready to
accept Mobutu's assessment of himself as sole performer on a puzzlingly empty political stage, an impression he conveyed by either scaring his rivals into exile or buying their loyalties. By supporting Mobutu so openly, the West helped bring about that scenario. Sitting in Washington, the economists and politicians never registered how fundamentally their support shored up the domestic image of Mobutu as a kind of malign demi-god, foisted on Zaire by inscrutable alien powers. Dulled since Leopold to the notion of outside forces determining their fate, a defeatist population became convinced he could only be ousted by external intervention.

‘When are the Americans going to take Mobutu away?' a parliamentary deputy once asked me as the sun was setting over the People's Palace in Kinshasa at the end of yet another day of pointless wrangling. ‘Why can't they come in with their helicopters, like they did in Panama?' The idea that, as a member of the political establishment, it was up to him and his peers to take responsibility for Mobutu's removal had clearly never occurred to him.

Idealists take a different tack, arguing that however faulty the record of Western aid, engaging with Mobutu was a moral obligation. Dictators, supporters of this argument say, thrive in isolation and although much may be stolen on the way, cajoling autocratic leaders to liberalise their economies, open their countries to world trade and set up the institutions associated with accountable government can end up weakening them more dramatically than any amount of foreign disapproval. And what, after all, is the alternative?

‘Do we watch a generation of Zaireans go down the drain?' asks Kim Jaycox. ‘Is that the smart option? Does that resonate as being wise? Not to me. Looking back, these were good gambles, these were the kind of gambles these institutions were designed to take.'

The problem is that a generation of Zaireans
was
effectively lost, notwithstanding all that goodwill. To cite just a few World Bank statistics, Congo's economy has now shrunk to the level of 1958, while the population has tripled. Average life expectancy is fifty-two, 80 per cent of the population is employed in ‘subsistence activities'; illiteracy is growing; AIDS is rife and such diseases as bubonic plague and
sleeping sickness are enjoying a vibrant comeback. By the end of the century the government's annual operating budget for what is potentially one of Africa's richest states was dipping below the daily takings of the US superstore Wal-Mart. It is hard to see how, if the World Bank and IMF had boycotted Zaire early on, the situation could have been more disastrous. As debt campaigners in the West point out, the Congolese can now rightly question why they should be asked to repay a penny of the loans made to a man notorious for his dishonesty, which so signally failed to deliver any of the benefits they were promised.