Congo (66 page)

On Christmas Day 1979, under the watchful eye of the IMF, one of the most remarkable monetary measures in the country’s history took place: the depreciation of the zaïre. To combat inflation, all citizens were summoned to bring their five- and ten-zaïre notes—the highest denominations known till then—to the bank and exchange them for new ones. In late 1976 there were 59,000 five-zaïre notes in circulation; by late 1979 there were 363,000, six times as many. The result was inflation. Currency is to an economy what oil is to a motor: too little of it is not good, but too much is not good either.
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In addition to inflation, hoarding had also become a problem. In a vast country with a shaky economy like Congo’s, almost no one wanted or was able to put money in the bank. People stashed it away in suitcases, pillows, or jugs. Didace Kawang, an actor to whom I once gave a master class in playwriting, told me about his uncle, who had been a successful merchant in Lubumbashi: “He did business with Zambia. The banknotes came in through the big gates. He had piles and piles of them. He bound them together in
brikken
, bundles the size of a brick, wrapped with a rubber band. He had a mattress made of money. Really! He slept on it!”
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The IMF bankers knew that it is extremely unhealthy for a national economy when there is more money in circulation (in the form of coins and bills) than there is in the banks. They knew the big theories: money in the bank is used to provide new loans; money used as a mattress doesn’t help the economy one little bit. To combat hoarding, therefore, they rolled out a process of currency depreciation. Anyone who turned in his banknotes on Christmas Day 1979 would be given new ones, at least for half the amount brought in. The other half had to be placed in a bank account. It was a clever way to bring a lot of “dead” money back to life and at the same time to deal with inflation. The move was intentionally announced at the last minute and lasted only one day, to keep people from fleeing abroad with their cash. The border crossings were closed and even the country’s airspace was shut down. Zaïre was going to freshen up in a monetary jiffy, in order to reappear spic and span in the international footlights. But the country was far too vast for such a lightning operation.

“My uncle had no choice but to put his savings in the bank too,” Didace said. “But they had reserved only one day for that. There was a huge line. People came in dragging sacks full of money. The sun went down and my uncle still hadn’t been able to turn in his bills. All his piles of banknotes became worthless . . . . In one swoop, he was poor as a church mouse. He died in his native village.” And he was not the only one, not by a long shot. Many of those who lived too far from a bank or who did not understand what the operation was about lost all their savings, while in Mobutu’s circles everyone had been briefed beforehand and had taken steps long before.

Not only was there something awry with the practical side of the IMF measures, but the basic philosophy was skewed as well. After the stock-market crash of 1929, the fund had dealt with the excesses of unbridled market thinking; by 1975, however, the IMF itself had evolved into one of the great heralds of free enterprise. Almost all its officials were firmly convinced that the creation of favorable market conditions was enough to jump-start a national economy, regardless of the local culture, the state of the economy or the governmental structure. Here too, a form of macroeconomic blindness reigned. As long as the government kept its distance, the invisible hand would do its work; that was the institution’s mantra. No one had an eye for the pace and sequence of the needed changes.
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The whole package was imposed at once, in the form of programs for “structural adjustment.” For these zealots of liberalization, all forms of poverty reported to them afterward (for they rarely entered the field themselves) could be blamed on the defective implementation of their infallible, yea, holy formulae.

The Zairian currency was devalued no less than six times: in 1975 it was still worth two dollars, by 1983 only three cents.
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Those devaluations were intended to stimulate international trade. As part of its “structural adjustments” the IMF demanded a drastic reduction in government spending and far-reaching privatizations. Governmental and semigovernmental enterprises had to be slimmed down and operated with greater autonomy. The infrastructure and production had to improve.

In the early 1980s the IMF’s prescription seemed to be taking effect. Inflation was indeed tempered and the economy seemed to be achieving a higher degree of organization. The charts were looking good. The Paris Club creditors breathed a sigh of relief and hoped that perhaps their loans really would be paid back. On nine separate occasions they voted for a program of debt relief. But on the ground, things turned out quite differently. As is often the case with IMF interventions, success was short-lived: inflation resumed after a time, poverty rose. The per capita GNP fell dramatically from six hundred dollars in 1980 to two hundred in 1985.
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People ate less; infant mortality was high. Onions were cut into quarters before they were sold.
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Slim down the public sector? The ranks of the civil service were reduced from 444,000 to 289,000; the number of schoolteachers from 285,000 to 126,000.
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That was, indeed, one way to combat inflation, but it meant that thousands of families ended up with no income. The civil service and the schools had been the country’s last major employers.

Cut back on spending? Government funding for education and health care was reduced, so that those with no money at all suddenly had to pay for their own children’s schooling and their visits to the doctor. The charts didn’t show it, but it was the poorest of the poor who paid most dearly for the IMF’s well-intentioned measures, while the international funding kept Mobutu firmly in the saddle.
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Measures to jump-start foreign trade? As long as Mobutu failed to use the available funding to restore the country’s infrastructure, Zaïre could only become more dependent on imports. The country had all it needed, for example, to again become a major coffee producer, but in the cities people drank only imported instant coffee. Little wonder: of the 140,000 kilometers (about 87,000 miles) of passable roads that had existed in 1960, only 20,000 kilometers (12,400 miles) were left.
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The IMF was out to reorganize the country, but in fact dismantled it. Zaïre became nothing more than a sales outlet and would remained that way for decades to come.

In 2008 I once spent an afternoon beside the Congo River in the old port of Boma. Swallows zigzagged across the water. Fishermen paddled out in the canoes to inspect their nets. It could have been 1890—until a huge cargo ship came sailing past. It was on its way from Matadi to the ocean. The ship rode high on the water. At the back, close to the prop, I could even see the keel. The ship was empty, completely empty. With the exception of a few spare containers, it was carrying nothing at all. I was reminded of Edmund Morel, who had watched a century earlier as the ships entered Antwerp’s harbor loaded with rubber and ivory from Congo, but left again empty. To Morel, the difference between ships riding high or low in the water was proof that the Free State was not engaged in commerce, but in plunder. The difference in draft I noted suggested that free trade, as roundly promulgated for decades by the prophets of the international economic institutions, could be a form of plunder as well.

I
N THE
1980s Mobutu became a tired, somber man who seemed to draw little pleasure from his duties. After the deaths of his mother and his first wife, no one in his immediate surroundings had any control over him. His new wife, Bobi Ladawa, and her twin sister, who was also Mobutu’s mistress, never had the same impact as
mama
Yemo or
mama-présidente
Marie-Antoinette, his first spouse. Mobutu had been very fond of his old, mettlesome mother. Her death weighed heavily on him. His wife Marie-Antoinette had also been an outspoken character who had stubbornly refused to give up her Christian name. For a long time she had had a restraining effect on her husband’s tomfoolery. But now Mobutu had expelled his cabinet chief, Bisengimana Rwema, and his personal physician, the American William Close, had left the country.

Mobutu became a lonely man who grew more melancholy with each passing day. He seemed to fall prey to the longing for excess that marks all those for whom life holds no more surprises. In Europe he bought one chic property after the other. He owned a dozen castles, storage spaces, and residences in the wealthy Brussels boroughs of Ukkel and Sint-Genesius-Rode. He owned a luxurious, eight-hundred-square-meter (nearly 8,500-square-foot) apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, Savigny Castle close to Lausanne, Switzerland, a palazzo in Venice, a sumptuous villa on the French Riviera, an equestrian estate in the Portuguese Algarve, and a series of hotels in West Africa and South Africa, not to mention his luxury yacht on the Congo.
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But the most incredible of all his residences was, without a doubt, Gbadolite. In the middle of the jungle in his native region, close to the border with the Central African Republic, he had a city built, complete with banks, a post office, a well-equipped hospital, a hypermodern hotel, and a landing strip that could accommodate the Concorde. (Zizi Kabongo: “That’s right, as a journalist I once took the Concorde from Gbadolite to Japan.”) A cathedral was added, with a crypt that was to serve as the family grave, and a Chinese village with pagodas and imported Chinese people. The crowning glory was Mobutu’s opulent, 15,000-square-meter (158,400-square-foot) palace. The mahogany doors were seven meters (nearly twenty-three feet) high and inlaid with malachite. The walls were covered with Carrara marble and silk tapestries. Crystal chandeliers, Venetian mirrors, Empire furniture: no expense was spared, no luxury was too excessive. There were Jacuzzis, massage rooms, a swimming pool, and a beauty parlor. Mrs. Mobutu had a walk-in closet fifty meters (over 160 feet) long where she hung her extensive collective of French couture, some one thousand creations in all. Beneath the building itself, thousands of top French vintages lay gathering dust (if not actually going sour in the tropical climate). There was a discotheque for the children and a bomb shelter for the family.
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The fountains scattered around the grounds splashed around the clock and were lit at night—in a region that had almost no electrical network. Mobutu threw state banquets for thousands of guests where the pink champagne—his favorite beverage—flowed freely and the suckling pigs lay grinning with an orange in their mouths.

“He had the great chefs of France and Belgium flown in,” recalled Kibambi Shintwa, a man who still retained his “authentic” name. Shintwa had worked as a reporter for the
présidence
from 1982 and was closely acquainted with Mobutu. “After years of hard work, he started taking it a little easier. He enjoyed good food and good restaurants. But he also derived a lot of pleasure from giving to others. He was extremely generous.” That generosity, however, was functional. “He always felt the need to remind others that he was the chief. He wanted to display his power.”
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Mobutu’s corruption was so shocking that it caused a long-forgotten term to resurface in the English language: kleptocracy. The unforgettable Jamais Kolonga had witnessed it firsthand. After his short-lived adventure as sawmill owner, he went to work for Miba, the national diamond enterprise in Kasai. “Oh, but I visited Gbadolite often. I usually went along with the great Mibaas Jonan Mukamba to see the president. Every time we went I had to carry an attaché case and hand it to the president when we met. Here you are! A briefcase full of diamonds, that was.”
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But kleptocracy was only part of the story. It was also a “giftocracy”: Mobutu stole in order to share and so ensure his popularity. No one left Gbadolite emptyhanded, or so the saying went. A few hundred dollars, a valise full of zaïres, a cigar box full of diamonds: Mobutu always had a gift ready for his guests.

“Mobutism” and the cult of personality that went along with it had already made clear the boundless nature of Mobutu’s vanity. Of the seventy-nine series of banknotes printed during his regime, seventy-one bore his likeness.
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But in the 1980s his narcissism became nothing short of pathological. No one knew that better than the Flemish tailor Alfons Mertens, who I met in a well-to-do residential area in Antwerp province. A good-natured family man he had never dreamed that he would become directly involved in world history, but he worked for Arzoni in Zellik (close to Brussels), the company that made the world’s chicest
abacosts
and so became a brand name in Zaïre, like Dior or Versace. Mertens was such a skilled tailor that in 1978 he became Mobutu’s private couturier. “Between 1978 and 1990 I traveled to Kinshasa more than a hundred times. I always stayed at the Intercontinental. Mobutu would have me come in to take the measurements of Air Zaïre’s pilots and stewardesses, or of his army generals. When his son was promoted to the rank of sublieutenant, I had to design a dress uniform and a ceremonial uniform for his entire class at the military academy: twenty-seven cadets in all. I often made clothes for Mobutu himself, including his civilian dress. His wife or mistress would pick the material, my boss would draw the pattern, I took the sizes. The Mobutus always went for extremely costly materials, like natural silk, wild silk. His sizes didn’t change much. He was tall, almost one meter eighty [five feet ten inches], but he never wore anything bigger than a size 54. He was a fine man. You had to meet him a few times before you won his trust, but after that he was nice person.”