In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (32 page)

What had become of the campaign to repatriate the exiles' stolen money, in particular the funds belonging to the most high-profile exile of them all, Mobutu? I asked him. The Congolese lawyer who initially dealt with the issue had never been paid, ‘in order to discourage him'. The dossier itself had been taken out of OBMA's hands by the Justice Ministry, which was suspected of planning to close OBMA down altogether. ‘There's a clear intention not to touch the assets of the mouvanciers,' he confessed.

Why such carelessness on the part of the institution that once vowed to clean out the Augean stables? Why was no one answering the letters sent by the Swiss and Belgian authorities? I found the answer in the padded office of Congo's friendly public prosecutor, reading what the latest incumbent assured me was the most recent paperwork drawn up in the Mobutu case. As the prosecutor fielded calls, I leafed through the four-page fax his successor had sent abroad in July 1997, the request for an asset freeze that at the time seemed to signal the start of something important, but now appeared to mark the high-point of an exercise in futility.

Mobutu, the head of state who had bled his country dry for thirty-two years, merited just five lines. His former aide Seti Yale, regarded by Congolese as one of the richest men in Africa, stood accused of misappropriating twenty-four state vehicles. Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Atumba, also known as the Terminator, came next,
accused of stealing eighteen cars. Here too was Kamitatu, charged with appropriating two embassy buildings in Tokyo. Curiously, former Prime Minister Kengo Wa Dondo, reckoned to rival only Seti in his wealth, had not been judged worthy of a separate entry. He featured only on the list of eighty-three mouvanciers whose accounts should be blocked.

Given this half-hearted effort, indeed, it seemed remarkable that foreign judicial authorities had taken any action at all. Was this, er, it? I inquired politely. ‘Well, we're leaving it to our friends abroad to fill out the details.' But, I said, I understood those officials were themselves waiting for Kinshasa to provide proof of criminal activity. A vicious circle seemed to be at work, with each side expecting the other to deliver. The prosecutor looked thoughtful. To be honest, he acknowledged, investigations had been disrupted from the start, ‘disrupted almost voluntarily'. Too much time had been allowed to elapse. Telexes had been delayed, files sent to the Justice Ministry never returned. He was still awaiting official approval for a trip he hoped to undertake to Switzerland and Belgium one day to pursue the affair. ‘There's a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the judicial system. Even the presidency doesn't seem to be interested.' He paused. ‘At the moment, we are following another path,' he said, and it was clear the ‘we' referred to Congo. ‘Given the desire for everyone to get on well together, this has become a secondary issue.'

Comprehension dawned. I had heard reports of an official softening in stance towards former Mobutu cadres. The planned trials of over forty mouvanciers in Makala prison had been quietly dropped. Instead, each had been allowed to buy his way out of jail—in some cases with a $1 million contribution—in exchange for letters informing them the state now considered their cases closed. Feelers were being extended to the exiles in Brussels and Paris to try and persuade them to return home. Names familiar from the Mobutu era were circulating again. Jonas Mukamba, the former MIBA head, had moved back into his villa in Binza. Bemba Saolona, the magnate who had flourished under Mobutu, would shortly be made Economy Minister, part of an attempt to woo his rebel leader son.

With rebels holding half the country and a hostile West turning its back on Democratic Congo, an isolated government could not afford to be fussy about its friends. The mouvanciers the AFDL had sworn to bring to justice were now welcome if they brought cash contributions, the support of their ethnic groups and a modicum of experience back with them. So who wanted a legal investigation that would expose how soiled the partners in this new marriage of convenience really were? Principle had been sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Or, in the more tactful phrase of the public prosecutor: ‘I think this is a dossier people want to forget in the name of national reconciliation.'

 

With investigations stalled
by an embattled government making the cynical accommodations it needed to stay in power, the task of establishing the most basic premise of all—the actual size of Mobutu's stolen fortune—remained unfinished.

I have never been able to track down the fabled teams of European and American lawyers Mulemba told me had been hired as detectives by the Congolese state. I have spoken to US Treasury officials, Swiss bankers and policemen, legal experts from the International Monetary Fund and British law firms who specialise in this kind of work and badgered the Congolese authorities themselves—but all to no avail. The apparent absence of legal expertise has not stopped Congolese opposition parties, human rights activists and debt campaigners from claiming a vast fortune lies hidden abroad, still tapped by the president's extended family. Mobutu's name features near the top of a list which embraces Marcos and Bhutto, Noriega and Suharto: Third World leaders whose swollen assets serve as shameful indictments of a bankrupt Western policy based on indulgence and appeasement. For the campaigners, the paltry $4 million unearthed by the Swiss banks is a sign of either institutional hypocrisy or wilful naivety. An operator as wily and as well connected as Mobutu, they argue, would never make the basic
mistake of depositing the bulk of his takings in his own name. ‘They launch an electronic search for “Mobutu” or for “Bobi Ladawa”. But you'd have to be crazy to keep accounts in those names!' scoffs Jean Ziegler, a writer and socialist Swiss MP who has dedicated his career to exposing the moral duplicity of the Swiss banking system. ‘If you set up an off-shore society, which sets up a trust fund, which opens an account in a fictional name, then that's not going to show up on the computers.'

And Mobutu certainly avoided using his own name when it came to sending money out of the country, often opening accounts and establishing shareholdings in the names of trusted relatives, employees and friends. The practice, with all its inherent risks, was exposed after the death of Litho Maboti, Mobutu's uncle and one of his financial frontmen. Clearly not sharing his parent's sense of loyalty, the son asked a US lawyer to help him seize funds held in his father's name.

Yet the more you scratch at the huge numbers cited by Mobutu's critics, the less appears to lie behind them. The $14 billion estimate given by the incoming Justice Minister Celestin Lwangi in 1997, for example, is immediately suspicious because of the way it exactly mirrors the amount Zaire today owes its foreign creditors. This financial parallel can be traced all the way back to 1982, when German banker Erwin Blumenthal asked Nguz Karl i Bond, Zaire's disaffected prime minister, how much he thought Mobutu had in his foreign bank accounts. Nguz ventured an estimate of $4 billion, on a par with the Bank of Zaire's estimate of the country's foreign debt at the time.

In a system of personalised presidential control, the premier's post did not bring much power with it. It certainly did not entail knowledge of Mobutu's bank accounts, as Nguz himself admitted in the report. But being able to source such a figure back to a prime minister—a supposed figure of authority—was a godsend for those trying to draw international attention to Mobutu's iniquities. The president could cancel an entire country's foreign debt with one personal cheque! The parallel was a seductively simple way of conveying a point about African corruption and Western complicity. As interest
payments went unpaid and Zaire's debt rose, the estimates of one man's personal hoard were similarly, automatically, upgraded: $4 billion, $6 billion, $8 billion, $14 billion. The authors of books on Zaire quoted the journalists, the journalists quoted the authors, the left-wing politicians quoted both, until eventually the sums became true by dint of sheer repetition.

The financial tandem is too neat to be convincing and it is noticeable that those who repeat the billion-dollar mantra rarely offer even the sketchiest of breakdowns. The most credible attempt has been made by Steve Askins and Carole Collins. Using leaked World Bank and IMF documents, they have logged some of the misplaced export earnings, the inflated presidential allowances, the nebulous spending on ‘other goods and services' that gobbled up hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

But their reports provide only partial, tantalising glimpses. Wary of those who might one day come snooping, a man by nature impatient with financial detail, Mobutu left the most insubstantial of paper trails. Commands were issued verbally, withdrawals from the central bank or state enterprises nominally authorised by subordinates. ‘He made sure his signature was never on a withdrawal slip,' remembers a political contemporary. ‘Nothing could ever be traced back to him.' Deprived of access to bank statements and shareholding certificates, the two US researchers wisely skirt shy of offering any independent estimate for the size of the remaining presidential treasure trove.

But can Mobutu's aversion to paperwork alone explain this uniform failure to quantify or locate a missing stash? My own belief is that the crudeness of the methods Mobutu used to divert sums through the years, the vulgar ostentation of Gbadolite, the cellars of Laurent Perrier stacked in the tropical African heat, are all in danger of blinding us, just as they did the Richardson delegation, to the central truth about his style of rule.

Mobutu was certainly no ascetic, but money was always a method, an instrument, the most effective of the techniques available when it came to maintaining, extending and preserving his power.
‘He never had the soul of a racketeer,' says son Nzanga. ‘For him money was simply a means to an end, a way of getting what he wanted.' For once son and aide are in agreement. ‘No one will ever lay their hands on a fortune, for the simple reason that it doesn't exist,' insists the Terminator. ‘Yes, Mobutu liked to do things in style. He felt he was the head of a great country and could live the good life. A lot of money went through Mobutu's hands. But it went through his hands and didn't stay.'

It was a clientilist system that gobbled cash. There were bribes to be paid to Western businessmen, politicians and journalists, wages for the DSP, donations to foreign guerrilla groups, gifts to generals, governors and opposition politicians. Even fairly trivial sweeteners, such as the Mercedes, Peugeots and jeeps provided to new ministers and their deputies, mounted up when repeated ad nauseam. A World Bank economist once calculated that if each vehicle cost $40,000, a reasonable guess given Zaireans' love of flashy cars, every new government team spent on average $4.8 million on vehicles. Multiply that by the fifty-one government cabinets Mobutu appointed and at a rough guess, $250 million was spent on Zaire's state cars alone between 1965 and 1990.

Mobutu's theft, concurs Kim Jaycox, the World Bank's former Africa supremo, was a measure not of greed but of political weakness: he needed the money to remain head of one of Africa's largest, most fractious states. ‘The country was kept together by the loyalty of the regional governors, who were essentially warlords. Mobutu was milking whatever cows he had and sending the money to these guys. It was a very, very expensive business. Which is why when people understood what was going on, they closed their eyes.' Seen in this light, the thieving becomes a crude form of pork-barrel politics as practised by a leader who, like many an African contemporary, never grasped the concept of state as distributor of national revenue. Those visits to the provinces, in which Mobutu promised a hospital here, a school there, and handed out brown envelope after brown envelope, ensured the loyalty of regional leaders did not wander and the unitary state survived.

The demands on his purse were huge. The US Treasury launched preliminary investigations into the matter when, in the early 1990s, Washington, Paris and Brussels briefly played with the idea of forcing political reform on Mobutu by freezing his foreign assets. The Treasury's assessment was that, in contrast with public perceptions, Mobutu in his last years had been outstripped by his generals—active in the diamond and oil trade—when it came to revenue-raising. ‘When we tried to get a hold on what he had, we found to our surprise that Mobutu was having serious cash flow problems,' said one official. ‘He was having problems paying his bills, maintaining his French properties and keeping his entourage happy. It suggested that his ability to plunder various state mechanisms had shrunk enormously as Gécamines and Miba had decayed. He had squandered huge amounts and not squirrelled it away as was supposed.'

The US Treasury came up with a figure of $40–45 million, an estimate that only involved real estate, the most visible and therefore quantifiable aspect of Mobutu's wealth. Interestingly, this is close to the sum Mobutu himself revealed to an interviewer when in 1988 he was asked the size of his fortune. Estimating it at under $50 million, he added: ‘What is that after twenty-two years as head of state of such a big country?' By 1997, there were even signs Mobutu was running out of spending money. Unable to maintain even his personal jet, he was reported to have pillaged funds set aside for the elections to pay for the Kisangani mercenary force. With his own survival in the balance, it seems unlikely he would have stinted on this had the cash been easily to hand.

When the subject of Mobutu's fortune arises, Nzanga rolls his eyes to heaven. Since going into exile he has received a letter from the AFDL asking for the return of $8 billion (‘Eight billion!' he snorts incredulously) and has fended off numerous overtures from enterprising Congolese claiming that as Mobutu's illegitimate children they deserve a share in his inheritance. He knows, better than anyone, the spell cast by the fabled billions. ‘There's so much hearsay. But it's all supposition which began with the Blumenthal report. I'm
no beggar, but I drive a ten-year-old car and I can't afford to go out and buy myself a plane. All we have is some real estate bought by Mobutu, which doesn't amount to a billion French francs. Yes, there are large sums in the accounts of important men. But it's not with us. Millionaires tend not to be very generous men, and my father was very generous.'