A cautionary tale of an African ‘radical’ who fleeced a nation

ONCE upon a time in a central African country called Zaire reigned a man who went by the name of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.

He was an extraordinary political survivor who clung to power for more than three decades despite concerted efforts, from within and outside the Great Lakes region’s powerhouse, to have him removed.

Mobutu had come to power by conspiring with the CIA and other foreign government agencies to have his country’s first prime minister, the pan-Africanist Patrice Lumumba, illegally ousted from office and assassinated.

But even though Mobutu “won” the power struggle with Lumumba, he never really knew peace.

His government grew increasingly unpopular with every economic crisis visited upon the country that, before he took charge, was known as Congo.

Although Mobutu had been critical of Lumumba’s leftist economic programmes when the latter was still in power — arguing that these chased away much-needed Belgian and other Western investors — he now preached a populist national ideology he termed “Mobutuism”.

It professed to be a form of radical economic transformation, whose main objective would be to unshackle the mineral-rich country from the yoke of a colonial economy that benefited Europeans and left very little for the locals to share.

To implement Mobutuism, he came up with Goal 80 — a sort of national development plan that would have taken 10 years to achieve.

According to this plan, the state would build Inga Dam into the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam; industrialise the country; double copper production; and invest in mining in Lubumbashi and Kisangani.

But the country was broke and depended heavily on the World Bank to fund these projects. The World Bank, though supportive of his government, refused to fund Goal 80 as it would be too costly for the country.

The bank and other Western backers of the Mobutu regime were increasingly concerned about his reckless use of state money to fund vanity projects.

He had already turned his tiny rural hometown of Gbadolite into one of the country’s most developed cities by building himself three large palaces, an international airport and a hydroelectric dam there at great cost to the fiscus.

As a result of the palaces and all the luxury that came to be associated with the town, Gbadolite came to be known as the “Versailles of the Jungle”. Today the town stands in ruins as a monument to Mobutu’s corruption.

But despite strong misgivings about his kleptocratic and dictatorial tendencies, Mobutu was an important African ally for the West in a world that was still deeply divided along Cold War lines.

So US banks, particularly the US government’s Export-Import Bank, extended Mobutu credit to carry on with his spending programme.

But all this did was to push Zaire into further debt, crippling the economy even further. So Mobutu came up with another “radical” concept to whip up nationalist spirit in the country and draw the population’s attention away from the cause of the economic hardship. “Authenticity”, he named it. Gone was Joseph-Désiré, as the head of state decreed that he would now be known by the name Mobutu Sese Seko.

Although for much of the 1960s his government had sought to protect and promote the interests of settlers and foreign investors who owned property in Zaire, Mobutu now introduced “Zairianisation” which included the expropriation of factories and land in the hands of Europeans and other expatriates.

But in all this radical economic transformation, the masses gained nothing but growing poverty and suffering.

The biggest beneficiaries were the political elites aligned to the head of state, his party and his family.

The economy collapsed some more, causing Mobutu to once again turn to the West for help. The nationalised and “Zairianised” businesses were soon sold back to foreigners.

By the time Mobutu was forced out of power and Zaire changed its name to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the central African state had become one of the poorest countries in the world. And its people have lived unhappily ever after.

At the time Mobutu was busy pauperising his nation, his praise-singers were exalting his great survival skills and calling him a master tactician. But history will not be kind to him. History will remember him as a man who betrayed a dream and destroyed a fabulously minerals-rich country that could have anchored the start of the post-colonial economic revolution in the Great Lakes region and in Africa.

What Mobutu’s story teaches us is that we should always be careful of economic transformation radicals of convenience; politicians who use nice-sounding but empty political slogans to hoodwink the population while lining their own pockets.

Be wary of the modern-day Mobutu Sese Sekos.

Msomi is the deputy editor of the Sunday Times. Barney Mthombothi will resume his column next week