Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (65 page)

Perhaps the most nagging, persistent problem I have witnessed while researching and writing this book has been the lack of visionary, civic-minded leadership. The constant refrain from Congolese and foreigners alike is: Why do most Congolese political officeholders seem so morally bankrupt? If change can only come from Congolese themselves, how will this be possible?

On one of my trips back to the United States from the Congo, I spent time in a library reading Thomas Hobbes. The English philosopher, a founder of western political thought, was writing in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which devastated much of central Europe and caused the deaths of millions of civilians. That war was the result of a complex mixture of political competition, violent localism, ideology, and greed. Hundreds of different fiefdoms battled against each other, egged on by the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as by competition for power in the Holy Roman Empire. The war was notorious for its marauding bands of mercenary soldiers, who fought for the highest bidder and who laid waste to entire regions searching for bounty. Historians often use the Latin phrase
bellum se ipsum alet
to describe the phenomenon—the war feeds itself. This is a concept many Congolese commanders would understand.

Writing three years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Hobbes had good reason to be pessimistic about the state of nature, which he believed to be one of “war of man against man.” Life in this state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In view of this, it was in the common interest to forfeit individual rights to the state—the Leviathan, in Hobbes’s parlance—in return for protection. This was the first notion of a social contract, which justified a government’s rule and made it responsible to its citizens.

But the Congo does not have a Leviathan, a state that can protect its citizens or even impose a monopoly of violence. In contrast with the Thirty Years’ War, which helped produce the European system of nation-states, it is unlikely that the Congo wars will forge a strong state. As these pages have made clear, the story of the Congo wars is one of state weakness and failure, which has made possible the ceaseless proliferation of insurgent groups, still numbering around twenty-nine in late 2010. These armed groups fight brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that, as the United States discovered in Vietnam and Iraq, are not so much about controlling territory as about controlling civilians, who are brutalized in order to obtain resources and as retaliation for attacks by their rivals.

Congolese state and society have not always been so weak. In the fifteenth century, large kingdoms with sophisticated governance structures began forming in the savannahs in the center and west of the country. The Kongo kingdom, based in the far west along the Atlantic coast, at one point was able to field over 20,000 infantrymen and archers in battle, funded through an elaborate system of taxes, and had diplomatic representatives at the Portuguese, Spanish, and papal courts. The Lunda and Luba kingdoms, based in the center of today’s Congo, in the savannahs along the Angolan border, developed a successful model of government based on sacred kingship and local councils that spread through neighboring regions.

Since then, however, the Congo has been the victim of four hundred years of political disintegration. Starting in the sixteenth century, several million slaves were exported from the Congo by both European and Arab slave traders, sparking devastating wars between rival kingdoms over the lucrative trade as well as huge population shortages in parts of the country. Then, starting in the nineteenth century, Belgian colonial administrators dismembered what remained of most Congolese kingdoms, naming hundreds of new chiefs, severing ties between the rulers and their local councils, expropriating vast tracts of land, and allowing Belgian officials to take over many functions of the customary rulers. They created a colonial state whose purpose was to extract resources and—in its later days—provide basic services to the population, but this state was never intended to be accountable to its citizens. Unions, political parties, and other forms of mobilization were brutally suppressed by colonial authorities until the final days of their rule.

The colonial authorities then handed over government to a Congolese people almost wholly unprepared to manage their vast state. There were a handful of lawyers and university graduates in the country; under Belgian rule, no African could become an enlisted officer in the army, and all important positions in administration were held by white foreigners. At the same time, Belgian business interests and cold war politics led to the external backing of military strongmen and the repression of nationalist mobilization.

This historical legacy weighs heavily on the present. Since independence, the story of political power from Joseph Mobutu to Joseph Kabila has been about staying in power, not about creating a strong, accountable state. This is understandable. In the Congo, everything flows from political office: the best business deals, influence, and status. For those outside of power, there is scant opportunity to prosper. These rulers have treated strong public institutions as threats, eroding the capacity of the army so as to maintain tight control over key units and undermining an independent judiciary and parliament. The biggest fear of Mobutu’s and Kabila’s regimes has not been a foreign invasion—Mobutu was incredulous to the end that a neighboring country could oust him—but internal collapse. They feared even their own bodyguards and ministers would stab them in the back. The Congo of today is in some ways more similar to the sixteenthcentury Italy of Machiavelli—and its court intrigues comparable—than to any modern twenty-first-century state.

A central reason, therefore, for the lack of visionary leadership in the Congo is because its political system rewards ruthless behavior and marginalizes scrupulous leaders. It privileges loyalty over competence, wealth and power over moral character. Well-intentioned (albeit misguided) leaders like Wamba dia Wamba are spun to the outside of this centrifuge, while the more guileful ones stay at the center. Spend some time in the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, where politicians mingle and deals are struck, and you will realize that the welfare of the Congolese people is absent from their conversations, while court intrigues and battles for power are a matter of obsession.

This is not to say there is no ideology in the Congo. It is full of firebrand nationalists who are tired of the humiliation of being “the doormat of Central Africa, on which visiting armies clean their shoes,” as one friend griped. But the political system has failed to channel this ideology into responsible leadership. The only viable means of popular mobilization remains ethnicity, although even that has been gutted of much of its moral content by generations of customary rulers co-opted and repressed by the state. These ethnicity-based organizations, whether political parties or armed groups, mobilize for greater resources for their own narrow community, not for the public good. This in turn fuels corrupt systems of patronage, whereby ethnic leaders embezzle public funds in order to reward their supporters.

In Europe, states were forged through war, trade, and technology. The rulers who could not raise enough taxes to fund large standing armies were ultimately overthrown. War required taxes, which in turn spawned large bureaucracies to gather and administer the revenues.

In the Congo, there has been little pressure on rulers to create strong armies or bureaucracies. For years, Mobutu relied on outside help to put down rebellions, calling on South African mercenaries and Moroccan, Belgian, and French soldiers, whom he could pay in cash or commodities. He had little need to create a strong administration—which could then become a breeding ground for political opposition—as he could get plenty of revenues from the copper mines and foreign donors. Joseph Kabila has largely privatized the economy and has strengthened tax collection, but he is wary about creating a strong rule of law that could tie his hands. Even the violence in the Kivus region, which continues until today, has not prompted major reforms in his army or police; he has preferred to co-opt dissent rather than to promote an impartial, disciplined security service. And instead of business elites demanding greater accountability and less corruption from the government, they are often themselves dependent on patronage from Kinshasa.

No one factor has produced the kleptocratic, venal political elite. Certainly social and educational issues also play a role. But it is clear that political elites react to incentives and that no meaningful reform will result as long as these incentives are skewed against the creation of strong institutions. Buoyed by foreign support and revenues from copper, oil, and diamonds, the government feels little need to serve its citizens and promote sustainable development. Why empower nettlesome parliaments, courts, and auditing bodies if they will just turn around and harass you?

This state of affairs should force foreign donors to think more carefully about contributing billions of dollars to development in the Congo without pondering the long-term repercussions. The donors—mainly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom—usually insist that this money is politically neutral, that it does not directly benefit the political elite. This is true, as most of the money is for schools, roads, health care, and water projects. But all development is deeply political. By taking over the financing of most public services, donors take pressure off the Congolese government to respond to the needs of its citizens. Ultimately, the rule of law will be created not through a capacity-building project in the ministry of finance but through a power struggle between the government, local elites, and business circles. Donors need to figure out how to most responsibly insert themselves in this dynamic and not just pave roads, build hospitals, and reform fiscal systems.

But why should we help at all? First, because it is not just an act of joint humanity. We owe it to the Congolese. Most obviously because of the centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation of rubber, copper, and diamonds, which benefited western companies and helped build Belgian cities. Those past injustices should be reason enough for feeling a moral debt toward the country, but we don’t need to go so far. Most of the foreign companies operating in the Congo today are listed on stock exchanges, are incorporated in Europe or North America, or obtain their financing from banks based in those countries. Many of these companies are engaging in questionable behavior that would be proscribed in their home countries. Big mining companies have signed contracts that provide little revenue to the state and have allegedly provided large kickbacks to government officials. Smaller trading companies buy minerals from the eastern Congo without scrutinizing the origins of their shipments to make sure they are not funding armed groups. So we should do what we can to allow the Congolese to benefit from their riches, not be held back by them.

This is not to say that the war has been fueled by western governments eager to get their hands on Congolese riches. There is little evidence for that. It is certainly true that many companies, Congolese and foreign, have benefited enormously from the conflict. Nevertheless, for the most part it was small, junior outfits that made a fortune—the conflict postponed major industrial mining and investment for over a decade. Similarly, while some western diplomats flourished through their corrupt dealings in the Congo, it would be wrong to flip causality on its head and say that western businesses and diplomats caused the war. For the most part, the mining companies go where profit margins take them, and the embassies in Kinshasa do their mandated job of helping them. The problem has been one of regulatory failure; of mining cowboys allowed to get away with mass fraud, hiding behind shell companies registered in Caribbean islands and working the corrupt stratosphere of Congolese politics; and of western governments not caring about the behavior of their companies once they leave their borders.