Zaire remains Africa's heart of darkness

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 9, 1996 by Carole Collins

Diplomatic correspondent Carole Collins first reported from Zaire for NCR in 1985-86. In September she returned for nine weeks, visiting Zaire's riverside capital of Kinshasa, the refugee-packed regions of Zaire's eastern Kivu provinces, the diamond-rich central area of Mbuji-Mayi and the southern city of Lubumbashi.

KINSHASA, Zaire -- Perhaps nowhere is the axiom "the more things change, the more they remain the same" more true than in the poverty-stricken central African nation of Zaire, home to more than 42 million people, more than half of them Catholic.

Five years after massive public protests forced President Mobutu Sese Seko to agree to free elections, Zaireans are still mired in an indefinite transition to democracy amid what a Reuters dispatch termed an "apparently terminal economic decline."

An eight-week trip across this vast land the size of the United States east of the Mississippi is enough to challenge even the firmest believers in democracy as a panacea for political conflict or economic woes.

Zaire's 1960 independence crisis brought U.N. intervention to sub-Saharan Africa to deal with civil unrest for the first time. Since then, it has become a textbook example of how corruption can bring a government to the verge of collapse -- and of what happens to ordinary people when that occurs.

It's a government downsizer's dream turned to nightmare.

To visit the country that Joseph Conrad once called the "heart of darkness" is to enter a vast land of remarkable beauty and rampant corruption, incredible poverty and spiritual vitality. Many Zaireans told NCR they despaired of being able to end either the corruption impoverishing their lives or the endless political games in Kinshasa sapping their hopes. But others believe that Zaire's emerging civil society -- a lively mix of grassroots development, women's and human rights groups -- is beginning to better people's lives and nurture a new politics of accountability.

To visit Zaire is to enter a world of cannibal capitalism, where most public services and any logic of economic growth and expanding productivity have ceased to operate. Zaire's economy has shrunk more than 40 percent since 1988, and its 1993 per capita gross domestic product -- a modest $117 -- was 65 percent lower--than in 1958, just prior to independence.

Almost all Zaireans and foreign observers agree that a major source of the country's economic and social crisis is the extensive corruption cultivated during three decades of misrule by Mobutu and his closest cronies. This corruption has effectively bankrupted the public sector, crippling its ability to provide essential public services, from repairing roads to running schools and hospitals, or even pay its workers. In October faculty, at the University of Kinshasa -- officially entitled to a salary if $12 a month struck to protest not being paid for more than a year.

Zaire's Catholic church, along with other religious groups, has not been immune to such corruption and maladministration. Last February a major Kinshasa daily reported that several European church groups had refused to fund development projects through Zaire's Catholic episcopal conference due to misspending of earlier funding. At the same time, the church has played a key role in helping thousands to survive after they had been abandoned by disintegrating public structures.

Struggle for survival

On a continent not known for tidy, urban public spaces, the piles of rotting garbage and sludge-filled open sewers in Zaire's capital city of Kinshasa are truly remarkable. So is the lack of hygiene at Kinshasa's largest public market, where this wary shopper had to edge carefully around large areas of slime. "The situation in which people now live is worse than that of a war," Bruno Lokuta Lyengo, vice president of the human rights group Voix de Sans Voix (Voice for the Voiceless) later told NCR. "People are dying of famine, of malaria. Diseases we once eradicated have now reemerged. Yet this situation is supposedly 'normal.'"

Equally remarkable is the extent of neglect of Zaire's roads. At independence, cars crossed the country in six days. Today, if one gets through at all, it takes three months. Most rural roads are virtually unusable, but cities fare little better. On the main street of Bukavu in eastern Zaire, traffic resembles a surreal dance as cars careen in all directions to avoid innumerable tire-puncturing potholes. In central Zaire's Mbuji-Mayi, many roads turn into virtual riverbeds when it rains. One road ends in a steep cliff just outside town. Travelers must climb down a 50-foot ravine to reach the other side, where a small unit of soldiers often awaits them with pretexts for seizing their goods.

Trying to communicate with the outside world -- or elsewhere in Zaire -- is akin to being lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Most cities lack working public telephone systems. Few people can afford to use expensive cellular phones (at $12 a minute) or two-way radios. Most Kinshasa-based daily newspapers rarely cover what happens outside the capital, so few people know of events in other regions. "Kinshasa is as far as Europe to us," a development worker from the eastern Zaire town of Goma told NCR after recounting the difficulty of communicating with both.