What Mobutu Did Right
Foreign Policy (blog) - 4 hours ago

Sixteen years after the late President Mobutu Sese Seko fled Zaïre,
since renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, his mismanagement of
the country, dubbed a "kleptocracy," continues to dominate analyses of
his 32-year tenure among scholars and
journalists. Through this lens, Mobutu's reign was characterized by
the rampant corruption of a government engineered solely to benefit
him and his friends. It is true that in the final analysis, Mobutu
squandered Congo's potential and resources, and tended to treat the
national treasury like his private checking account. As a construct,
however, the "kleptocracy" perspective is devoid of policy meaning and
context, and presumes a lack of vision, planning, and state-building
or nation-building initiatives. It reduces Congo to a caricature. Any
analysis that bases its entire argument on Mobutu's patronage system
is bound to ignore the merits and gains of the Mobutu years and come
to the wrong conclusions about Congo's current tribulations and its
prospects for the future. Most importantly, such discourse sets the
lowest expectations, standards, and benchmarks for international
engagement in Congo today.
James A. Robinson, a Harvard University professor and co-author of Why
Nations Fail, falls into this trap in his recent Legatum Institute
reportCuring the Mal Zaïrois: Is Congo Finally Getting Its Act
Together?
An abridged version of that study ran on Democracy Lab in December
2013. At the outset, Robinson seeks to establish Mobutu's patrimonial
system as the primary reason for the near collapse of the Congolese
state and the current political leadership deficit, which sustains the
government's failure to provide basic services to the people and
protect Congo's territorial integrity. The country appears to be on
autopilot, bumping from crisis to crisis. But Mobutu has been gone for
16 years, the equivalent of four U.S. presidential terms. The
responsibility for the present governance crisis and insecurity rests
with today's leadership.
Today, Congo is embroiled in a conflict in the eastern provinces, an
outgrowth of the 1998 War, which was so broad, complex, and violent
that it's sometimes called "the African World War." Meanwhile, the
government wraps itself in the macroeconomic discourse of the Bretton
Wood institutions, touting GDP growth rates as proof of successful
economic reforms. Still, for all the positive indexes and steady
revenue flow, there are no signs of prosperity and investment in
public services. Infrastructure for health and education has literally
crumbled.
The Mobutu years are a virtual dark age for foreign analysts, who
consistently cite myth-making sources like Joseph Conrad's century-old
Heart of Darkness while ignoring historical accounts like Crawford
Young and Thomas Turner's The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State
and Georges Nzongola's The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila. By focusing
exclusively on colonial history and the Kabila years that followed
Mobutu's regime, they conveniently skip over the critical years of
state-building and consolidation that followed independence. 75 years
of colonial experimentation did not yield a state or a nation. That
much became clear to newly elected President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba, and the members of parliament when they
assumed their positions in June 1960. Independence euphoria was cut
short five days later when the nascent army, a remnant of the Force
Publique (colonial army and police), mutinied. Katanga, the mining
province that accounted for over 60 percent of the national revenues,
seceded six days later, and diamond-rich South Kasai followed
immediately after. Conflict erupted across Congo as various rebel
groups and mercenaries sought to control sections of the national
territory.
It was the Congolese leadership's duty to turn King Leopold's colony
into a single people politically organized as a state. In February
1960, at the Table Ronde in Brussels, these leaders had set their
differences aside and negotiated the details of independence as a
Congolese collective. For the next five years, the founding fathers
had to learn about the democratic process while trying to woo runaway
provinces back into the fold.
It was in that context, amidst a post-electoral constitutional crisis,
that the 35-year-old Lieutenant-General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (who
later changed his name to "Mobutu Sese Seko") staged his coup d'état
on November 25, 1965, with the support of the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency and Belgian security services. (The photo above
shows then-Colonel Mobutu answering media questions from a car in
Leopoldville in 1960.)
Mobutu promised to restore peace and order and to return the country
to democratic rule within five years. But seven months after he came
to power, Mobutu ordered the execution of four former ministers from
the deposed government at a public hanging at Kinshasa's main stadium
for an alleged coup plot. The message of fear registered in the
national psyche and the show of force terrified the people into
submissiveness.
In an effort to rebrand and reshape Congo, Mobutu renamed the country
Zaire. Aware that, historically, Congo's many power centers had never
been consolidated, but determined to be the only one in charge, the
president banned political parties and co-opted all citizens into his
Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, the new party-state. The senate
and the assembly were replaced by the Politburo and the Central
Committee. But these two political bodies did not shy away from
rigorous policy debates, often challenging and sometimes reversing
presidential executive orders.
By 1973, after a trip to North Korea and China, Mobutu assumed the
titles of Enlightened Helmsman and the Father of the Nation, fostering
a robust and pervasive cult of personality, which marked Zaire's
descent into dictatorship. Nevertheless, apart from the military (over
which he had total control), he could not fully rein in the other
power centers, such as the Catholic Church, labor unions, and business
associations. Mobutu's move to consolidate power necessarily included
initiatives to unify the country and build a nation.
His successive governments were meticulously composed to reflect
Congo's regional and ethnic balance. He integrated the civil service,
transferring officials and administrators across the country to
leadership posts away from their native provinces. In the military, no
ethnic group could represent more than 25 percent of a unit to avoid
the ethnic rebellions, such as the M23, that are a central challenge
facing Congo's government today.
Both the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Youth and Sports also
invested large financial and programmatic resources to launch a
cultural renaissance and an athletic revival aimed at forging national
pride. Congolese rhythms emerged as a dominant force in African music,
and in 1974, Congo became the first sub-Saharan African country to
compete in the World Cup. That same year, the Congolese state
underwrote and hosted the Rumble in the Jungle, the historic boxing
match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
With revenues from its mineral resources, Congo expanded its
educational system, building new colleges, as well as primary,
secondary, and vocational schools. Until 1985, when the International
Monetary Fund imposed the Structural Adjustment Program, the Congolese
State covered full tuition and granted a stipend to all college and
university students. In another successful nation-building project,
the state introduced a quota system to guide admission in institutions
of higher learning and military academies in order to correct the
disparity in educational opportunities between provinces.
During this time, Congo also launched a number of economic projects,
creating new state-owned enterprises and a series of Pharaonic
undertakings such as the Inga Dams and the Sidérurgie de Maluku
projects. Through these massive centralized projects, Mobutu instilled
a strong sense of national unity and pride that still bind Congolese
to this day and helps keep the country together despite the different
waves of conflict and foreign invasions. Today, governance issues
notwithstanding, the Congolese see themselves as a nation.
With the protracted conflict in the east, it is sometime hard to
imagine a professional Congolese army. But under Mobutu, Congo did
manage to raise an adequate army from the ashes of the colonial Force
Publique, which was recognized as a military leader in the region for
two decades. The United States relied on this army to fight the
communists in Angola in the mid-1970s and stop Libya's expansionist
advances in Chad in 1982. Throughout the '70s and '80s, the Congolese
trained elite troops from several African countries, such as Chad,
Rwanda, Burundi, and Togo. Incidentally, Mobutu would later
cannibalize and ethnicize the military and other security
institutions, relying primarily on his elite, Israeli-trained
presidential guard, which recruited mostly from his Ngbandi and Ngbaka
ethnic base. With such a limited recruitment pool, Mobutu could no
longer retain the most talented and competent military and
intelligence officers. Today, the ethnicization of security
institutions remains a key driver of instability.
After consolidating power and uniting the nation, Mobutu -- and his
state -- eventually fell victim to his kleptocratic instincts. To
remain in power, Mobutu suppressed opposition to his power through a
combination of money, force, and deportation. But even as Mobutu's
absolute power was gradually corroded by corruption, he remained the
country's primary centripetal force. He held the center of state
power, pulling the country together, but he never fully controlled the
countervailing institutions of power. As unchecked patrimonialism
weakened the state and the physical and social infrastructures
collapsed, the uprising that would undo his power grip came from
within his parliament.
After Mobutu's flight into exile, the Kabila governments all but
abandoned his unification efforts, investing little capital in
nation-building projects. Meanwhile, the current regime is as
patrimonial and kleptocratic as ever, as shown by the recent loss of
nearly $1.4 billion in opaque mining deals underpricing national
assets. The Sun City Agreement that Robinson highlights as the primary
catalyst for structural societal change in post-Mobutu Congo did not
lead to better governance, but rather to unprecedented levels of
corruption and paralysis of leadership. With its one president and
four vice-presidents, this transitional arrangement was derided by the
Congolese people as the "1+4=0 government." Today, national pride
comes from other power centers. All major reforms of consequence,
including the electoral system and the revision of mining contracts,
were initiated by civil society groups. For now, civil society is the
nation's centripetal force. Robinson, like so many analysts before
him, assumes that patrimonialism and state-building are mutually
exclusive.
Patrimonialism was a prevalent feature of African politics in Mobutu's
days -- yet other African patrimonial regimes are credited for their
state-building efforts. During this time, Côte d'Ivoire's longtime
dictator, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, presided over an equally perverse
patrimonial system for 33 years. Yet analysts never describe him as a
kleptocrat, instead choosing to depict him as the laudable architect
of the Ivorian nation. After his death in 1993, Côte d'Ivoire
experienced unprecedented political and ethnic strife that culminated
in a civil war.
By insisting on the Mobutu regime's kleptocratic dimension, Robinson
fails to acknowledge Mobutu's achievements as a nation-builder. If the
Congolese identify themselves as citizens of a common state today as
he notes, it is mostly due to Mobutu's vision and leadership.
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&hl=en-CA&u=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/09/what_mobutu_did_right&source=s&q=What+Mobutu+Did+Right
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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