In the tradition followed by African coup leaders, General Joseph Désiré Mobutu explained his motive for seizing power in 1965 as being to prevent the Congo from sliding into chaos and corruption. ‘The existence of the nation itself was threatened,’ he said. ‘Threatened on all sides, from the interior and the exterior. From the interior by the sterile conflicts of politicians who sacrificed their country and their compatriots to their own interests. Nothing counted for them but power . . . and what the exercise of power could bring them. To fill their own pockets, to exploit the Congo and the Congolese, that was their trademark.’ The politicians, he said, had ruined the country.
Determined to restore the power and control of the central government in Léopoldville, Mobutu set out to create a ‘new Congo’ from the shambles it had become after five years of civil war and political strife, acting ruthlessly to suppress disorder and dissent. Four former cabinet ministers were arrested on treason charges, tried by a military tribunal and publicly hanged before a crowd of 50,000 spectators. ‘One had to strike a spectacular example, and create the conditions for a disciplined regime,’ explained Mobutu. ‘When a chief takes a decision, he decides, full stop.’ The leader of a rebellion in Kwilu province in 1964, Pierre Mulele, who returned to the Congo from exile under the impression he had been promised an amnesty, was tortured then executed. When units of the former Katangese gendarmerie serving with the national army in the eastern Congo turned against Mobutu, they were brutally crushed. A white mercenary revolt also failed. Regional opposition was suppressed. Within five years Mobutu managed to impose law and order of some kind on most parts of the country.
Mobutu’s economic strategy initially was equally effective. Inflation was halted, the currency was stabilised, output increased and the government’s debts were kept low. The giant copper mining industry was successfully nationalised. By 1970 the Congo under Mobutu was no longer regarded as an object of ridicule and despair but as a viable state which seemed about to realise its vast potential.
Mobutu was regarded as a particularly valuable asset by the United States. Since the Congo’s chaotic debut at independence in 1960, Washington had been determined above all to ensure that the country remained a pro-Western bulwark against Soviet ambitions in Africa. During Mobutu’s first trip to Washington in May 1963, when he was still army commander, President Kennedy remarked, as he invited his guest to move out into the Rose Garden for photographs: ‘General, if it hadn’t been for you, the whole thing would have collapsed and the Communists would have taken over.’ Mobutu modestly replied, ‘I do what I am able to do.’ When Mobutu asked for military equipment and training, including six weeks of parachute instruction for himself at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, Kennedy was only too willing to oblige, but asked apprehensively, ‘Can you afford to be away from the Congo that long?’ In a gesture of support, Mobutu was given a command aircraft for his personal use and a permanent US Air Force crew to go with it.
After his coup in 1965, Mobutu remained on the CIA’s payroll for some time and received regular briefings from Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville. On successive visits to Washington, he was accorded star status, promised support and constantly flattered. In August 1970 President Nixon described him as a leader of stability and vision. ‘Though you are a young man and you come from a young nation,’ said Nixon, ‘there are things we can learn from you.’ Nixon cited Mobutu’s handling of the economy as an example. ‘Tomorrow I have a meeting scheduled with my cabinet on the budget. I find in studying your administration that you not only have a balanced budget but a favourable balance of trade, and I would like to know your secret before meeting with the cabinet.’
With political stability restored, the Congo’s riches excited an increasing number of foreign investors. Its resources of copper, cobalt, industrial diamonds and other minerals provided a glittering basis for economic expansion. Mobutu offered a generous investment code. Further encouragement came from Washington. Twice during Mobutu’s visit to the White House in 1970, Nixon extolled the virtues of the Congo as a good place for US investment. In the early 1970s the Congo’s prospects seemed ever brighter. The price of copper soared, providing the government with huge revenues. Buoyed up by this new wealth, Mobutu launched a series of grandiose development projects: a steel mill near Léopoldville; a giant dam on the lower reaches of the Congo River at Inga; a long-distance power-line from Inga to Katanga; an ambitious new copper mining project; new manufacturing plants and an array of infrastructure projects. By 1974 American and European financiers were involved in a headlong rush to invest in the Congo, committing more than $2 billion. As a sign of how much the Congo’s image had improved, the organisers of the world heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman decided to stage their ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ there in 1974.
Mobutu’s political ambitions grew at the same time. He created a single national political party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR), set himself up as its sole guide and mentor, and laid down an ideology to which everyone was instructed to adhere. The ideology was known at first as authenticité, but its official name was subsequently changed simply to ‘Mobutuism’. Though never clearly defined, Mobutuism had the full force of law. Any ‘deviation’ was treated as a constitutional offence. Mobutu’s views were clear: ‘In our African tradition, there are never two chiefs; there is sometimes a natural heir to the chief, but can anyone tell me that he has ever known a village that has two chiefs? That is why we Congolese, in the desire to conform to the traditions of our continent, have resolved to group all the energies of the citizens of our country under the banner of a single national party.’
Stage by stage, he accumulated vast personal power, ruling by decree, controlling all appointments and promotions and deciding on the allocation of government revenues. In an endeavour to create an ‘authentic’ national spirit, he ordered a wide variety of names to be changed. The Congo was henceforth called Zaire, a name derived by the Portuguese from a Kikongo word, Nzadi, meaning ‘vast river’. Towns with European names were given local ones: Léopoldville was changed to Kinshasa; Elisabethville to Lubumbashi; Stanleyville to Kisangani; and the province of Katanga to Shaba. Zairians with Christian names were ordered to drop them for African ones. Priests were warned that anyone caught baptising a Zairian child with a European name would face a five-year jail sentence. Mobutu himself took the name Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. In his own Ngbendu translation, it meant: ‘The warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.’ The more succinct Tshiluba translation meant: ‘Invincible warrior; cock who leaves no chick intact.’
With similar fervour, Mobutu banned Congolese men from wearing European suits. By decree, he ordered that they should be replaced with a collarless Mao-style tunic, worn without shirt or tie, which came to be known as abacost – à bas le costume – literally, down with the suit. The abacost became Mobutu’s personal trademark, along with leopard-skin hats made for him by a Paris couturier and thick, black-framed spectacles.
The personality cult surrounding Mobutu became all-pervasive. He assumed grand titles: Father of the Nation; Saviour of the People; Supreme Combatant; Great Strategist. His deeds were endlessly praised in songs and dances. Officials took to wearing lapel badges with his miniature portrait. Much of the adoration took on religious overtones. The television news was preceded by the image of Mobutu, with a leopard-skin hat perched on his head, descending, as it were, through the clouds from heaven. Places where he had worked and lived were designated as national pilgrimage points – ‘high places of meditation’. His interior minister Engulu Baanga Mpongo told the party faithful: ‘God has sent a great prophet, our prestigious Guide Mobutu. This prophet is our liberator, our Messiah. Our Church is the MPR. Its chief is Mobutu. We respect him like one respects a Pope. Our gospel is Mobutuism. This is why the crucifixes must be replaced by the image of our Messiah.’
In his memoir of Mobutu, one of his former prime ministers, Nguza Karl-i-Bond, described the miasma of adulation that surrounded him:
Nothing is possible in Zaire without Mobutu. He created Zaire. He fathered the Zairian people. He grew the trees and the plants. He brings rain and good weather. You don’t go to the toilet without the authorisation of Le Guide. Zairians would be nothing without him. Mobutu has obligations to nobody, but everybody has obligations to him. As he said to me on August 13, 1977, in front of three witnesses: ‘Nguz’, there’s nothing I have to do for you; on the contrary, I have made you whatever you are.’
Mobutu next turned to self-enrichment on a scale unsurpassed anywhere else in Africa. In 1973, citing the need to give Zaire greater economic independence, he ordered the seizure of some 2,000 foreign-owned enterprises – farms, plantations, ranches, factories, wholesale firms and retail shops. No provision was made for compensation. Mobutu described his decree as a ‘radicalisation of the revolution’. But instead of the state taking control, the enterprises were handed out to individuals as private property. The main beneficiaries were Mobutu and members of his family.
At a stroke, Mobutu acquired free of charge a vast agricultural empire, including fourteen plantations that he merged into a conglomerate called Cultures et Elevages du Zaire (Celza). Celza’s plantations produced one-quarter of Zaire’s cocoa and rubber output, and employed some 25,000 people, including 140 Europeans, making it the third largest employer in the country. The cattle ranches he obtained were equally extensive. A livestock survey showed that three-quarters of the ranch cattle in the country were in the hands of Celza or other companies controlled by Mobutu or close family members. In grand patrimonial style, Mobutu distributed other valuable properties and businesses to members of his entourage and political allies in return for their loyal service. Official letters assigning assets to them read simply: ‘You have been allocated . . .’ or ‘The State authorises you to take possession . . .’ In Équateur province, interior minister Engulu scooped up thirty-five plantations. Mobutu ordered further expropriation of foreign-owned businesses in 1974.
Mobutu’s personal fortune grew in leaps and bounds. During the 1970s it was estimated that one-third of total national revenues was in one way or another at his disposal. He used the central bank at will for his own purposes. He also became the largest shareholder in the Banque du Kinshasa, where parastatal companies were required to bank. His other interests included investments in the local operations of multinational corporations such as Fiat, Gulf, Volkswagen and Unilever. He was involved in diamond marketing in conjunction with an American business partner, Maurice Tempelsman. He also had control over the two main parastatal organisations involved in the copper industry and other mining enterprises – Gécamines and Sozacom.
Each year, he funnelled huge sums abroad into his private bank accounts. In one transaction alone in 1976, one of the plantation companies he seized transferred $1 million to his Swiss bank account. The central bank estimated that in 1977 fifty Zairian companies controlled by Mobutu’s clique secreted abroad some $300 million in export proceeds. Nguza Karl-i-Bond testified to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa in 1981 that between 1977 and 1979 Mobutu had withdrawn $150 million in foreign exchange from the central bank and deposited it in his private accounts; that in 1981 he had ordered the central bank to transfer an additional $30 million to his personal account abroad; that at about the same time 20,000 tons of copper, worth about $35 million, was privately sold for Mobutu’s benefit; and that quantities of cobalt and diamonds were exported by chartered aircraft to Europe with the proceeds of sale also deposited directly into his personal accounts. ‘The budget and the mining revenues are really the private pool of funds for Mobutu and his friends,’ an official from the International Monetary Fund observed. ‘If Mobutu decides to load a plane with cobalt to sell in Europe, nobody knows about it.’ By the end of the 1970s, Mobutu had become one of the world’s richest men. In the 1980s his fortune was estimated to total $5 billion.
He spent much of the money assembling a portfolio of luxury houses and estates, mostly in Europe. Among his properties were the Villa del Mar in Roquebrune-Cap Martin on the French Riviera; an 800-hectare estate in Portugal’s Algarve; and a converted farmhouse in the Swiss village of Savigny. He also owned a vast apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris; at least nine buildings in Brussels, ranging from office blocks to mansions and parklands in the residential districts of Uccle and Rhode St-Genèse; and properties in Spain, Italy, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Morocco and Brazil.
His residences in Zaire were similarly lavish. In Kinshasa they included a hilltop mansion with a private zoo in the grounds. He also enjoyed the use of a three-storeyed luxury cruiser, Kamanyola, entertaining foreign dignitaries and visiting businessman by taking them on trips along the river; a gracious host, he was assiduous in attending to the comfort of his guests, personally topping up their glasses of champagne.
His favourite residence was a huge palace complex costing $100 million which he built for himself in the depths of the equatorial forest at Gbadolite, a small village 700 miles north-east of Kinshasa that he regarded as his ancestral home. His main palace there, with vast marble-lined salons, sprawled across some 15,000 square metres amid a landscape of ornamental lakes and gardens. A smaller second palace was equipped with a discotheque, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a nuclear shelter and fitted out with Louis XIV furniture, Murano chandeliers, Aubusson tapestries and monogrammed silver cutlery. Among Gbadolite’s other features were luxury guest houses, a hotel and an airport capable of handling supersonic Concordes which Mobutu often chartered for his trips abroad. Mobutu also ordered model farms to be developed in Gbadolite, stocking them with Swiss cows and Venezuelan goats delivered by plane. Four or five times a year, Mobutu would descend on Gbadolite with an entourage of a hundred or so, stay for a few days, drive around in a great cavalcade and then fly off.
While Mobutu was busy accumulating riches, Zaire plunged headlong into crisis. Mobutu’s expropriation of foreign businesses proved disastrous. Many quickly went bankrupt; some were simply stripped of their assets and abandoned; others were ruined by incompetent management. The disruption caused to commerce, agriculture and trade in rural areas was severe. In 1976 Mobutu was obliged to reverse his ‘revolution’ and invite back foreign owners, but few returned.
Simultaneously, the copper bonanza came to an end. After surging to a record high of $1.40 per pound in April 1974, the world price for copper slumped to 53 cents per pound in 1975; in 1977 it reached an all-time low. In 1975 Zaire’s exports were worth only half of their 1970 value. At the same time the cost of oil and imported grain soared. As if struck by a tidal wave, Zaire was suddenly beset by an onrush of massive inflation, fuel shortages, falling revenues and huge debts, as well as severe disruption to commerce and agriculture caused by Mobutu’s seizure of foreign-owned businesses. In 1975 the government fell into arrears on repayments of its foreign debts, which by then amounted to $3 billion. Alarmed by the possibility of financial collapse in Zaire, Western bankers came to the rescue by agreeing to stretch out their loans so as to reduce the immediate burden. Even then, Zaire failed to keep to the revised payment schedule. In 1977 its debt-service liabilities amounted to nearly half of the government’s total revenues. More money was lent to Zaire in the hope that the government would eventually bring its finances under control. The banks had reached the point where they could not afford to let Zaire founder.
The grandiose development projects that Mobutu had launched added further difficulty. The steel mill at Maluku near Kinshasa, constructed at a cost of $250 million, was designed for a capacity of 250,000 tons of steel a year, four times Zaire’s requirements. After its opening in 1975, production reached a peak of 25,000 tons a year; after 1978 it never exceeded 10,000 tons a year. The mill produced only low-grade steel at eight times the cost of better-quality imported steel. In 1986 it was shut down.
The Inga hydro-electric project, together with its power-line to Katanga (Shaba), proved an even more costly venture. The first 300-megawatt phase of the dam was built to provide power to the Kinshasa region, including major customers like the steel mill at Maluku. A second phase of the project, providing power to Katanga, was deemed economically feasible because of the planned expansion of the copper industry there. Work on Inga II began in 1973 and was completed in 1977 at a cost of $260 million. Work on the 1,100-mile power-line to Katanga also began in 1973 but it was only completed, six years behind schedule, in 1982 and at a final cost close to $1 billion, four times the initial estimate. By then, the copper industry was in severe difficulties and had abandoned the expansion plans on which Inga II was predicated. Only 18 per cent of Inga II’s hydroelectric capacity was used and only about 20 per cent of the power-line’s capacity.
The administration, meanwhile, rapidly disintegrated. As corruption spread from the top, permeating every level of society, many government services allocated a budget were never provided. teachers and hospital staff went unpaid for months. Civil servants and army officers routinely siphoned off state revenues. One informed estimate by foreign bankers suggested that as much as 40 per cent of the government’s operating budget was either lost or diverted to purposes other than those intended. It was estimated that two-thirds of the country’s 400,000 civil servants who were paid regularly every month were in fact fictitious; their wages were merely pocketed by senior officials. Army officers regularly kept for themselves their soldiers’ pay and sold army food supplies on the black market. The soldiers, in turn, extorted money from civilians and set up roadblocks to confiscate farmers’ produce being taken to market. Air force officers turned the air force into their own air transport company, undercutting the rates of the national airline by more than a half. Hospital medicines and equipment were sold by staff for their own benefit. Nothing could be accomplished without a bribe.
In a pastoral letter in 1976, Archbishop Kabanga of Lubumbashi issued a devastating critique of the system that Mobutu ran.
The thirst for money . . . transforms men into assassins. Many poor unemployed are condemned to misery along with their families because they are unable to pay off the person who hires. How many children and adults die without medical care because they are unable to bribe the medical personnel who are supposed to care for them? Why are there no medical supplies in the hospitals, while they are found in the marketplace? How did they get there?
Why is it that in our courts justice can only be obtained by fat bribes to the judge? Why are prisoners forgotten in jail? They have no one to pay off the judge who sits on the dossier. Why do our government offices force people to come back day after day to obtain services to which they are entitled? If the clerks are not paid off, they will not be served. Why, at the opening of school, must parents go into debt to bribe the school principal? Children who are unable to pay will have no school . . .
Whoever holds a morsel of authority, or means of pressure, profits from it to impose on people, especially in rural areas. All means are good to obtain money, or humiliate the human being.
Mobutu himself referred to the blight of corruption afflicting Zaire – le mal Zairois – and, with brazen hypocrisy, attacked the manner in which government officials were obsessed by the drive for personal enrichment. Addressing delegates at a party congress in 1977, he observed:
In a word, everything is for sale, anything can be bought in our country. And in this traffic, he who holds the slightest cover of public authority uses it illegally to acquire money, goods, prestige, or to avoid all kinds of obligations. Even worse, the citizen who simply asks for his most legitimate rights to be respected is subjected to an invisible tax, which is then openly pocketed by officials. Thus the right to be heard by a public servant, to register one’s children in school or to obtain report cards at the end of the year, to obtain medical care, a seat on an airplane, an import licence, a diploma – and I could go on – are all subject to this tax.
Yet Mobutu himself relied on corruption to hold the system together and to keep himself in power. Moreover, he publicly condoned it. ‘If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested,’ he told party delegates. ‘Yibana mayele – Steal cleverly, little by little.’
The plight of Zaire, after ten years of Mobutu’s rule, was pitiful. Hospitals closed for lack of medicine and equipment, deserted by staff unwilling to work unpaid. A fraction of the rural road network remained usable for motor traffic; the river transport system was a wreck. The level of employment was lower than at the time of independence. Because of inflation, the wages of those who could find employment were worth little more than 10 per cent of their value in 1960. Disease and hunger were rife. Relief agencies estimated that 40 per cent of Kinshasa’s population suffered from severe malnutrition. In rural areas agricultural production plummeted; only 1 per cent of the land was cultivated. Large imports of food were required to feed the population. The state existed only to serve the interests of the ruling elite, while the mass of the population was left to fend for themselves. ‘Débrouillez-Vous!’ – ‘Fend for Yourself!’ became the guiding principle for surviving Mobutu’s regime. Sometimes known as ‘Article Quinze’ in a satirical reference to a supposed ‘fifteenth’ article of the constitution, or ‘Système D’, débrouillardisé covered everything from embezzlement to smuggling to hawking and petty crime. It was the only way to get by. ‘On se débrouille’ was a phrase commonly used. A leading Zairian intellectual, Ilunga Kabongo, described Zaire as having two parts: a zone of existence occupied by the political elite, and a zone of non-existence, for the rest.
In despair at the chaotic state of Zaire’s finances, foreign creditors in 1978 forced Mobutu to agree to a series of corrective measures. Foreign officials were placed in key institutions such as the central bank, the customs department and the finance ministry. One of their principal aims was to prevent Zairian companies, with links in high places, from evading taxes, import duties and foreign exchange regulations, as they had been doing at great cost to the exchequer for many years. In November 1978 a retired Bundesbank official, Erwin Blumenthal, who had been given effective control of the central bank, issued a list of fifty individual businessmen and corporations whom he prohibited from engaging in all import and export transactions until all their debts had been repaid and all foreign exchange earned from their past operations, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, had been repatriated. Another group of fifty individuals and companies were placed under investigation. Virtually all the names appearing on both lists belonged to Mobutu’s inner circle. Blumenthal singled out as the worst offenders two corporations owned by Mobutu’s uncle, Litho Maboti.
The effect of Blumenthal’s orders was outwardly encouraging. Several companies complied with his requirements; and Mobutu himself announced that 1979 would be a ‘year of moralisation’. But ways and means were soon found to circumvent his instructions. In 1979 Blumenthal left in disgust. In a confidential report he compiled about Zaire’s prospects, he described ‘how gradually the possibilities of control, of intervention, were wrested from the IMF team, its cooperation with honest Zairians inside the bank destroyed, my personal influence diminished, the position of the Central Bank within the administration damaged, its independence threatened’.
On occasion, Mobutu’s men used direct methods:
At the end of January 1979, one evening (around 7 p.m.) when I was still in the bank, soldiers of General Tukuzu threatened me with submachine guns when they could not get their hands anymore on the head of the foreign department when they wanted to demand foreign exchange for their general.
Towards the end of his one-year stay, Blumenthal slept with a shotgun under his bed and had a radio that kept him in contact with the West German and American embassies.
He catalogued the lavish spending by members of Mobutu’s family, illustrating the way in which Mobutu used the central bank as a private account for himself and his family and associates, listing details of their properties abroad and explaining how Mobutu personally profited from the sale of Zaire’s mineral riches.
There just is no effective control over the financial transactions of the Presidency; one does not differentiate between official and personal expenses in this office . . . All endeavours to improve budgetary control in Zaire had to stop short before the operations of the central governing authority: la Présidence!
Whatever promises Mobutu made about his commitment to reform, warned Blumenthal, he had no intention of keeping them.
The corruptive system in Zaire with all its wicked and ugly manifestations, its mismanagement and fraud will destroy all endeavours of international institutions, of friendly governments, and of the commercial banks towards recovery and rehabilitation of Zaire’s economy. Sure, there will be new promises by Mobutu, by members of his government, rescheduling and rescheduling again of a growing public debt, but no – repeat – no prospect of Zaire’s creditors to get their money back in any foreseeable future.
He concluded: ‘There was, and there still is, one sole obstacle that negates all prospect: the corruption of the team in power.’
To protect his grip on power, Mobutu relied on a number of elite military and police units, such as the Division Spéciale Présidentielle, which were commanded by a select group of officers from his own Ngbendi tribe and which he rewarded with high pay and perks. He similarly promoted personnel from his own Équateur region when making other key appointments. He kept ministers and senior officials in a constant state of flux, rotating them regularly, dismissing them or imprisoning them to ensure they represented no threat. ‘Conventional wisdom said that besides Mobutu and his family there are only eighty people who count,’ wrote an American journalist, Blaine Harden. ‘At any one time, twenty are ministers, twenty are exiles, twenty are in jail, twenty are ambassadors. Every three months the music stops, and Mobutu shuffles the pack.’
The most remarkable example of this vagabondage politique, as it was called, was Nguza Karl-i-Bond. A nephew of the Katanga leader, Moise Tshombe, he served as Mobutu’s foreign minister in 1974, and as foreign minister again in 1976. To his cost, he was mentioned in the foreign press as a possible successor to Mobutu. Accused of involvement with a rebel group, he was charged with high treason in 1977, tortured, sentenced to death and then pardoned. Named prime minister in 1979, he fled into exile in 1981, called for Western governments to overthrow Mobutu’s ‘regime of terror’, testified against him in US Congressional hearings and wrote a savage denunciation entitled Mobutu, ou l’Incarnation du Mal Zairois. Despite all this, in 1985 Mobutu induced him to return to the fold, appointing him first ambassador to Washington, then as foreign minister for the third time and then as prime minister for the second time.
Buying off dissidents was Mobutu’s standard practice. ‘My father used to say “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer still”,’ Nzanga Mobutu recalled. ‘Leaving people in exile was a danger, they were making a lot of noise. The game was to neutralise their capacity to damage him.’
But not all Mobutu’s critics were willing to play the game. In 1980 a group of fifteen parliamentarians published a fifty-one-page indictment of Mobutu’s rule, arguing that he was the root cause of Zaire’s difficulties and demanding open elections.
We know how allergic you are to candour and truth . . . For fifteen years now we have obeyed you. What have we done, during this time, to be useful and agreeable to you? We have sung, danced, animated, in short, we have been subjected to all sorts of humiliations, all forms of subjugation which even foreign colonisation never made us suffer . . .
After fifteen years of the power you have exercised alone, we find ourselves divided into two absolutely distinct camps. On one side, a few scandalously rich persons. On the other, the mass of people suffering the darkest misery.
Mobutu’s response was to arrest them and banish them to remote villages. Some subsequently decided to join his regime. Others held out. In 1982 a hard core of dissidents led by Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, a former minister, formed themselves into an opposition party, Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social. The dissidents were accused of attempting to overthrow the government, put on trial before the State Security Court, sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, but released after one year. Tshisekedi was arrested time after time again – ten times in eight years – but remained outspoken in his attacks on Mobutu. Describing him as a ‘Zairian Caligula’, he stressed that Zaire was suffering from something more than just a case of high-level theft. ‘Mobutu truly has a malady,’ he said. ‘He is a kleptomaniac. Zaire is ruled by an uncontrolled thief. It is a kleptocracy.’ But in 1988, Tshisekedi, like others before him, tired of the struggle and agreed to quit politics in exchange for his freedom. ‘Always arrested, exiled, banished,’ he said. ‘It’s not fun.’
However repressive and corrupt Mobutu’s regime had become, he still enjoyed the support of Western governments. His pro-Western, anti-Soviet stance earned him much credit in Western capitals, notably in Washington. In Washington terminology, Mobutu was a ‘friendly tyrant’, a faithful ally who could be relied upon to support Western interests regardless. The perceived wisdom about Zaire was that the choice was either ‘Mobutu or chaos’, a theme that Mobutu himself skilfully advanced. When rebels invaded Katanga from Angola in 1977 and 1978, Western governments – the United States, France and Belgium – and African partners such as Morocco were quick to come to Mobutu’s aid. US aid between 1965 and 1988 totalled $860 million.
Mobutu sustained direct links to the White House through successive administrations. He regarded George Bush senior as a personal friend, meeting him first when he was CIA director. When Bush visited Kinshasa as US vice-president in November 1982, shortly after Mobutu had imprisoned Tshisekedi’s dissidents, he was generous in his praise: ‘I have come to appreciate the dynamism that is so characteristic of Zaire and Zairians and to respect your dedication to fairness and reason,’ said Bush. ‘I have come to admire, Mr President, your personal courage and leadership in Africa.’ Mobutu also struck up a warm friendship with President Reagan, regularly visiting him in Washington.
When George Bush became president in 1989, Mobutu was soon on the plane to Washington for a reunion, the first African head of state to pay an official visit. ‘As regards George Bush,’ he said, ‘I’ve met him thirteen times. We know each other from way back. He was in charge of the CIA and knew Zaire’s problems backwards. He received me at his home in Maine with his mother, wife and children and grandchildren. I met him again recently at the funeral of Emperor Hirohito. He is an intelligent, open and sensitive man, with strong convictions.’
As they stood together on the South Lawn of the White House, Bush was equally fulsome. ‘Zaire is among America’s oldest friends, and its president – President Mobutu – one of our most valued friends,’ he said. ‘And we are proud and very, very pleased to have you with us today.’