Zaire’s Hopes Ride on Dictator’s Return

From his plush 15th-floor hotel suite, far above the broad Congo River, Mukalay Msungu Banza juggled three cellular phones, taking calls from an ambassador, a government minister and party loyalists.

All wanted the news. When will Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of this sub-Saharan nation since 1965, come home from the French Riviera, where he has been recuperating after his treatment for prostate cancer in August?

The answer: this week. On Tuesday. Definitely. Maybe.

“The population can feel the void, the absence of the president,” said Banza, a top Mobutu aide. The president’s return, he added cheerfully, “will raise everyone’s morale.”

Amazingly, even Mobutu’s political opponents agree. The students, human rights leaders, diplomats and other longtime foes who call his rapacious reign one of the worst in post-colonial Africa say the only thing worse than Zaire under Mobutu has been Zaire without him.

The government of Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo has been unable to quell a humiliating rebellion in the country’s east, where Rwandan-backed insurgents have emptied refugee camps, captured town after town and now threaten a lucrative diamond and gold mine. Zairian troops have responded by raping, killing and looting as they have retreated.

Many here argue that only Mobutu, still feared and revered as the self-appointed “father of the people,” can rally the nervous nation and solve its latest crisis.

“We want him to come back,” said Mary Pey Bmoma, an advisor to Etienne Tshisekedi, the leader of the bitterly divided opposition. “Because we know reconciliation is only possible with Mobutu.”

“There is no alternative,” agreed Guillaume Ngefa, head of the Zairian Assn. for the Defense of Human Rights, which has documented numerous abuses under Mobutu. “He is the only one who can bring people together. Unfortunately, we need him back.”

A senior Western aid official marveled: “If he comes back, he’ll be welcomed as a messiah, as a god. He’s perceived as the only one who can change things.”

The real question is why. Mobutu has visited this crumbling capital only twice in recent years, holing up instead on his yacht or at his palace in the remote jungle near Gbadolite in the north. And 31 years of Mobutu misrule have left Zaire in a state in which chaos is the norm.

With a population of 42 million, and an area as vast as the United States east of the Mississippi, Zaire is potentially rich with diamonds, copper, cobalt and other minerals. Its huge rivers could provide electricity for much of Africa.

But Zaire’s formal economy has collapsed, and its people are among Africa’s poorest. Hyper-inflation, about 800% this year, eats away at incomes. Most mines and other industries have closed. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Western donor nations have suspended nearly all assistance after seeing billions of dollars stolen in government corruption.

The bankrupt government spends no money on hospitals or schools. Civil servants rely on bribes to live because monthly salaries are only $1 and are rarely paid anyway. Roads are lined with potholes and are swallowed by the jungle outside the cities. Communication links barely exist.

A rocketing 3% annual population growth is slowed only by the deadly ravages of malnutrition, AIDS and such preventable diseases as measles and malaria. The country is lawless, with police and soldiers preying on the population.

The revolt in the east has yet to spark sympathetic uprisings elsewhere in Zaire. But that may be a formality.

In East and West Kasai provinces, in the country’s center, local authorities are so contemptuous of the national government that they refuse to use the new national currency, preferring the country’s former money. And Shaba province, in the southeast, has closer ties to neighboring nations than to the capital.

“The influence of Kinshasa is theoretical to a certain extent,” Jan van Deventer, South Africa’s ambassador to Zaire, said diplomatically.

With billions of dollars salted away in foreign bank accounts, however, Mobutu’s influence is real. “You can count 5 million people who are on the payroll of Mobutu,” a Western diplomat said. “Several leaders, political opponents, the military, religious leaders, everyone.”

Until recently, the West also kept him in power. Washington, which helped Mobutu seize control in a 1965 coup, used him as a strategic Cold War ally against communism in Africa. France and Belgium repeatedly sent troops to crush secessionist movements and revolts that threatened his reign, in exchange for using the country as a staging ground to prop up friendly regimes elsewhere in the region.

In a country that feeds on rumors, the fact that only France among Western nations stands in apparent support of Mobutu’s regime in its hour of need has spawned a siege mentality and countless conspiracy theories.

Some here, for example, accuse the Clinton administration of secretly supporting the rebels in a diabolical plot to foist the English language on this Francophone nation. Others insist that the rebels in the east are foreigners intent on splitting the giant country and seizing its riches.

“The chief of the rebels is from Zaire, but his force is from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Somalia, Sudan, Belgium, France, mercenaries, even people from Israel, many nationalities,” said Martin Tshipamba Kapangla, a 27-year-old university student.

What Mobutu, or anyone, can do to stem Zaire’s steady disintegration and growing anarchy is unclear.

Multi-party elections are scheduled by July, seven years after Western governments first forced Mobutu to start a transition to democracy. But with more than 400 political parties already squabbling for the spoils, few expect elections to improve the country’s plight.

Some here warn that the country will break up after Mobutu dies. Or that warlord-like generals will follow his example and launch a coup. Or that wholesale ethnic bloodshed will erupt, endangering the nine nations on Zaire’s borders and destabilizing much of the continent.

“There’s a real fear of violence,” worried a longtime American resident. “But not everyone agrees. People in my office feel that everyone will go out in the streets and celebrate.”

Up in his hotel suite, Banza, second in command of Mobutu’s political party, dismissed the question of succession with a look of horror. “In Africa, we don’t speak of people’s deaths,” he explained. “We don’t say such things. In Africa, we only speak of what’s agreeable.”