A Nation in Throes of Disrepair

A visit to the Mama Yemo Hospital, Zaire’s largest public health facility, is not for the faint of heart.

The operating room floor is so rotted that surgeons must avoid gaping holes, crumbling plywood and rusting metal. Only a few lights and air conditioners work. So doors are open to the sun and the sweltering heat outside, where rats scurry in the grass.

“We try to do what we can,” said Dr. Jean Baptiste Sondji, pausing as he performed a mastoidectomy in the gloom. “But mostly, many people die.”

In the maternity ward, mildew shrouds the walls, and cobwebs cover the broken incubator. Like all patients, the women who come here must bring their own food, sheets, soap--even syringes, bandages and medicine. The hospital provides none.

Doctors and nurses are rarely paid their salaries, so patients must pay for treatment. Those who cannot afford the fees sometimes are held against their will until relatives or friends can come up with the money. Some barter their release by leaving a TV or radio as collateral.

“We have not had support from the government for the last 10 years,” said Dr. Antoine Modia Oyandjo, director of what once was one of Africa’s best hospitals.

The Mama Yemo is named for the late mother of President Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu, whose prostate cancer was diagnosed earlier this year, flew to Switzerland and France for treatment. After four months abroad, he returned home to a jubilant welcome Tuesday.

But Mobutu is considered unlikely to reverse the cancer-like decay that eats at Zaire. His calamitous 31-year reign is chiefly to blame.

Plundered by its leaders, with a culture of corruption that undermines all attempts at progress, one of Africa’s largest nations is undeveloping, sliding into chaos.

“There is no law,” said Guillaume Ngefa, head of the Zairian Assn. for the Defense of Human Rights. “No state. No government.”

The government does exist. But it is bankrupt and provides few public services to a population suffering growing deprivation and hardship.

Salaries of state employees, from teachers to postal workers, are often less than $1 a month. But they are not paid for months. To survive, many have privatized their jobs, selling government property or demanding fees and bribes for everything from birth certificates to burials.

“This is a kleptocracy,” complained a Western diplomat. “You have to bribe your way for everything. The country is being destroyed by ignorance, inefficiency and malice.”

Virtually every aspect of life--schools, hospitals, courts, roads, banks--is affected by the collapse of central authority. In response, people have taken matters into their own hands--for good or ill.

With no government funding for education, for example, most schools in this crumbling capital have no books. Teachers are so rarely paid that they charge their students--often in dollars, since Zaire’s currency is nearly worthless.

As a result, many parents can’t afford the fees and have to alternate their children’s schooling year by year.

“Most of the time, if one child has been to school last year, this year another child will go,” said Elise Muhimuzi, who heads a community group in Kingabwa, a Kinshasa community where flimsy, wooden shacks are crammed along rutted dirt roads.

Families increasingly take turns eating, as well. Muhimuzi said a survey of 1,200 homes by her group in four Kinshasa districts showed 70% of families ate “at intervals,” with the children eating one meal and the parents the next.

“Some families eat only once a day or once every three days,” she said.

Once rare here, malnutrition is now increasing rapidly. So are epidemics of infectious diseases, from polio to measles. Child immunization rates have plummeted, and infant mortality--in a country where nearly one-fourth of the children die before age 5--has not improved in a decade, according to UNICEF.

“People don’t have enough food,” said Marie Therese Mubien, 39, a mother of five in Bandalungwa, another Kinshasa slum. “And many children are just abandoned.”

About 30 million people, nearly three-fourths of the population, have no access to health services or proper sanitation, the United Nations estimates. About 24 million people do not have access to safe drinking water.

The near-collapse of government services has forced desperate Zairians to fend for themselves. Many in this city of 5 million have formed informal cooperatives and civic groups that increasingly replace the dysfunctional state and stave off total anarchy.

In traffic accidents, for example, onlookers ferry the wounded to hospitals in trucks and taxis because few ambulances exist. If fire breaks out, residents form bucket brigades because few fire engines work. When water runs out--in some areas, it is not even available in communal taps until after midnight--the buildings burn down.

Other efforts are entrepreneurial. Each morning, for example, groups of unemployed men shovel dirt and rocks into the huge potholes in Kinshasa’s crumbling streets in exchange for tips from passing drivers.

Some men dig trenches to divert raw sewage away from homes, or deep pits for the garbage that rots along the roads. An informal economy, or black market, thrives too, with dusty roadside stalls selling everything from used tires to new toilets. Money-changers clog what has been dubbed “Wall Street,” waving brick-like wads of cash.

With runaway inflation causing prices to double every few weeks, Kinshasa’s residents have planted corn, cassava and other crops on nearly every patch of land, including highway medians. Children shine shoes or scrounge in the trash heaps for whatever they recycle or resell.

The lack of central authority means no one--and everyone--is in charge.

“It’s very eroding,” a senior relief official said, sighing. “You negotiate an agreement with a minister, and then you go to the airport and some army lieutenant says: ‘This is nothing.’ Or you get a paper that says you can fly somewhere. And we go and when we want to land, they say: ‘OK, you can fly over, but you can’t land.’ ”

The police and military, rarely paid by the government, pay themselves by robbing people or holding them for ransom. “Undisciplined soldiers . . . commit many criminal infractions, including robbery, extortion and looting on a daily basis,” a U.S. State Department human rights report noted earlier this year.

Mobs of mutinous, armed soldiers rampaged through the capital in 1991 and 1993, looting homes, offices, factories and even hospitals. Damage and losses were estimated at nearly $1 billion. And fear of another “pillage,” as the rampage was known, remains strong.

“For us, the most important time of the month is whether the military has been paid or not,” said Jan van Deventer, South Africa’s ambassador to Zaire.

Ngefa, the human rights activist, blames security forces for summary executions, torture and arbitrary arrests. “The army is uncontrolled by anybody,” he said. “They can kill people, and no one does anything.”

Courts offer little help. Many judges, officially paid only $20 a month, auction their decisions to the highest bidder. “If you want to win a case, you must give the judge money, and the person who brings the most money wins the case,” Ngefa said.

“We don’t have the rule of law,” he added angrily. “It’s the rule of the jungle.”

For example, local youths in Ndjili, a dusty slum near Kinshasa’s airport, banded together last year to fight crime. They handed out whistles to each family, collected dues from homeowners and did not bother with a trial when a local military officer and two soldiers were found breaking into a house.

“We burned them,” declared Eddie Sibadio. The 22-year-old AIDS educator said the three men were set ablaze with gasoline and tires. Three other suspected thieves also were executed in separate incidents, he added.

“It has not always been like this,” Sibadio said. “People have come to organize like this because the state doesn’t do anything.”

Zaire should have been an African success story. The former Belgian Congo, independent since 1960, boasts vast mineral deposits, immense forests of valuable hardwoods and a network of rivers that holds an estimated 13% of the world’s hydroelectric power generating potential.

But Mobutu nationalized most industries in the 1970s, and most soon were looted of assets or run into the ground. Ruthless security agencies enforced his every whim. Washington, viewing him as an anti-Communist, ignored his excesses.

After the Cold War, as democracy swept the world, Mobutu was forced to bow to Western pressure. He ended one-party rule in 1990 and pledged democratic and economic reforms. But he sabotaged the supposed transition to democracy, creating a system that has produced political paralysis and economic catastrophe.

At one point, two rival prime ministers, both appointed by Mobutu, claimed to be in power. The government, mired in debt and disorder, could not even produce a national budget for three years. The 728 legislators in the transitional parliament, many on Mobutu’s payroll, agreed on little except to postpone national elections until next July, when their terms expire.

The crisis deepened after international lending institutions and Western donor nations, frustrated at the lack of progress, suspended all but humanitarian aid to Zaire pending the elections.

Today the formal economy and most of the country’s infrastructure have “virtually collapsed,” according to a recent U.S. Embassy report. Production and incomes have fallen for each of the last six years, and purchasing power “is at an all-time low.”

Production of copper, zinc and coal--the chief source of export earnings--each have fallen more than 90% since 1989. Consumption of petroleum products is down by half. Electric and water distribution systems have begun to collapse. Most roads outside urban areas have been swallowed by the jungle, so it is impossible to drive between major towns and cities.

Once again, the private sector has partially filled the void. The national railways “had de facto ceased operation,” the embassy report noted, until sections were privatized in 1995. The wealthy use cellular phones from an American company, Telecel, because Zaire’s land-based telephones rarely work and the state telecommunications authority is bankrupt.

Because the state transportation agency is moribund, private barges now steam up the Congo River. Private passenger and cargo planes have begun to replace the defunct state airline, Air Zaire. Public buses do not run, so unregulated minivan taxis pack passengers on their fenders and roofs, as well as inside, before careening down the roads.

“Banks don’t function,” complained Floribert Chebeya, head of Voice of the Voiceless, a local human rights group. “Checks don’t exist. Credit doesn’t exist. We live in chaos.”

Analysts increasingly fear for the viability of Zaire. Europe’s colonial powers drew its borders at a Berlin conference more than a century ago, creating a nation as large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi.

With nine nations on its flanks, Zaire’s total collapse could wreak havoc on much of Africa. Some analysts warn that the country could explode into another Somalia or Liberia, with rival warlords battling for power and floods of refugees destabilizing the region.

“Zaire is inherently unstable,” warned a European diplomat who has extensive experience in the region. “As long as Mobutu is alive, it’s unlikely to disintegrate. When he dies, all bets are off. And trying to get in the way of the breakup of Zaire will be like trying to get in the way of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union.”

Diplomats and many Zairians say they hope the ailing, 66-year-old dictator will live long enough to keep his promise to allow multi-party elections. A successful vote could bring foreign donors and lending institutions back to help rebuild the shattered nation.

“This is not an unimportant region,” said Randolph Kent, a regional expert and former U.N. official, now retired in Sussex, England. “You are dealing with a nexus of resource potential, of business potential, that is vast. This is a rich and important area.”

For now, most foreign governments see no choice but to support Mobutu’s embattled prime minister, Leon Kengo wa Dondo, and his largely unsuccessful efforts to implement political and economic reforms since mid-1994 to keep the country afloat.

But Kengo’s spokesman, Sombo Dibele, abruptly ended an interview after complaining that questions about the government’s lack of progress were “insulting.”

“Don’t judge people by appearances!” he said angrily. Then he stormed out of his air-conditioned office, climbed into a shiny, red Jaguar parked outside and drove away.