Why does it cost so much?

If you are an official visitor, at the expense, for example, of the UN or the World Bank in the Congo, you will be told about the per diem allowance. For a hotel it’s between $150 and $300 per day, and for meals between $60 and $120 extra. Unbelievable.

But, ridiculous as these rates sound – that is what things cost. A small room – just large enough for two single beds and a tiny desk, with a bathroom with plumbing that can only be described as erratic, is $150 per night. That’s probably the maximum allowance for the place concerned, so if you want a better room, with a bathroom that works, for example, you might have to pay the difference from your pocket. For meals a standard dish is between $20 and $30, and $40 is not unheard of.

In an apparently fertile land in which many of the population have no gainful employment apart from agriculture, why is everything so expensive? Of course there are problems of getting food to market, people are scared of leaving settlements because of the bandits, and there is corruption all along the food chain which reduced the value anyone gets from producing food. But does that explain everything?

I was sitting at Kinshasa airport the other day: not an obvious pleasure spot with its crumbling plaster, broken stairways and lack of lights. But it has one feature that most airports abolished a long time ago in this age of security concerns: a viewing platform from which you can watch planes arriving, wave to passengers or exchange final shouts to departing friends. As it happens the space has now been allocated to the Grand Hotel which provides quite a smart – if very expensive (one proper espresso = half demi-tasse black coffee, $5.00) – place from which to watch goings-on.

The airport is a machine which works tolerably well in spite of a terrible shortage of equipment.

(On the subject of equipment I couldn’t help laughing as I watched one of those stairs for passengers being driven across the tarmac in the rain. The windscreen wipers didn’t work, so a man was standing on the front bumper, himself clad in a yellow raincoat, wiping the windscreen with his hands as the machine drove across.)

There are as many cargo planes as passenger ones. We all know what is typically sent by airfreight – high value goods such as TVs, medical equipment, specialised parts for machinery, etc. But not here. The freight consisted of sacks of flour, rice and other bulky heavy staples.

I watched as men lined up to carry the produce from the plane: one sack per person, carried on the head, in a long procession that looked exactly the same (were it not for the location) as anything Dr Livingston might have witnessed. They don’t dawdle – in fact they’re almost running. Within no more than 10 or fifteen minutes the entire plane was emptied, and a similar procession of similar looking bags would fill the plane up. Within half an hour it would be off again.

Why send this sort of thing by air? It is simply because there are no roads on which to transport stuff. Even the river transport has broken down to the extent that it is no longer the main form of transport. So, air it is. That must have something to do with why everything is so expensive.