Good God - Governance?

From time to time the Congolese government has hand-wringing seminars on what has gone wrong. There’s some rather attractive about such transparent discussions of failure, but it is also very depressing.

There was a recent event called “The Role of the State” which was attended by all the major Ministers, donors, civil servants and NGOs. Closely woven into a wonderfully abstract theoretical framework – as only French speaking people can do – were details about the status quo, and what we are going to do about it. One by one the Ministers took the podium to share their problems and their plans.

One couldn’t help thinking how much easier it is to make plans than it is to implement them. For example, the Minister of Health admitted that almost half a million children die before the age of 5, that there are about 100 million cases of malaria annually (for a population of 64 million) and the ratio of doctors to patients was between 4 and 5 per 100,000 inhabitants. However, this, he said, they planned to change: by 2015 they would have 50 doctors per 100,000. Malaria would be reduced by 80% by the same year. How? Better not to ask . . .

Sticking to health, of every $18 spent per person annually in a recent survey in RURAL provinces, $5 was provided by international aid, $7 by the households themselves and only $4 came from the state. Remembering that most patients come from truly poor households this is bad news indeed. The situation in agriculture is worse. The government used to provide seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, veterinary services and technical assistance. Now, 90% of the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture goes to pay salaries, so they do virtually nothing. Without government support, combined with the collapse of roads and lack of commercial suppliers of agricultural inputs, peasants have a hard time.

The GDP has gone down from $380 at Independence (51 years ago) to $175 today. In the UN’s Human Development Index the DRC now stands at 168 out of the 169 countries covered. On the commercial front, in the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings, the DRC is 175 out of the 183 countries included, while the DRC is ranked 164 out of 180 countries by Transparency International in terms of corruption, having slipped two places during the past year. Not a happy picture.

But to give credit where it is due, the report of this event is elegantly written in the form of lessons. Each section is a numbered lesson, totalling 29 in all. I don’t think I have ever seen an official report quite so interestingly and well formulated. So the obvious question is this: will the lessons be learned?

Unfortunately, history suggests that they probably won’t be. Here’s an example.

Last month a Boeing 727, with 112 passengers on board sets off from Kinshasa for Kisangani, the third largest town in the DRC and location of VS Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River”. The pilot was told that there was no meteorological information available about conditions there, as the weather station was out of order.

Manning the control tower in Kisangani was an apprentice air traffic controller. Nearby, but not present at all times, was a qualified one, though his licence had expired. When the pilot (with 7500 hours of flying, and 5300 hours with the Boeing 727) radioed for information, being particularly worried about the weather, he was given the all-clear to land, but was given a routing which took him right into the heart of a violent storm. A much calmer route was available, but it was not mentioned.

Not only was he directed into the storm, but he was given the wrong information about the flight path, as a result of which the plane crashed into a forest.

The response of the emergency services was, in the words of Jeune Afrique, (the best magazine in Africa about politics and economics), typically Congolese. The fire engine had no capacity to put out the fire, and first-aid workers only arrived much too late to be much help. About 80 passengers were killed, of whom 14 were travelling on fraudulent identity documents, so have not been identified.

Airports are managed by a state agency, with over 5000 employees, which receives substantial landing fees from airlines, and collects departure taxes from all passengers. In spite of this substantial income most runways are potholed, none of the systems such a radar work, even in Kinshasa, and the buildings are in a state of total disrepair with plaster falling off the walls, lights not working, and stairs chipped and broken. It has never been audited, and where the money goes is a mystery.

As evidence of the risks to aviation there have been 83 air crashes since 2000. Have repairs been done? New equipment bought? No. Some international airlines have installed equipment at their own expense in Kinshasa, but that’s about all that has been done.

Back to Kisangani. Recordings of the conversations between the tower and the plane demonstrated that incorrect information was given to the pilot, and at first the air traffic controllers acknowledged their mistake. Later they claimed they had had no contact with the aircraft. In the words of Jeune Afrique:

Coincidentally these recordings have disappeared. The DRC is truly a land of magic.