Your Money or your life

Something a bit more serious. I’ve written about a riot in Lubumbashi which came about when people who had been holding a spontaneous outpouring of anger against some government decision or other, discovered that the man who told them to demonstrate was refusing to pay. Now that, in Congolese culture, is totally wrong. Why would you demonstrate if you are not going to be paid for it?

I had not grasped the full significance of this at the time, but it appears that this is so engrained that it is practically impossible to raise any form of political enthusiasm without paying for it. One can only guess how this started, but clearly it is much easier than it might be elsewhere due to the poverty. And where the elite have fortunes measured in the billions, a few dollars here or there is worth it. So rent-a-crowd, a tradition not unknown in the West, is now the norm.

Recently there was a major clash in Kinshasa when “civil society” was demonstrating against corrupt voter registration. I assumed that the demonstrators were truly expressing their anger, and had unselfishly given up a day’s livelihood to participate. No sir! They got (one is told) $5 each for their pains. What they didn’t know is that this $5 would put them at risk: one was killed and many were severely injured by riot police. That is not to say that they were unprepared for confrontation: that was the whole idea. So some had thoughtfully been armed with Molotov cocktails which they did not hesitate to use when the police attacked.

A Congolese friend of a colleague was in charge of a large construction project. He had to hire a large team of tradesmen and labourer. At the end of each month, after they got paid, they would queue outside his office. My colleague asked him why they were queuing. Without any sense of shame his friend pointed out that each one owed him 10% of their salary for getting them a job, and they were just paying their dues.

It is no different with the police. In a system where every policeman has a godfather, either the person who got him the job, or gave him the promotion, this mercenary behaviour is almost a necessity. At the occasional times when they are paid the policemen queue outside the office of their respective godfather to give him his 10%.

Some would say that the police handling of the voter registration demonstration was inept. They could maintain that if the police hadn’t been so rough, the situation would not have turned violent. But is this the whole truth? Maybe they had an incentive to make it rough. If so, it would not be unusual. Just as the politicians pay the public to demonstrate, so too others pay the police and the military to shoot the demonstrators. You might think that this is a ridiculous invention, but there’s a whole book about it.

After all, if you’re one of the security forces, you too can demand a special bonus for doing what you’re told. You need money to survive, and, like the demonstrators, you are risking life and limb.