Sanctity and savagery

If there’s one quality in the Congolese that I truly admire it is their patience. They can sit for hours and hours, just waiting. They have the patience of a saint.

Take the case of our consultants who had a confirmed seat on a flight leaving at 7.00 a.m., for which they had had to get up at 4.00. When they come to check in they are told that the flight is overbooked, so they’ll be on the next flight. With nowhere to go, (and in the domestic terminal in Kinshasa there you can get literally nothing – not a cup of tea, not a Coke, NOTHING) they must just sit around for five hours. This they do. Then it’s the same story – the midday flight is also overbooked, so they must go on the last flight of the day which leaves at 7.00 p.m. They sit around for another seven hours and eventually get on. And when I see them the following morning in Lubumbashi, are they boiling with rage? Demanding compensation? Threatening riots? No, they smile nicely and say they had a good flight, though it was a bit boring waiting 14 hours before it took off.

Another unfortunate person was booked to come home on 23rd December. All he can get from the airline is a “Sorry: the flight is cancelled”. When he asks when the next flight is he gets a brush-off: “Try tomorrow. We might have a flight then”. Did they? No, but very luckily he got a seat on another airline.

And the traffic jams. People create totally unnecessary traffic jams by driving on the wrong side of the road, and refusing to get out of the way. Do people get out guns, and shoot each other, as they would in South Africa? Do they drag the offending motorist out of his car and beat him up? No, they just sit. Sit and wait. After a long wait – let’s say 15 minutes – they might get out of their car and remonstrate with the culprit, shouting loudly, waving arms and so on. But fighting? Never. Meanwhile the jam can continue for literally hours.

And waiting for attention from government officials. After a day of waiting and receiving hardly any acknowledgement of one’s existence, the citizen will have to come back tomorrow, and maybe the next day and the next. The process can drag on for weeks, and will only be abbreviated by a serious inducement. But do they complain? I’ve been here hours and no one has taken any notice of me? Who’s in charge here? Take me to your supervisor? No: nothing like that. They sit, apparently neither angry nor impatient, just waiting. For us, so quick to start blaming someone and raising hell about some perceived failure in service, it is incomprehensible. But then we don’t have the patience, as they say, of a saint.

The roots of such patience must derive from decades – indeed all living memory – of powerlessness. First it was the Belgians, then it was a system that didn’t work, and finally it is a system that doesn’t want to work unless paid to do so. And even that doesn’t always help.

But patience doesn’t extend to politics. That’s a totally different story. The tiniest incident can trigger violence. What has made a lot of people justly angry recently is that the government has used its armed forces effectively to prevent the opposition from holding rallies. Then it, the government, blames opposition parties for turning violent.

But no one can justify the violence that expatriate Congolese have been up to. In South Africa they attacked the Embassy and beat the Consul so badly he had to be taken to hospital, where he died three days later. In Paris last week they attacked the Head of the Senate who had stood as a Presidential candidate. They said they attacked him because (even though he had got a pathetic 4% of the vote) he had split the opposition vote and thereby denied victory to their candidate, Tshisekedi. It didn’t matter that Tshisekedi himself had refused to talk to any opposition candidates to form an alliance.

And what did they do to this harmless old Senator, whom we see every day walking along the river banks in Kinshasa? They beat him up so badly at the Gard du Nord that they broke two of his teeth, and he had to be hospitalized for four days.

We’ve been discussing this remote-control violence in the office. The cynical view is that the real source of fury for the thugs was that they had aligned themselves with Tshisekedi and thought that, when elected, he would give them plum jobs. Even if this is untrue, they’ve certainly got reason to be angry at the way their leader and his party have been treated.

But whatever their motives were, this is clearly a case where patience is not a virtue. Electoral fraud needs to be dealt with without delay, but can you think of worse tactics?