It makes a change

Kinshasa is not the most exciting place, and most people spend their leisure time, and much of their work time too, planning their next trip away. The conventional wisdom is that you need to get away every three months. Not everyone has it that tough: the British officers in the UN peace keeping force have six weeks in the DRC followed by two weeks of home leave. It’s a hard life.

So when something does happen, it is truly an EVENT. There aren’t very many of them. Of course last year was different: we had all the excitement of the election, and numerous days off work “for security reasons.” For a lot of the people, of course, it was an excuse to get out anyway. But that year was definitely full of events. This year, by contrast, has been virtually event free. Until last Friday.

Partly because there isn’t much else happening, news seems to play a disproportionately big part in our lives. Our diet is mainly BBC, CNN and Sky News, (but with regular trips to Al Jazeera which covers some things much better). So for the past month we’ve been getting a diet of wall-to-wall London and that little event that it is hosting.

When the British Embassy invited all citizens and all diplomats to a big-screen showing of the opening ceremony, everyone came. The street outside the Embassy was blocked with parked cars as far as the eye could see. In the Embassy, the garden was full of tables, and large screens had been put up in the bar and the tennis court.

But what was such fun was the atmosphere. In fact less than half the people were watching the event: it seemed that just to be there was fun, no matter whether you watched the show or not. Even the people watching couldn’t follow it properly because there was such a noise of happy chattering, broken only occasionally by cheers when, for example, Daniel Craig appeared with the Queen, and Rowan Atkinson did his Mr Bean trick on the piano.

There was a raffle of Olympic memorabilia, but there was so much noise that I don’t think most of the winners heard their lucky ticket being announced.

In spite of this huge turnout, the normal Friday night barbecue went without a hitch in spite of the massive demand, and the booze didn’t run out.

But one couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between this carefree scene and the war in the East. The British Consul had sent a message at 6.30 that evening warning all British citizens in Goma to evacuate, as the rebels were only 20km away, and had announced that they would invade the town. The fact that they didn’t do so makes little difference: there seems to be a very real escalation of the conflict which is making many people nervous.

The origins of the rebellion are a bit fuzzy, but it seems that the rebels are Tutsi (as in the ruling tribe of Rwanda) who mutinied because a peace accord under which they had been integrated into the Congolese army had not been honoured. Their name, the M23, derives from the date of the accord, 23^rd March, three years ago. As their success grows, so do their demands. Now they are demanding the resignation of President Kabila. Their discipline and generally sensible demands contrast vividly with the behaviour of the Congolese Army itself. There is, in some people’s view, the possibility that it can grow into something much bigger, especially as they are being supported by Rwanda itself.

The next day we met a left wing Spanish couple who had come to the show, but had left before the event started. They pride themselves on being on the side of “the people” and I think they decided that the atmosphere was maybe a little too patriotic, even though only a tiny proportion of the people there were British. So they had gone to a restaurant which also happened to be showing it.

Their comments: it was just a Disneyworld denigration of the struggles of the working classes. Denying the importance of events by writing them off as history.

Well, it takes all sorts, doesn’t it?

A Study in Contrasts

We are in the flat of an elderly Greek couple. He is 82 and she about ten years younger, but to look at them you would place them at little more than 65 or 70. This evening is, for them, something of a social coup. Among seven guests five different nationalities are represented and there are three ambassadors – Greece, Italy and Egypt. The tone is delightfully formal and respectful, but without any attempt to ingratiate.

They have been in the Congo since 1946, have made lots of money; and three times lost lots of money. The first was when Mobutu announced his indigenisation programme under which all foreign owned businesses were seized and given to Zaire nationals. In their case they have several businesses and substantial assets including 17 lorries. The owner, Basil, went to the president, whom he knew quite well (whom he refers to as M. Le Maréchal), and begged him to change his mind. He won a promise to consider his case, but the junior enforcers of the policy harassed him from morning until night, so he knew that, in the end there was no hope and he fled the country with wife and five children.

Within less than a year the policy was totally discredited. Most of the new owners of the businesses had simply spent all the income, and looted the assets, as a result of which they were little more than shells. Basil decided to take the bull by the horns and flew back to Kinshasa. He went to see M. Le Maréchal again and used the argument of his children’s future, asking Mobutu, who had many children, how he would feel if his children had no future. This argument worked, so five of his businesses were restored to him, one for each child.

Then came the two pillages in the early 1990s during which the masses took the law into their own hands and simply looted all the businesses. The second one was worse than the first. They systematically removed everything, even to plumbing pipes, electrical conduit and suchlike, leaving Kinshasa and most other towns in a state of total dereliction.

But Basil and his wife stayed through it all, and are still here. He has a grocery shop in the heart of what used to be the known as the African town, but has seen his turnover decline steadily, partly due to increased prices and decreased incomes, and partly due to increasingly fierce competition from the big supermarkets.

His story is not unique, and the once powerful Greek community has been reduced to practically nothing. In the good old days they built a beautiful orthodox church, a school and two blocks of flats and offices, and a club – all in a compound in the centre of town. The buildings are still there, but the church is now 100% black, and the school has only nine pupils (with a staff of five!). They can only survive thanks to the rents which they can charge. A bank and UNICEF are their main tenants. The club is still operating as a restaurant, and serves very good Greek food. The Greek community has published a beautiful, fully illustrated book entitled “The unknown pioneers” which traces the history of Greek entrepreneurs in the Congo from the early 1800s, but from 5,000 or more it has now declined to less than 100.

As we listen to these stories one cannot help but contrast their lives with our own. They have stuck with it, through thick and thin, while we flit from flower to flower, pretending to engage with the country, but knowing that we can leave at any time. We have no real need to deal with the fundamental flaws which, to this day, pull this country down. By contrast he feels the situation deeply and can fully share the distress of others trying to make ends meet. He talked of what had happened that morning: the police had mounted a raid to “clean up” the city in the area where he has his shop. It is an area near the main market, packed with little stalls. These were the target of the raid. He watched while the police broke down the shacks, and took all the goods. Owners who were not quick enough to run away were beaten up by the police, and their mobile phones and money stolen.

We shake our heads sympathetically and make noises of disapproval (in French, the lingua franca of the evening) and disgust. But what do we really know?

Driving Licences

It was a pleasant surprise when we first arrived to find that getting a driving licence was no more difficult than giving someone from the office $70, and the next day, there it was: a nice laminated item, complete with a photo. But that, clearly, was too simple, so the government decided to tighten up.

The new system was introduced about two months ago, and with it a warning that the old driving licences would expire by the end of June. The new procedure was considerably different from the old one. It would involve a health check by a doctor (mainly blood pressure), an eye test, and three competence tests: a written test on the rules of the road, a second test on road signs and a driving test. If you got through all that you had to deposit money in the authority’s bank account, and show proof that you had done so. Finally your finger prints would be taken, together with your photo, and a couple of days later your licence would be issued. The cost $120.

As far as we know there is only one centre issuing licences in Kinshasa, with at least 100,000 drivers. As the deadline approached there would surely be massive queues, so a group of us at the office decided to go together before it became totally hectic.

The scene at the testing centre was very different from what we had imagined. We were ushered into an air-conditioned waiting room, and each was given a number. There was one person in front of us. Things were clearly not so bad. Then bureaucracy hit: we didn’t have the right identity papers. It was not enough to have a passport and the certificate of address issued by the commune. We had to have a Residence Card. So after waiting over an hour while they debated whether they could stretch the rules and accept us without a residence card we were sent away empty-handed. We later found that we would each have to pay $300 for the said card.

But we found out one important fact: the expiry date for the old licences is no longer the end of June. That will now be announced at a later date.

With the streets awash with fake driving licences, it makes sense to have one which is harder to forge, but this is clearly going to be an impossible system to implement in the short term at the scale required. But there can be no doubt that there will soon be an official announcement regarding the latest date for the validity of the old licences, and the police will start to crack down – to great financial benefit for themselves (the policemen) as they extract ever increasing bribes from the motorists. 

But there’s something else interesting about the set-up. The testing centres, that have been set up throughout the country, are operated by none other than the brother of the President, contracted by the Government. No wonder the fee is $120.