Endangered species

Pandas, tigers, frogs, polar bears? . . . no none of those. Plumbers and electricians. In the Congo.

I often feel guilty about the fact that I write too much critical stuff about the Congo, and it may sound as if I just want to run it down but I can, hand-on-the-heart state that that’s not my intention.

Make no mistake, there are big problems here. Everyone agrees about that, including the government, the President and his people.

Get a Congolese aside for a few minutes and the complaints are endless. Justifiably. But when I write critical stuff it’s not supposed to be the “you must try harder” type of criticism, but rather to illustrate the difficulties which its Government, President and people face.

So here goes – another comment which could be seen as criticism, though, taking a historical perspective one could say it is the result of a Darwinian selection system, a classic case of endangered species.

We all know how species survive: it is through reproduction, and if the conditions are wrong for reproduction then the species is doomed. E.g Pandas and Tigers, especially in zoos. If you also have the problem of nasty predators, as Tigers do, then the chances are not good.

Enough about Tigers – what about the plumbers and electricians (P&Es for short?

Long ago the economy of the Congo was collapsing. There was hardly any money for public employees, no one was investing in new building and the outlook was bleak. At that time, the publicly funded Trade schools, which were supposed to be training the said P&Es virtually stopped functioning: they had few tools and no materials with which students could learn their trade. As times got harder and harder, the schools demanded ever larger financial contributions from the students, while giving less and less in terms of tuition. At the same time, construction came to a halt, so there was no way of learning on the job. And then came the two pillages, the mass lootings, which systematically destroyed all factories, most offices and many private houses and finished off the already fragile economy under Mobutu. It takes a long time to recover from that damage, especially when there is, in effect, no working government. So even when Kabila’s father came to power there was nothing more than a tentative stirring of economic activity.

That’s all changed, so now there’s a lot of building, and people are demanding higher standards for their water and electricity. So the few P&Es that are still alive from the period when Trade schools were operational are now working for high wages for high powered construction companies. Where does that leave the rest of us? Without.

So there you are: reproduction impossible because no one teaches anyone how to do it any more, and the high powered predators that take the best out of the system.

That’s why, dear reader, when I go to Kalemie and my room has no light, and the bathroom no water – even when, the Manager says, they were both working yesterday – the Manager can complain with justification that there aren’t any P&Es in Kalemie. Another hotel in the same town was almost as bad, and I’ve realised he wasn’t just telling a story – he was correct. Likasi, the same: to get someone to mend a leak in a water pipe serving a basin was, according to the Hotel Manager, practically impossible. Our own experience in our flat with P&Es is much the same.

Everywhere you go you see the results of incompetence by would-be P&Es, people who maybe have a few weeks of working alongside an expert, but who neither have the tools nor the skills to do the job properly. But so desperate are people for some help, they’ll employ anyone, no matter how useless they are. The results are all too clear, and sad.

I recently read that there is a world-wide shortage of welders, but not P&Es.  So, why don’t some of them come here and teach the young Congolese how to do it? That would be real development.