Take that,Europe!

This site kindly counts the number of blogs it contains, which allows me to be sure that you are now reading blog number 200. This also allows me the chance to mention that our time in the Congo is running out. It's not goodbye yet but readers will be relieved to know that there won't be many more. 

I felt really jealous when we recently met a Frenchman, who’s happily housed in Provence, and whose life sounded ideal. “You know,” he said, “it doesn’t feel so marvellous from over there. What are the prospects? Europe is nothing but doom and gloom. Even France is worried about the risk of financial collapse. At the very best our prospects are for little more than years of austerity. Things are getting worse, not better. While for you, in Africa (we were in South Africa at the time) things are getting better all the time.”

This made me think about the DRC. So renowned for war, mismanagement, corruption, shady mining deals, at the bottom of the list of the human development index, what are the prospects here?

And I had a tiny revelation. Kinshasa then and now are two different places. Start with the airport: though grubby and badly organised it’s far better than it used to be. The immigration process has been transformed, the passport control is done on computers, and the staff are generally polite. Similarly, South African Airways seem to have realised that their check-in procedures were idiotic and have (to a small extent) streamlined them.

Driving from the airport on a mostly new road is also a completely different experience than the previous stop/start traffic jam on potholed, narrow and filthy roads. Dual carriageway much of the way, with newly completed tarmac, it's almost normal. And once in Kinshasa there is an eight lane Boulevard driving right though the centre, with fancy traffic rights that count down the seconds before they change.

The police have stopped harassing drivers for absurdly technical infringements, and even though one can never be 100% sure, it seems that there’s a real change of style.

Most of the ruined shops in town have been replaced and there is not only a wider range of shops, comparatively normal places that you might see anywhere in the world, but also lots of new restaurants and patisseries and salons de thé. A new large supermarket has opened, and the two other largest ones have had complete refits and doubled in size. There are many new hotels and more under construction, and smart new office blocks are sprouting up all over the place.

The centre of town has been completely cleaned up, and there are bins to throw your rubbish into – though not widely used by a public that seems blind to litter.

Kinshasa now has a Kinshasa Fashion Week in July, and a new competitor for the Tour de France has just been announced: it's the 948km Tour de la République Démocratique du Congo which is to take place in June this year. 

Other, less tangible things, have also changed for the better. The Government is (I think reluctantly) becoming increasingly serious about financial management, and accounting to the public how its money is spent. It has introduced VAT and is reforming the tax law to make it more fair and simple.

So yes, things are getting better. And it is quite nice to be living in a place where each day brings improvements, however tiny. Sorry Europe.

Danger zone

If you ask the average expatriate aid worker in the Congo why he or she is here, she would say, in one way or another, “to help make it a better place”. Whether they’re working in humanitarian aid, training doctors or teachers, supplying drugs, or reforming the forces of security and justice the response is pretty much the same for everyone. Of course, she will add, “life’s pretty difficult here, but I try and make the best of it”. What no one will admit that it’s because of the money, even though that is, without doubt, the real reason. Because if you turn it around, and threaten, for example, to remove the post differential (which is the difference between one’s normal salary, and what one gets in the Congo), the cost of living allowance, and the danger pay (in most of the Congo, but not Kinshasa) then they’ll refuse to work and threaten to get out.

A friend, in a well-intentioned move to get more people interested in coming to the Congo, made a video about Kinshasa. In the video, people gushed about how good the American school was, was fun it was to go on the river at the week ends, how nice the restaurants were, what a pleasure it was to play on the lovely golf course, etc etc. Life, they said, was good. There was no mention about the unstable policing situation, oppression of the opposition, the war in the east, or the previous wars and lootings even in Kinshasa. But this video sent shivers down our mercenary spines – if word got out that life was so good, what would happen to the post differential?

We also have to carefully guard the value of the cost of living allowance. This is compiled annually by a physical check of prices on supermarket shelves for a specific range of goods. The trick here is to include in the list of goods being monitored lots of products that are typically imported and therefore very expensive (e.g. Kellogg’s corn flakes, baked beans, cheddar cheese) – after all, we all benefit from the system, so what incentive is there to get the lowest prices? This process convinces the people in the various capitals of Europe and the US that life is really expensive here, and so that they pay us accordingly.

Indeed, we’re engaged in a sort of conspiracy to make the country seem as difficult and dangerous and expensive as possible. 

The embassy securocrats circulate ludicrous warnings about the dangers on the streets of Kinshasa, and restrict their charges to a small area where it is relatively safe. The tiniest incident is blown out of all proportion: for example, someone has her car door opened by a street kid, while she’s loading her shopping. She’s quick witted and pushes him out of the way and nothing is stolen. But the incident is immediately reported by text message to all embassies, and thence to international services to warn travellers about risks. Before long Kinshasa has earned itself a reputation as a danger zone. No one’s going to contradict these warnings because they allow us to justify our extra allowances.

Recently, though, the system began to unravel. A number of embassy people were living in houses that had no burglar bars on the windows. The embassy security chief noticed this and pointed out that even though the landlord didn’t fit the bars, the embassy would do so, at its own expense, to protect the occupants from possible break-ins and looting. His decision was greeted by howls of outrage. “We don’t want our views to be spoiled by bars. We like the windows as they are.”

He reported their reaction to the HQ. “If that’s the case,” came the reply, “and they consider that there’s no danger, we’ll remove the post differential.”

Caught out.