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.