From behind the curtain

Readers will know that there’s been a bit of trouble in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Violence was expected around the time of the election, so we were told to get our ten days before it. I was due to return on the 4^th January, but was told to delay my return until after the 15^th. The US was following the example of all of the other foreign missions but many were even more cautious.

Some successful demonstrations in the last few years have been organized through WhatsApp and SMSs.  So the DRC government, confusing ends and means, have closed down the internet for the third time in a year. Simultaneously Zimbabwe, facing massive riots, has done the same.

I wouldn’t call myself an internet freak. My phone reports screen time at the end of every day, and it’s less than an hour. BUT, you quickly forget how much we rely on it. In the old days we used to get a paper.  Today we get emails highlighting today’s stories, or turn to the papers on line. We used to listen to the weather forecast on the wireless, now we check our phone. We used to have encyclopaedias to solve disputes or even just get information. Now – Google, in a flash. We used to have letters, now email, with a peppering of FaceBook and sometimes LinkedIn.  And talking about news, even though we’re thousands of miles away we listen to the Today programme on Radio 4 every morning, and lots more besides (how else to understand Brexit?) – thanks, of course to the internet. Finally, of course, there’s Netflix, our only way of seeing a whole lot of films and TV series. All this is possible in a town with no bookshops, no postal service, one cinema, and a very limited range of anything except good food thanks, of course, to the internet.

But wait, there’s more. WhatsApp and Skype have revolutionized our lives. We can chat to whoever we like whether they are in the DRC or lower Patagonia. Since it’s virtually free we talk more and longer. And those expensive crackly phone calls have been consigned to history.

That’s the social stuff. Besides that there’s the business stuff. We get all our bills by email, indeed all communication such as “We want to offer you a job in . . . “, or nasty letters from the bank about credit cards or overdrafts.

That’s insignificant compared to the trouble that businesses – and the aforesaid banks – must suffer. The close down has not been for a few days: it’s been weeks!

For us it’s been a life changing experience, full of strange gaps. My beloved’s comment is to the point: “Now we’ll have to talk to each other”.

(Alert readers will ask themselves how I can post this if there’s no internet: a secret – someone has managed to do a back-door deal to keep theirs going)

PS Just after I had written this, just to prove me wrong, the internet pops up again. So no need for a back door deal.

Law and order

It’s a strange paradox. This country, known for the depradations of bandits and revolutionary groups, with infrastructure that is far worse than it was in colonial times, and an economy so bad that public servants either don’t get paid, or get paid very late; this mad country can really get things done.

We look with amazement at the fact that Europe had to allow at least a year for certain types of plastic to be banned, and the painfully slow adoption of rules to charge for plastic supermarket bags.

Not here. The Governor of Kinshasa decided that plastic shopping bags should be outlawed and lo and behold within a week, yes, just one week, they had gone. Shopkeepers scrambled for alternatives: paper bags were one alternative, and another was woven plastic bags of the sort that hawkers use. These are quite expensive, so of course they charge for them.  Some smaller shops are still surreptitiously using plastic bags, and the women hawkers selling vegetables seem to have a limitless supply of Obama bags (see photo)

Much the same happened with taxis. Most taxis are little cars, usually with plenty of dents. They operate on a sharing basis, and try and cram in as many people as possible. For a short while the rule was that they should have stripes down the side in the colours of the Congolese flag. So there was a rush to get colours painted on. But there was no rule about how wide the stripes should be or strictly speaking what shape. So the net result was somewhat disorganized. This annoyed the Governor who decreed that henceforth all taxis and mini-buses should be painted yellow. NOW. And must have a City-issued licence sticker on both front doors.

The next day the town was like a morgue as all taxi owners rushed to get their cars sprayed yellow. But . . . within a week there they were. Yellow everywhere, and all with the official stickers on their doors. Quite how it was done has never been explained, but done it was. To me it was amazing that there was enough yellow paint to go around, because there are thousands and thousands of these taxis – probably 40% of all cars.

Some time ago there was an outbreak of polio in the other Congo – across the river. Within three days the streets were flooded with volunteers offering polio vaccine – the sort you take by mouth. At the entrance of shops, at traffic lights, in the airports, everywhere there were girls with neat waistcoats proclaiming that they were vaccinators (organized and paid by UNICEF.but with 100% government backing). Polio was stopped in its tracks.

Maybe it’s because the law is weak that things can be done so fast. But whatever the reason, it’s impressive.

Makes a change

Through a series of coincidences we are invited to lunch by the food and beverage manager of the Club Nautic de Kinshasa. She’s a warm hearted Congolese women who decided it was time to have some friends around to share a meal, and show off her cooking.

It’s not very far from where we live – fifteen minutes by car on a Sunday, but 45 minutes during the week – along the triumphal Boulevard around which the city was developed, and then turning South towards the airport. But the last stretch is something else: we turn left to enter a densely packed market and drive nervously over thick layers of rubbish. If we hadn’t been warned we would have thought, without doubt, that this was the wrong turning. But it wasn’t, and before long we see the entrance to a green and calm space, protected from invasion by a boom and a suspicious security guard.

Beyond the car park is a long low building through which one can just see a patch of river. We find our way to the wide verandah overlooking the river and join the other guests. Unlike most other occasions, when English is used, this is a French-only occasion, which is very good for us.

We’re so used to mixing with development people, like me that it’s good to meet a different set: these were people in business. There’s a bank manager, whose wife we’ve met before, and she’s the interesting one. Rather than sit around, doing nothing, as so many expatriate wives do, she started a little business making purses, wooden trays, and a variety of such like small useful objects. She has a full time staff of nine, who work in her house, and sells everything she makes without difficulty. The other two were running a new hotel. He, the Manager, said they had deliberately positioned it as a three start establishment that would appeal to foreign NGO workers. It had, above all, to be clean, with good service, and although it’s in a part of town that we consider dodgy they are doing very well. His wife runs the restaurant. This keeps them very busy, but they know that unless they are on duty 24 hours a day standards will drop.

That’s when the discussion became truly racist. In spite of a recognition that there are amazing opportunities available in the Congo if you are willing to take the risk, the guests spent most of the meal talking about how difficult it all is; how the workers are like children; the absurd mistakes that they make; and how to boss them around in such a way that things don’t go wrong.

It’s true that there are huge differences between our cultures and that of the Congolese, and sometimes these lead to funny or disastrous results. But the other guests raised more than an eyebrow when I talked about our amazing team, about 70 of them, people who are comfortable discussing deontology as a pressing training need. (Do any readers know what that is? I didn’t), or who get really excited discussing political and economic analysis techniques, or theories of change. In fact, I find their enthusiasm for what seem to me to be futile abstractions quite frustrating, but you can never say that are not thinking about their work.

The meal was a proper three courser: prawn cocktail, then prawns fried in garlic butter and chips, followed by fruit salad and ice cream, accompanied by wine and beer.

The view from the verandah could be more beautiful than it is. In the foreground is a small marina, beyond which is a narrow creek leading to the main river. But on both sides there are towering rusty wrecks of once fine river steamers, now occupied by poor squatters. The main flow of the river itself is only a strip on the horizon. I had thought that because the river flows so fast and is so wide that it’s level doesn’t change much, but apparently it is about two metres below the level it used to be. In the old days, they said, the water was almost lapping up to the verandah.

Whatever the level of the river, it was like a breath of fresh air to be able to sit there, in almost total silence, and just absorb the view. Hopefully we’ll get invited again.

It's a funny country (3)

Sometime in June the Governor of Kinshasa decreed that all taxis had to have stripes along each side in the national colours of blue and yellow.  Within days most had complied, but the instruction was so vague that no one knew how wide the stripes should be and just where they should be painted. Police tried to enforce the rule, but somehow it didn't really catch on. So o o a few days later the Governor came to different decision. Starting from a few days away (I'm not sure, but it was less than a week) all taxis should be painted yellow. On the appointed day the police were out in force, and any non-yellow taxis was taken off the road. Literally within two days all taxis were yellow. It must have made a fortune for spray painters and paint manufacturers, but it happened. And if you're thinking what is the fuss about, painting a few cars, you're wrong. It's literally thousands: looking along the streets of Kinshasa about one in three cars is a taxi. They're mainly little things, usually quite battered, and driven without any regard for other users; and packed to the brim with long-suffering passengers. But in a city with very few buses they are the mode of transport that most people use.

But that's not all. The Governor had a similar idea about supermarkets packing shopping in plastic bags. Possibly after seeing Blue Planet, or hearing one of the many scare stories about the terrible impact that plastic bags are having on the environment, he banned them. Seven days notice. And it worked! There's not a plastic bag in sight now.

In a country where salaries are often paid late, where air traffic is in a state of complete chaos, where roads are allowed to revert to jungle, and tax collection is the art of the deal rather than complying with the law, one can only marvel about the level of compliance with these decrees.  It showed that it can be done, and one can't help wishing that this level of discipline was applied more widely.

A carefully whispered opinion is "if only we had someone like Kagame running this country" - whispered because Rwanda invaded the DRC, and Kagame is considered a threat. But is any politician likely to make discipline and the rule of law a priority, as in Rwanda? That's not the history so far.

It's a funny country (2)

There's a row of new statues, designed and cast in Kinshasa. But what's he doing with his left hand??

A monument to emptiness

The survivor tree (look at the bottom)