In pursuit of happiness

This is the best time of the month: when people have got money in their pockets. We set up ourselves by the side of the road and look forward to a profitable day. We like to work in threes: once we stop a car one of us talks to the driver, while another one stands in front, and the third stands behind. In that way the driver can’t make an escape if he thinks he’s caught.

There’s only one problem today. This is such a good route that there are three other road blocks within two kilometres. It doesn’t make any sense, because one group is taking the money that another group could get. But our Commanding Officer doesn’t listen to our complaints. He just says if you think your salary’s too small it is up to you to work out how to get some extra.

As I said, it’s a good route. That’s because there are so many cars and mini-buses. The mini-buses are the best for us: they often haven’t paid their insurance, or their lights don’t work. It amazes me how many fines they pay because their lights don’t work, but the drivers tell us that the owners are too busy to do anything about it.

But in some ways this is a bad route, because most of the drivers have very little money. A friend of mine has got a much better one: he managed to be assigned to the other end of town. They’ve mounted a wonderful operation there. Every month or so they set up road blocks to catch people who haven’t paid their insurance. Quite frankly I’m not surprised that people don’t pay it on time – how do you find $450 to pay in one go? It’s ridiculous. But it’s good for us. As I was saying, in their road blocks they catch Mercedes, Land Cruisers, Pajeros, Hummers – all sorts of fancy cars. Then, if the driver can’t pay, they clamp the wheels. He’ll find the money quick – you can be sure of that. So they pick up $50, $100 or even $200 if they are lucky. The best ones are the expatriates because they easily get scared.

The only problem is that sometimes the driver of someone with connections gets hit on, and we get a huge blasting from on top, but it’s still worth it. It happened to me not long ago – boy was I annoyed. I thought I had got someone: she had a broken mirror. That’s not a big deal, but she had a fancy car and a white guy sitting next to her, so I thought she’s good for $50, or at least $20 – that’s 20,000 francs. But then she turned out to know the Commander in Chief for the whole province and I got a blasting. How unfair is that? (See Two Policeman and a Princess).

So this is my plan. I’ve worked it out with my two mates. We’ll stick to the area we’ve got. We only get about 2000 francs a time for most of our fines – it’s nothing more than a friendly deal so that the drivers don’t loose too much, and we keep a steady income. Sometimes, especially if we are lucky enough to see an accident, we can get 20,000 francs, or even more, but that’s not very common.

We’ll keep half our takings in a special place: it’s investing in the future. When we’ve got enough we’ll go to our Commander and persuade him (if you know what I mean) to give us a road with lots of the posh cars.

Then we’ll be happy.

Witnessing Jehovah

We were driving down a busy road, minding our own business when CA-LUNK!!

Looking behind we saw a vast, brand new, Land Cruiser turning across the road. It was a LOOK AT ME car, with high level air intake so that it can drive through rivers, and huge bars in front so that it can push through the jungle. And it, in its haste to find a slot to turn around on a main road, across two lanes of traffic, it had hit our back end.

The driver had the decency to stop, and we jointly looked at the damage. Luckily it wasn’t much – he had knocked off a back reflector, housed in our rubber bumper. Many people would have brushed that off: we had retrieved the damaged part from the road and could probably glue it back again. But there was something about the car that told me that we should insist on getting recompense. After all, the spare, small as it is, would probably cost a fortune – about $200.

It was at that stage that I noticed, on the driver’s door, in discrete writing, the words Jehovah’s Witnesses. That clinched it.

My driver took the lead. With great eloquence he emphasised the great damage that we had suffered and the inconvenience and cost that we would suffer to get it repaired, and demanded to know what the driver was going to do about it. Did he, we asked, want us to report the matter to the police? If he was going to be obstructive we would have no choice. Oh no no, we will find a solution. After humming and hawing he went to get someone else whom, it seemed, he had just dropped for a meeting nearby. The new person insisted that they would pay for the damage. But how? Then things got a bit vague. He phoned the HQ, and after a long palaver said we should go to the reception and they would sort it out. Meanwhile the driver would continue with his work. Continue with his work? – what about me continuing with my work? We insisted that the HQ person should come to us, and stop playing around with us. He phoned again. No, it was impossible for anyone to come here – they didn’t have a vehicle. So we relented and agreed to go there. That was followed by more negotiation in which we insisted that the driver come with us. We knew they would never believe us if we just turned up without him.

So the convoy started and half an hour later, in a grim industrial area, we come across this very high wall, topped with razor wire and bougainvillea. We get inside the compound and are stunned at the beautiful landscaping, the obvious sense of order and cleanliness, as well as the grand scale of the place. The whole compound must be about 8 – 10 acres, with workshops, storage depots, classrooms, assembly rooms, offices and presumably dormitories. Walking around these beautiful grounds were lots of blessed, mainly young, people, basking in the knowledge of being saved. And everywhere we looked were rows of shiny news cars, just like the one which had hit us.

We park in front of the main reception area, and the culprit driver goes to find the man who deals with accidents. When he returns, and before he says any more to us, he reprimands my driver for parking forwards: here, he said, you have to reverse into your parking bay. So we did that, only to be told that the man we had to see was out, and they couldn’t say when he would be back. The injustice of the situation was so ridiculous that we started complaining loudly. After a while a group of observers clustered around. We had been told that all we had to do was present ourselves at the reception and now no one would see us?  Appalling. Especially when we had important business to do.

Eventually a grey-haired old man came out and invited us inside. He said everything would be sorted out. The offending driver was invited in first to give his report, and after about fifteen minutes we all went outside to inspect the damage. But then we were given the same message: there was no one available to see us. The responsible person was on business in town, and there was no one else. Then we get a lecture about good management, about how the Jehovah’s Witnesses were organised in independent lines of command, and how someone from the gardening division could tell someone from the garage division what to do, etc etc. Who, I asked, does the person we are waiting for report to?  Surely there’s someone above him who can help us? He, came the reply, reports only to God. Then someone started saying that we should follow the law. The law was that if you had an accident you had to report it to the police. And then the matter would be put in the hands of the insurance people. And so it went on, arguments becoming more and more bitter as their self-righteous attitude became more and more intolerable.

Then a little Frenchman (or more likely Canadian) turned up. He heard the story, made a phone call, and said “How would it be if we buy the spare part, and then call you when we’ve got it so that we can fit it for you? And, by the way,” he added, “I am very sorry for the accident and the inconvenience you have suffered.”

And that was that.

Is it worth it?

Being in the development business can be frustrating, even more so when, for all your good work, nothing actually changes.

Picture a naughty child, whose playroom is forever a jumble of toys. To the outsider the playroom looks like a dreadful mess, though to the child that doesn’t matter one bit. Parents regularly give lectures to the child, but, though he may tidy up now and again, nothing really changes.  Bring in Supernanny (those who’ve seen the TV show will know how she brings children to heel in a matter of days, and everyone lives happily thereafter), to give the child encouragement and clear guidance about what needs doing.

I hope the Congolese Government won’t be offended by the parallel, but that’s just what’s been happening with the Government finances. After years of chaos, Supernanny (The IMF, the World Bank, the EU, Britain and France) brings in a team of highly experienced experts. They set up new budget systems, new tax structures and new expenditure controls. There are full time advisers in The Bank of Congo, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Budget. The first such adviser, from the IMF, started nine years ago, so everyone’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea of financial reform and modern management methods. They can now proudly point to the fact that the annual budget is now properly presented and analysed.

But . . . that’s theory. What about reality? The 2012 budget, which was ready for submission to Parliament in October last year, was only adopted by Parliament in July 2012, thus giving spending departments, in the first seven months of the year, carte blanche to spend what they liked. Why the delay? The members of Parliament were too busy campaigning for the elections in October and November last year to bother about the budget. And this year, it took five months to form a new Government and just as long to get Parliamentary timetables back on track.

But even if there had been a budget would it have made a difference? The 2011 budget was passed in good time, so no one could claim that it didn’t exist. But what they could do was to use the procedure for emergencies under which expenditure may be made even though it is not budgeted. And in 2011 the country experienced so many so-called emergencies that 47.5% of the budget was spent using that excuse. And if you analyse which Ministries had to face the most emergencies it was, of course, the offices of the President and the Prime Minister. Emergencies such as having to induce people to vote for them, maybe?

The neat thing about the Congolese budget is that individual Ministries have their own sources of funds – taxation which they can levy directly from the public. These funds are supposed to go directly into the national treasury, but the Ministries concerned have no intention of allowing that. So the funds are kept off-budget, and used as a personal slush fund for patronage by the Minister, and salary supplements for him and his senior staff.

The situation has not been helped by the fact that, in an effort to reduce corruption and other offences, the government invented a truly Kafka-esque system for the approval of payments. The total number of actions required to pay a government bill was, until very recently, 120. You can imagine that there is every incentive to bypass that process, if you can use your own Ministry funds and just pay friends and family directly for services received. Even though this process has now been reduced to 20 steps, there’s still every incentive to ignore the system.

Anyway, that’s all going to end soon. A new report prepared by Supernanny has detailed all this malfeasance and described in detail the liberties which have been taken with the system. We have every confidence that its recommendations will be adopted and implemented with enthusiasm within the next six months. Every confidence??

TV

A few weeks ago we were alerted to the fact that The Head of State, as he’s typically called here (rather than President, which allegedly doesn’t sound so impressive) was going to make an important announcement at 4 p.m. Some people joked that he would announce that he had resigned; or maybe he was seeking political asylum in Britain so that he could see the rest of the Olympic games. Presumably it would be about the war in the East which is beginning to look increasingly unwinnable. Does he have a Syria on his hands?

Anyway, not unusually, he didn’t appear at four o’clock and we gave up watching after five. To this day I don’t know whether he ever did appear. But while we were waiting, the TV station (the state broadcaster, of course) filled in the time with the standard fare: dancing.

Dancing is very useful in this country because everyone likes music, and the theory is that if you ever have a message to convey it should be accompanied by dancing. Since 99% of all the music here has a particular beat, then you can be sure that the dancing will be more or less the same no matter what.

This message was not lost on election candidates, most of whom included dancing crowds in their videos. Nor is it lost on advertisers. Need to sell shampoo?  Show people dancing with happiness with their new hair.  Need to inspire people to worship? Show them dancing inside the church. Want to advertise the latest instant soup? Why not have everyone dancing with joy because it tastes so good.

This is not hi-octane dancing. The norm is for people to simply stand, hands at the side, wiggling their hips and smiling inanely. Feet are allowed to shuffle a little, but one must not fling them around: that’s much too western.

The big advantage is that, as TV material, it’s cheap. It requires no special “Strictly Come Dancing” floor or other props. We saw someone setting up a shoot recently by the river. They had a cheap boombox with a CD in it, a home-movie style video camera, and a team of eight girls dressed in identical kit. And that was that. After half an hour it was in the can.

It is so loved that some people will even prefer it to the daily soaps. So TV stations know that they don’t have to worry that people will turn off if they fill available time with dancing, and they have almost limitless supplies to do so.

But there comes a time when the standard model doesn’t seem quite right, so while waiting for the President to come on, the station decided to screen something different.

Scene: an operating theatre, with a bloodied almost dead girl on the table. Someone is trying, in rhythm with the music, to resuscitate her with periodic but delicate shoves to the chest. They put an oxygen mask on her. Getting bored with the helpless case in the operating theatre, the scene changes to the ward where nurses are dancing around more horribly wounded patients. A doctor comes in (we know he is, because he has a stethoscope round his neck) and with a beatific grin sashays through the ward, his chorus line following him, ignoring the poor patients. And so it continues, for a good fifteen minutes, crossing between mutilated bodies and jolly dancing nurses all to the relentless beat of happy music.

I was mocking it, much to the consternation of my politically sensitive Congolese colleague. “They,” he said, very seriously, and without any sense of irony, “are expressing the national outrage at the conditions in the East.”

Cleanliness 101

Kinshasa is getting really excited because the Francophonie Conference is to be held here. That doesn’t sound like much, but in fact it is quite a big thing. It’s not just a language conference, but more like a Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference for the family of French-speaking countries. It’s held every two years, and normally attended by Heads of State by over 50 countries. Like the commonwealth it has its own secretariat and acts as a cultural and developmental organisation.

Tradition has it that the conference is chaired by the host nation. President Kabila is naturally very excited to have this role, but less than thrilled to hear that Francois Hollande is probably not coming. Like many people, he (Hollande) is said to be reluctant to legitimise Kabila after last year’s dodgy election.

So what’s Kinshasa doing to prepare itself? It is said that Kabila has managed to get a Chinese billionaire to refurbish an office block, the one-time Zaire Chamber of Commerce, (a 23 storey white elephant of the Mobutu period that has lain unused for decades), as a conference hotel and venue. It’s certainly got a magnificent position, right on the river, but whether they will be able to make the interior suitably presidential is not so sure.

And . . . wait for it: they are sweeping the streets. One of the problems of this town is that the soil is very sandy and somehow the streets are always edged with sand. Someone from on high has recently decreed that this sand is unsightly, so an army of street sweepers have been consigned to do the necessary. Wherever they work large signs are erected on stands in the centre of the road proclaiming “Cleansing of Kinshasa”. We were astonished last week, coming back from a restaurant after 10.00 on a Friday night, to see them still at it. The same on Saturday and Sunday. 

It’s a laborious task. First the sand is swept into little heaps, then the heaps are collected in a wheelbarrow and put onto a bigger heap, then shovelled into large bags, and finally the bags are taken somewhere in little trailers pulled by a motorbike. It’s only done in the posh areas, of course. As part of the cosmetics, grass verges are also being trimmed, and leaves being swept up too. The only thing which doesn’t seem right is that we are about two months away from the Conference, so what’s it all for? A dry run, to see how long it takes?

Meanwhile, a mere block away from the immaculately swept streets and trimmed verges, the litter along the river spreads like an evil pox. In spite of the fact that litter bins are available, the scene is disgusting.

There’s something else which isn’t so savoury along the river. That’s the dog poo. There are a few – mainly American, it must be said – owners who carry around little plastic bags and dutifully pick it up. For most of us, it doesn’t seem that important unless the dog is insensitive enough to do it on the footpath. In that case it’s shameful and must be covered up by soil or otherwise made harmless. But we tell ourselves that in this climate within a day or two it’ll be washed away, or else sterilised by the sun, so it doesn’t really matter. In reality, of course, the excuse is just a cover for our laziness. Obviously, unlike the city fathers, we haven’t learned that cleanliness is next to godliness.

One block away they are sweeping up the sand and leaves: here, it's someone else's job
(It's not all as bad as this: there are parts of the river bank which are pristine)

African grey parrots, imparting their wisdom

But then, to help everyone forget the squalor, the parrots in the trees above make a noisy contribution to the debate. They tell us not to fret so much. It’s been like this for years, they say, just chill.

Turning over a new leaf

It’s been a mantra, since our project started almost three years ago, that the government doesn’t want to decentralise, even though the Constitution says that it has to. It was clear that the big fish in Kinshasa want to hang on to power and are no more likely to share it, or the money that goes with it, than they are to take a cut in salary in solidarity with the starving poor. Since one of the objectives of the project is to assist decentralisation it was getting pretty frustrating.

Kabila’s not got a very good reputation for decisive action, but one thing he has done right is to appoint a cabinet of younger people who want to make a difference. One such is the Minister of the Interior . . . and Decentralisation.

So, taking the bull by the horns we decided to hold a big conference about how to get the process moving. The Prime Minister agreed to open and close the proceedings, and the Minister of the Interior would give the opening keynote speech.

We had over three hundred delegates including the top brass from many provinces.

But what was amazing was that the Minister himself spent time in the working groups thrashing out details of a new strategy. One of them was chaired by another minister – Education.

On the last day three other Ministers came to give their ideas about what needed doing, and subjected themselves to some very critical questions from the floor. What was funny was that when the Ministers started speaking people from the floor would shout “Who are you?” and he would have to introduce himself, giving a CV just like a candidate in an interview. This was such a contrast with the pompous “I’m above all that” behaviour of the previous cabinet.

But refreshing as it was to see Ministers engaging with the real issues, it was even more refreshing to hear them talk about their problems. The Minister of the Civil Service talked very frankly about the problem with pensions. In a word they simply don’t have the money to pay the pensions due, so allow staff beyond pensionable age have to continue working. Not that the pensions are huge: $1000 is as much as some people might get as their full and final pay out. They may have been paying into pension funds, but all that was wiped out by successive bouts of massive inflation. The situation, he said, “is ridiculous”.

The Minister of Agriculture complained bitterly about the situation he had inherited. There is a staff of 16,000 in his Ministry in Kinshasa, and only 8,000 in the rest of the country – which is, of course, where they are needed. Even that is too many because all the Ministry’s budget is absorbed by salaries, so they don’t have money to do anything else. But the fact that he’s talking frankly about the problem was like a breath of fresh air, and he received enthusiastic applause.

They were actually enjoying themselves . . .

So we’re optimistic. But confident? That’s another story.

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?