Richard Dowden

The sick man of Africa

Why Congo isn’t sharing in its region’s renaissance

I dread attending meetings on Congo. At almost every one a Congolese will stand up and start to rail, then scream and weep. Some get very aggressive. The police were called to one meeting. For a while I was embarrassed and irritated. Now I think it is absolutely understandable, appropriate even.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, the vast heart of Africa, endowed with some of the richest ores and most fertile land on the planet, lies broken and ungoverned. Congo has the lowest GDP per capita in the world and lies at the very bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index.

The rest of Africa is now doing better. More and more Africans have a better life than they did ten or 20 years ago. The wars are diminishing in number and ferocity; trade and investment, led by China, have revived its economies so that 11 of the world’s fastest growing economies are African. If the numbers are to be believed — and many have been revised drastically upwards recently — there are also improvements in health, education and general well-being.

But not in Congo, which is still stuck where most of Africa was a decade ago. It never was a real nation state, originally carved out as a personal estate at the end of the 19th century by King Leopold of Belgium, its first owner-ruler. For the first half of the 20th century it was ruled by the Belgian state, then for most of the second half by Mobutu Sese Seko, who treated it much as King Leopold had done. In the village where he was born he built five grotesquely grand palaces and an airport with a runway to accommodate Concorde so that he could take his family shopping in Paris or New York. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch anti-communist, which ensured he stayed in power until the Cold War ended.

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