Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

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PLANET OF SLUMS
available for weeks or even months? Why continue the social convention
of referring to a banknote as "money" when one is confronted daily
with the fact that it is just a worthless slip of paper? ... What is the use
of distinguishing between formal and informal or parallel economies
when the informal has become the common and the formal has almost
disappeared? 61
The Kinois negotiate their city of ruins with an irrepressible sense of
humor, but even flak-jacketed irony yields before the grimness of the
social terrain: average income has fallen to under $100 per year; twothirds
of the population is malnourished; the middle class is extinct;
and one in five adults is HIV-positive.62 Three-quarters are likewise
unable to afford formal healthcare and must resort instead to
Pentecostal faith-healing or indigenous magic.63 And, as we shall see in
a moment, the children of poor Kinois are turning into witches.
Kinshasa, like the rest of Congo-Zaire, has been wrecked by a
perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment,
and chronic civil war. The Mobutu dictatorship, which for 32
years systematically plundered the Congo, was the Frankenstein
monster created and sustained by Washington, the IMF, and the World
Bank, with the Quai d'Orsay in a supporting role. The World Bank ­
nudged when needed by the State Department - encouraged Mobutu
to use the collateral of his nation's mineral industries to borrow vast
sums from foreign banks, knowing full well that most of the loans were
going straight to private Swiss bank accounts. Then the IMF, starting
with the first SAP in 1977, stepped in to make sure that ordinary
Congolese paid off the debt with interest. The early conditionalities
(enforced by an IMF team at Banque du Zaire and French personnel at
the Ministry of Finance) decimated the civil service: a quarter-million
public employees - the largest formal occupational group in the
61 Filip De Boeck, "Kinshasa: Tales of the 'Invisible City' and the Second
World," in Enwezor et aI., Under Siege, p. 258.
62 James Astill, "Congo Casts out its Child Witches," ObJerver, 11 May 2003.
63 Lynne Cripe et aI., "Abandonment and Separation of Children in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo," US Agency for International Development evaluation
report conducted by the Displaced Children and Orphans Fund and Leahy War
Victims Contract (April 2002), pp. 5-7.
A SURPLUS HUMANITY? 193
economy - were laid off without benefits. Those who remained punctually
turned to embezzlement and graft ("Article 1S") on an epic scale,
with Mobutu's public endorsement.
A decade later, with the Congo's once-impressive infrastructure rusted
or looted, the IMF imposed a new SAP. Tshikala Biaya describes how the
1987 agreement "sought to give 'legal power' to the informal sector and
make it a new milch cow which would replace the welfare state that the
IMF and the World Bank had just destroyed." The Club of Paris rolled
over Mobutu's debt in exchange for further retrenchment in the public
sector, more market openness, privatization of state companies, removal
of exchange controls, and increased export of diamonds. Foreign
imports flooded Zaire, home industries closed down, and another
100,000 jobs were lost in Kinshasa. Hyperinflation promptly destroyed
the monetary system and any semblance of economic rationality.64
"Money," wrote Rene Devisch, "appeared to be a mysterious and
fantastic entity, retaining no relation to either labor or production.
People came to seek refuge in an economy of fortune."65 The Kinois,
indeed, were caught up in a desperate frenzy of betting: French horse
races, lotteries organized by the big breweries, bottle cap games by the
soft drink companies, and, most fatefully, a pyramidal money scheme,
secretly controlled by the military. (A similar quasi-magical "pyramidmania"
would sweep Albania with equally devastating results in 1996-97,
sucking up and destroying half the impoverished nation's GDP')66 Initial
investors won radios or appliances from South Africa, inducing
everyone else to gamble that they could board the scheme and then disembark
before it crashed - but there were few survivors of the
inevitable disaster. As Devisch explains, "With such a large part of the
population of Kinshasa involved in these financial schemes, the effects
of the collapse on the economy, and especially the informal sector, were
64 Tshikala Biaya, "SAP: A Catalyst for the Underdevelopment and Privatization
of Public Administration in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1997-2000," DPMN
Bulletin 7:3 (December 2000).
65 Devisch, "Frenzy, Violence, and Ethical Renewal in Kinshasa," p. 604.
66 See analyses by World Bank researchers: Carlos Elbirt, "Albania under the
Shadow of the Pyramids;" and Utpal Bhattacharya, "On the Possibility of Ponzi
Schemes in Transition Economies," in Transition Newsletter (newsletter published by the
World Bank Group) (January-February 2000), (www:worldbank.org/transitionnewsletter/janfeb600/pgs24-26.htm).