As he embarks on the bitter life of the exile, former Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko can take comfort in one malevolent thought: The nation he leaves behind is in a state of anarchy.
Nowhere is his inheritance more poisonous than in the economic sector. For Laurent Kabila and the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), winning the war will prove far easier than reforming an economy that long ago fell off the scale of what is considered normal."The economic situation is disastrous," acknowledges Jose Endundo, head of Zaire's Business Association. "We will have to make a clean sweep and start again."
Zaire is the African country that gave "potential" a bad name. Rich in cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds, uranium, its mineral wealth dwarfs that of South Africa. Its rivers offer abundant hydroelectric power and its oil reserves remain largely untapped. Its fertile land could be a regional breadbasket, its virgin forest a huge source of timber. By rights it should be one of the continent's economic powerhouses.
The reality is somewhat different.
By 1994, World Bank figures show, Zaire's economy had shrunk to its 1958 level, while the population had tripled to 45 million. If the country had simply sustained pre-independence growth rates, gross national product today would be $1,400 per head. Instead, it has fallen below $100.
Bulky wads of notes that pass from hand to hand attest to the hyperinflation that haunts Zairians' lives. Last year it was 750 percent, but that paled in comparison to 1994's 9,800 percent, with the result that across the nation the only currency regarded as trustworthy is issued by a foreign country: the U.S. dollar.
Frozen in time, the economy is dominated by loss-making parastatals whose contribution to state coffers declines with each passing year.
The state had become little more than a leech on a population dependent on wheeling and dealing: "little presents" paid for services rendered and subsistence farming to survive.
The informal sector has expanded to embrace even banking, with commercial banks holding just 8,000 accounts.
The rebel movement will also come under pressure to spend on another front. Rebuilding the dilapidated roads, repairing the railroad, tackling some of the $3 billion in annual reconstruction work the World Bank estimates is needed.
But where is the money to come from? Both Gecamines, the copper-producing parastatal, and MIBA, the majority state-owned diamond company, applied in recent years for tax concessions because their finances were so parlous. And although the mining contracts the AFDL recently signed with foreign companies have attracted huge publicity, few involve cash on the nose.
"The only quick way Kabila will be able to raise money will be to widen the tax base, which is very, very thin," predicts a Kinshasa banker.
That won't be easy. Unable to administer a tax system confined itself to milking dry a dozen parastatals and high-profile multinationals.
Experts estimate that if properly managed, the customs office and the tax office, which each collect a monthly $10 million in revenue, could bring in five to 10 times as much. But as the African National Congress has learned in South Africa, changing tax avoidance habits is hard.
"Kabila cannot impose tax collection overnight without taking a high political risk," says a businessman. "If he doesn't have a strong political base to put an unpopular message across, he will be in trouble."
Other steps crucial to long-term profitability - trimming a bloated administration and privatizing the state giants - also carry inherent dangers. Zaire's incoming premiers previously doled out civil service positions to thousands of fellow tribesmen before their swing-door administrations departed.
As a result, Zaire boasts an army of 120,000 and a civil service of 600,000: drivers for ministries that have no official cars, typists who never turn up for work, secretaries who leave at midday for their real jobs. The central bank alone employs 3,000 people, compared to the 2,000 staff in the private banking sector. Paid spasmodically buthanging on in the hope of eventual pensions, each worker supports an extended family.
Layoffs will not enhance Kabila's popularity. Mass firings will also be necessary at the parastatals if they are to find private buyers. And the question of just who will pick up the companies' massive debts has to be settled before the country's "mammoths" can be sold.
Restoring capacity at Gecamines to 300,000 tons of copper a year from the current 38,000 would involve picking up a $2 billion debt and investing more than $1 billion, the World Bank estimates, a formidable disincentive to any purchaser. But until the rebels signal their seriousness about such reforms, they're unlikely to lure back the international institutions and potential lenders scared away by Mobutu's shifty ways.
A total of $14 billion in foreign debt currently makes it virtually impossible for the country to tap new credits. The World Bank pulled out in 1994, the same year that the International Monetary Fund suspended the country from its board for debt nonpayment.
These institutions will be ready to give a new administration a fighting chance.
So far the signs from the AFDL have been decidedly mixed. Assurances by Mwana Nanga Mawampanga, the AFDL's enterprise minister, a free market economy were welcome from a movement led by a former Marxist. But the sacking of MIBA's and Gecamines' executives smacked of interventionism. And the recent closure of Sizarail, the foreign-owned management company that revitalized Shaba's railways, reminded many of the disastrous nationalizations of the 1970s.
"For the first time, people thought Kabila's Maoism could make a comeback," says Endundo. "We don't know the reasons behind the Sizarail decision, it but it will very soon prove to be a mistake."
"This is probably the hardest economy in Africa to reform because Kabila will be fighting against habits and behavior established over decades," says a banker. "But if the alliance cannot deliver on the economic front, its political gains will vanish very quickly indeed."
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.