The Matabiche Boom

ZAIRE

For eight months Mobutu Sese Seko (formerly known as Joseph Desire Mobutu), President of the former Belgian Congo, has been preoccupied with a search for national "authenticity." He has changed dozens of place names reminiscent of colonial times, and the country itself is now known as the Republic of Zaire. Mobutu has also decreed that all Zairians--beginning with himself--should discard their Christian names in favor of "authentic" African ones. As a final symbol of the new order, Mobutu changed the principal national holiday from June 30--its independence day--to November 24, the anniversary of his own coup in 1965.

Last week, twelve years after the Belgian Congo became independent and embarked on a period of chaos, civil war and primeval savagery that lasted for nearly eight years, TIME Correspondent John Blashill completed a 2,000-mile tour of the sprawling country. His report:

Though many of Mobutu's 21.5 million countrymen may giggle at their new names, most of them respect the President's motive: to give them something of their own to be proud of. They felt degraded by Belgium's harsh colonialism under which they were called macaques (apes) and treated as backward children. Mobutu's "authenticity" campaign, going back as it does to their own precolonial tribal roots, at least gives them something to hold on to.

In any case, they have little choice but to accept Mobutu's ideas, because he is firmly in control. He runs the only party, the "nonpolitical" Popular Revolutionary Movement, and holds a tight rein on the provincial governments by rotating their leaders frequently. Most important, he appears to be in complete charge of the army, especially of the elite corps of 5,000 paratroopers that he himself created.

With his unchallenged power, Mobutu has succeeded in giving his country the two things it needed most: a measure of peace and relative stability. In consequence, Zaire is beginning to attract foreign investment on a rising scale. A Japanese mining group is about to open a large new copper mine near Lubumbashi (the former Elisabethville), for instance, and to the northwest of Lubumbashi an international consortium has discovered what may be the world's richest bed of copper ore. In Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, four auto manufacturers are planning to open assembly plants, Goodyear has just completed a $16.8 million tire factory, a steel mill is under way, and an aluminum plant is in the planning stage.

Yet the boom has something of a hollow ring. Most new investors come in on the understanding that they will be able to recover their full investment within three years, which means that in four years they will have taken out of the country more than they put into it. Even so, some prospective investors decide, after a few days of exploring, that setting up shop in Zaire is more trouble than it is worth. What turns them off, most of all, is a well-established system of graft known as matabiche (probably taken from a Portuguese word, matabichos, meaning bug-killer, with the implication that there are bugs everywhere to be taken care of). One high government official recently estimated that 60% of last year's government budget may have disappeared in matabiche.

To a potential investor in Zaire, the impact of matabiche is almost overpowering. He must pay to get his business application considered, pay to get it approved, and keep paying to build his factory, hire labor, import parts and sell his product. One U.S. Embassy man admits that his principal job is "to put our heads down and bull our way through to the right man to pay." Mobutu has repeatedly declared himself against corruption, and has indeed managed to stamp out some of the graft. But at other times he has ignored major pilfering.

Most of the current development is restricted to two areas--Kinshasa and Shaba province (the former Katanga). The rest of the country is suffering from massive official neglect. Countless roads and bridges have not been repaired since the days of the Simba rebellion in 1964-65. Most of the coffee, rubber and banana plantations are now deserted --either because the owners were killed or driven away, or because the planters have found it impossible to get their crops to market. Thousands of government teachers in rural areas have not received their salaries for more than a year, and some have not been paid for the last four years.

Surviving Simbas. Standing in sorrowful testimony to the decay of the Upper Congo Basin is Kisangani, the former Stanleyville, once a thriving commercial center. Today the river trade is moribund, the factories abandoned. A small casino attracts a nightly crowd of Europeans, but the facade is false. Much of the downtown section is deserted, and vast tracts of European-built houses have been abandoned to spiders, snakes and jungle grasses. After four invasions by Simbas, mercenaries and government forces between 1964 and 1967, the city is understandably nervous--so nervous that U.S. Consul Frank Crump prudently vetoed a fireworks display at this week's Fourth of July barbecue for Kisangani's small American community.

In Bukavu, on Lake Kivu, the scene of three battles during the Simba rebellion, the city is under a virtual siege of terror by the national army. Townspeople are afraid to walk in the streets after 4 p.m., and bribes greatly exceed the limits of acceptable matabiche. "Things were better under the Simbas," declares one longtime resident. "They may have been brutal, but they were not corrupt as well."

In the hills above the towns of Fizi and Baraka, a remnant of the Simba rebellion smolders on in what the surviving guerrillas grandly call the Congolese People's Republic. The Simbas operate two gold mines and produce enough ore to buy the arms they need. In fact, they buy most of them from members of Mobutu's own national army, with whom they have been playing hide-and-seek for the past seven years.

For all its continuing ills, Zaire is--potentially--an enormously rich country. It has almost everything it needs to become a power in Africa --vast resources of minerals, endless water power, sun-drenched soils in which anything will grow, and a government bent on unity and discipline. What it lacks is a cadre of responsible and competent men to turn its resources into wealth.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.