Declining copper prices and foreign investment have forced Zaire’s president to scratch the bottom of the barrel, report James Rupert and David Ottaway
PRESIDENT Mobutu Sese Seko, who for years has been widely regarded as one of the world’s most corrupt and wealthy men, appears to have run out of cash, according to diplomats and Zairean sources.
After 31 years of treating Zaire’s state treasury as his personal bank account, Mobutu is seeing his regime crumble.
He retains a constellation of real-estate properties worth tens of millions of dollars, and scholars, diplomats and Zairean journalists who have investigated him say he has other assets secreted overseas.
But in recent months Mobutu has had trouble scraping up cash even for what have become his basic tasks of survival, such as fighting off the rebel army or keeping his personal airliner fit to fly him back and forth to Europe for cancer treatments.
United States and European sources said Mobutu appears to have spent approximately $50-million for his military campaign, to buy weapons and rent mercenaries in an attempt to defeat foreign-backed rebels who now hold roughly half of the country and all the major cities, except for the capital, Kinshasa.
Mobutu took roughly half that amount from funds that his government had committed for elections this year, a US official in Washington and a European diplomat in Kinshasa said. Zairean election officials confirmed that the money is missing.
A more personal sign of Mobutu’s cash crunch is that, when he “simply wants to move somewhere, he has to go searching for the money to maintain his plane and buy jet fuel,” a Western diplomat said.
Since last year, Mobutu has flown repeatedly to Switzerland and France for treatment of prostate cancer.
After Mobutu travelled to France in February for convalescence, his plane was flown to London for maintenance work, and “was grounded … for a long time because he had no money to pay”, the diplomat said.
In an apparent effort to raise cash, Mobutu has put some of his properties in Europe up for sale, State Department sources in Washington said.
Foreign donors last year promised to contribute more than $100-million for elections to help stabilise Zaire, on the condition that Zaire first begin making a contribution of its own. By the end of 1996, Zaire was to have placed $50-million into a United Nations trust fund for the election, but so far has provided less than $3-million, according to Tshilengi wa Kabamba, vice-president of the Zairean election commission.
A Zairean Defence Ministry official said the ministry had been given “several tens of millions of dollars” from elsewhere in the government budget to fight the war, but that he did not know from which agencies the money had been taken.
The sums that Mobutu has been scrambling for are tiny compared to those he reportedly raked in during earlier years. A 1993 article in a British journal by researchers Steve Askin and Carole Collins cited World Bank documents that estimated Mobutu had skimmed between $150-million and $400-million a year from Zaire’s copper and cobalt exports throughout the 1980s. That embezzlement, while “the most lucrative pillar of Mobutu’s system” of corruption, still was only a part of his income, the authors said.
Mobutu also routinely helped himself to funds from Zaire’s state treasury, according to a 1982 International Monetary Fund report cited in the article. “The president’s bureau makes no distinction between state expenditure and personal expenditure,” International Monetary Fund official Erwin Blumenthal wrote in the report.
In 1981, the US government saw partial bank records of Mobutu that showed roughly a billion dollars in liquid assets in Europe, said Robert Oakley, a former US ambassador to Zaire. The records surfaced after the death of a Mobutu financial front man, known as Uncle Litho Maboti. Maboti’s son showed the bank records to a US lawyer as part of a legal effort to get money that had been held in his father’s name, Oakley said.
But 15 years after that glimpse, the size of Mobutu’s fortune is much disputed, and the arguments are likely to become more pointed as Mobutu’s opponents try to recover his money for Zaire. Angulu Mabengi, a spokesman in Europe for the rebel alliance headed by Laurent Kabila, told BBC radio last month that “we have asked the [Swiss] authorities to order the freezing of Mobutu’s assets. … According to our information, these – in Switzerland alone – amount to $4- or $5-billion.”
Several sources said Mobutu’s fortune never was as vast as the rebels claim, because he doled out much of his money to relatives, friends and political clients, partly to oil his political machine and partly to satisfy Central African tradition.
“He had to do this to keep his position,” said a Western diplomat. By tradition in this region, “a chief who becomes unable to give away money becomes no longer a chief,” he said.
Mobutu has “a lot of money in real estate, but I’d be amazed if he had much money in the kitty,” Oakley said.
Mobutu’s income dropped sharply since 1990, when world prices for copper collapsed. Zaire’s copper earnings shrivelled from $1,4-billion in 1988 to $218-million in 1994, according to International Monetary Fund figures.
Also, the corruption and instability of Mobutu’s rule has been killing the goose that laid the golden egg. With officials at all levels siphoning off public funds and demanding bribes, neither the government nor foreigners have invested in the economy.
Roads, rail lines, ports and telephone networks are falling apart and largely unusable.
In almost all of Zaire’s main money-making sectors, “production today is no more than about 10% of what it was five years ago,” a Western diplomat in Kinshasa said. “This has cut … drastically” into Mobutu’s income.
Mobutu also may find himself short on cash because of his own reported lack of financial sophistication.
“He couldn’t balance a chequebook,” basically because he never had to, said a Zairean business executive. “His idea of banking was to pick up the phone and call [a top aide] and say, `Send over 2- million.’ “
“He can’t keep all his money under his own name,” a Western diplomat said. “He has to use other people as fronts to disperse his funds.” His illness and the decline in his power have reduced the likelihood that a Mobutu aide will ever be punished for having stolen, thus enlarging opportunities for members of his entourage to take money for themselves, the diplomat said. – The Washington Post