OWN CORRESPONDENT, Kinshasa | Monday
DONA Byakadwa’s dog shack is one of the few businesses thriving in warring Congo’s teeming capital, selling the only meat affordable to some in its working class – mutt.
”I am making more and more money,” Byakadwa boasted in his dusty yard, where neighbours press forward each morning with lidded pans to buy dog meat at less than 50 cents a pound.
”People cannot get any other type of food, not pig or chicken or beef,” said Byakadwa, who buys his meat on commission from suppliers who roam the city. ”But I could sell as much dog as I could get.”
Byakadwa’s success comes in a capital city cut off within its own country. Kinshasa’s seven million people have been deprived of an estimated half of their food supply, and the Congo River to transport it, since foreign forces seized Congo’s north and east early on in the two-and-a-half year-old war that has dragged in many of the surrounding nations.
For Byakadwa, surrounded by the knives, hefty steel club, dog collar and gristly bones of his trade, wartime business is nothing to complain about. But for other city residents, it’s a different picture.
”Kinshasa is suffocating,” said local merchant Jose Alves Vital.
Congo’s new leader, Joseph Kabila, is pressing to get aid and trade flowing back into Kinshasa.
But Kabila, a 29-year-old who rose to power with his father’s assassination in January, controls less than 40% of Congo, a country the size of Western Europe. Estimates say Kabila needs $8m a month in foreign financial funding just to buy fuel and other essentials needed to maintain calm in the city.
The search for international credibility and funding is an early test for Kabila. At home, he’s faced with five foreign armies and two major rebel movements that have carved up his country.
Kabila holds Kinshasa and the rest of the west only with the support of troops from Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. The three southern nations lent their forces when rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda took up arms to oust late Congo President Laurent Kabila in 1998.
Rwanda, Uganda and their rebel allies quickly captured the biggest share of Congo, including the fertile Equateur province up north, where 60% of the country’s food comes from in normal times.
Upward of 1.7 million Congolese are estimated to have died in the rebel-held east, many of them civilians who perished of hunger and disease after being uprooted or cut off by the conflict.
But food is scarce in Kinshasa as well. Some families get by on less than one full meal a day, eaten late in the day so as to go to sleep with a full stomach.
Rice imported from Pakistan and Vietnam is easier to find than the staple starch, manioc, from Congo’s interior. Forced by shortages to innovate, many have substituted rice in the making of their traditional meal, fu fu, said Olivier Bonte, Kinshasa head for the Catholic charity Caritas.
For those with money, flights from Europe keep fresh supplies of steak, cheese and fresh endive rolling in.
”Everything that comes is for a certain class,” said Vital, the merchant. ”Beans, manioc don’t come.”
With the currency at one-fifth of its official value and falling, and money and jobs hard to come by, much of the city gets by on backyard vegetable gardens – or the kind of four-legged fare Byakadwa sells.
”I buy [dog] because it’s meat,” said Bernadette Misenga, mother of three children and the widow of a Congo soldier killed in 1999. ”The other meats are too expensive.”
Like many in Kinshasa, Misenga came to the capital when war and her husband’s death forced her to leave her home province, thinking jobs and food would be easier to find here.
The U.N. Security Council plans to send 3_000 troops in coming months to monitor the promised disengagement of all the warring forces in Congo. To restore transportation to the capital, the UN mission has made reopening the Congo River a main objective, said Kamel Morjane, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s envoy for Congo. – AP