#mobutu

Mobutu, of course, in turn is the classic US-backed Cold War dictator

With Washington’s backing, President Mobutu’s thirty-two-year rule (1965–97) made corruption into a form of governance that came to be termed “kleptocracy.” Compounding a century of Belgian misrule, Mobutu turned government revenues and investment capital into ready cash, tending to his regional base in the north while making regular payments to local warlords and tribal chiefs elsewhere in that vast nation. To sustain his elaborate patronage network, while also stashing some $6 billion in his overseas bank accounts, Mobutu siphoned off about 50 percent of Congo’s state revenues, along with much of its mineral export income, foreign aid, and private investment. [...] At his death in 1997, the Washington Post reported the Congo’s per capita income was less than 10 percent of its level in 1960, half the country’s children died by the age of five, almost all schools and hospitals had closed, and the country’s currency was worthless. The research group Transparency International later reported that Mobutu had stolen half of the $12 billion in development loans Congo received from the International Monetary Fund, leaving the country with a crippling debt and no development. As a legacy of Mobutu’s thirty years of misrule, in 2008 the Brookings Institution rated Congo as the world’s third-weakest state, comparable to Haiti, with an average life expectancy of only fifty-five years, one of the world’s worst.

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