In Congo, Hopes Rise With Fall of Dictator

KINSHASA, Congo — When Henry Kabeya, a youthful school principal, reminisces about life under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, one word springs to mind: disastrous.

It was a nightmarish time of government mismanagement, nepotism, corruption and despair. Opportunities for higher education were granted not on merit but based on ethnicity or the ability to pay bribes. Good jobs--and all that followed--went only to Mobutu loyalists and cronies.

For Kabeya and his wife, Cecile, the Mobutu years represented almost daily humiliations: fear, poverty, extortion, ethnic discrimination, thwarted ambitions and hopelessness.

Then, last fall, the miracle that the Roman Catholic couple had prayed for occurred.

A rebel army led by Laurent Kabila, a former guerrilla fighter, launched a civil war. Many raced to support the cause, believing that it would lead to the economic, social and political revival of this mineral-rich nation of 45 million.

Now, eight months after the struggle began, Kinshasa has been captured and Mobutu driven into exile. Kabila has proclaimed himself president. Zaire has been renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And the Kabeyas have begun to dare to dream.

“I already feel freer,” said Cecile Kabeya, 32, who, after months of unemployment, has landed an accounting job with Alliance Airlines, formerly Zairian Airlines. “I just hope that things will become normal, that the victimizers are punished and the law is respected. We don’t want any more robberies, no more corruption. We just hope Kabila can clean up this country.”

That will be a daunting task.

The Mobutu regime inflicted deep scars upon the conduct and psyche of the Congolese, beaten down by decades of chaos and abasement. Changing this state will largely depend on the government’s ability to tap the talents of the millions of underutilized, opportunity-hungry people like the Kabeyas.

The couple, whose tales of hardship are shared by most working-class people here, are ready to help rebuild their nation. But they admit that it will not be easy to erase their horrific memories.

Few average citizens had passports; most were confined to the squalor of sprawling, crime-infested cities like Kinshasa, the capital where 5 million people cram into slums full of crumbling concrete buildings, mounds of garbage and pothole-peppered streets.

The government kept the populace under heel with an army of well-fed soldiers and secret police. Ambitions were stifled, independence smothered, hopes for a better future snuffed out.

“We could never feel at ease,” said Kabeya, 35, who at the time could not begin to imagine a better life for sons Kevin, 2, and Sam, 5 months. “Many people faced misery. We certainly had hard times.”

Like most of their countrymen, the Kabeyas survived by developing a network of friends from whom they could borrow money, trade belongings and exchange favors.

“African solidarity, that’s how we managed,” Kabeya explained. “It’s something difficult for outsiders to understand.”

Although he said his religious faith helped him cope with the daily abuse from Mobutu’s thugs, Kabeya grew visibly angry as he recounted his lost chances and shattered dreams.

‘So Many Had to Forget Ambitions’

Sitting on a tattered brown sofa in the living room of his shabby home, he noted that, as a member of the Luba ethnic group from the central Kasai region of Congo, he was constantly blocked by others from getting the education that he felt he deserved.

His ethnic group was unpopular among the ruling elite, primarily from Mobutu’s Ngbandi clan.

As a result, it took months for Kabeya to get into Kinshasa’s National Teaching Institute, where he eventually managed to earn an undergraduate degree.

“You had to be recommended by a member of the Central Committee, which was a political institution among the former regime,” explained Kabeya, who now heads a church-sponsored secondary school. “Everything was decided according to your tribe. It wasn’t easy.”

Kabeya, though, got lucky and was one of the random Luba allowed to enroll.

But he and others soon realized that getting into the school was hardly their last hurdle. They quickly found that some of their peers were paying to get answers in advance to exams. Some professors awarded grades in exchange for sexual favors. Many students, who did not even bother to show up, passed their tests with flying colors.

“Many of us were hard workers, but we felt frustrated,” recalled Kabeya, whose receding hairline and square-framed glasses make him appear older. “That is why many people gave up studying, because they just couldn’t cope with the system.”

While many students grew discouraged and dropped out, others spent up to 14 years to graduate from what normally should have been a three- or five-year program.

“People were not allowed to do what they had the competence to do,” said Kabeya, who graduated at age 28. “So many had to forget their ambitions.”

A Price for Everything in a Corrupt Society

Corruption also permeated every other sector of life. Everything had a price: A birth certificate, a high school diploma, admission to the city’s main airport, access to a government building.

There was little respect for human life--a reality Cecile Kabeya knows well. She trembled with rage as she recalled the day she went to the market to buy a pair of shoes for son Kevin. She was stopped by soldiers, arrested without explanation and taken to a jail where she was made to buy back her freedom. She could not recall how much she had to pay.

“Everyone saw what was happening but no one came to my aid,” she said. “They just took my money, without explanation, without a receipt.”

Her husband chuckled at the thought of receiving a receipt for money stolen by officials who were assigned to uphold law and order. But he was less happy when describing the pathetic conditions of the past.

“The system [then] gave people the mentality that they could have lots of money without any effort, without an honest job or having done anything to help the country prosper,” he said as he described one 1994 trip he took from Congo to Angola.

The vehicles in which he rode were stopped every few miles by gun-toting soldiers demanding payment before they would let the travelers go on. Only a fool would travel then without cash for bribes, Kabeya said, adding that taxi drivers were routinely pulled over on trumped-up charges and made to pay.

But at the time, the affronts against ordinary people were myriad. For the Kabeyas, the difficulties did not stop even after he finally landed his headmaster post four years ago, having dabbled for a few months in a failed diamond venture and another teaching job.

Soon after he started at his current school--with its 250 primary students and 60 11- to 18-year-olds--he was forced to work part time because there was not enough money to pay him a full salary. And then there were months when he was not paid at all.

To make things even harder, his wife’s salary was halved eight months ago, with the beginning of the civil war, when air travel came to a halt. The air traffic has still not resumed a regular schedule; neither has her pay.

Between them, the couple make the equivalent of $230 a month. That is hardly enough to support their two children. Consider: A can of baby formula costs $15; 2 pounds of poor-quality meat cost more than $4; half an ounce of sugar can go for more than $6.

Meanwhile, the couple must come up with $30 a month for rent and transportation costs of $80.

With so little money coming in and so much going out, it is little wonder that the Kabeyas feel impoverished.

He has not bought a shirt in more than a year. His children, who are tended by his wife’s younger sister during the day, have never seen toys. Kevin has never eaten chocolate. The family’s diet is made up mainly of rice, maize and fufu, a sticky mixture of ground cassava and water.

Their meals are prepared on a portable stove in the outside courtyard, where bathroom facilities are shared with four other families.

A Family’s Struggle to Survive

The odor of burning wood, rotting fruit and human perspiration drifts in and out of the courtyard from the throngs of market vendors who line the main street a few yards from the Kabeya home.

The dank, two-room concrete house--with peeling yellow-painted walls and cracked bare stone floors--once was his bachelor pad. It now holds their prized possessions, including a freezer, portable color TV, mini-cassette recorder and a plastic fan. These appliances work only rarely because the power goes out so often.

The couple, meantime, have no savings.

“Even if you have a job, you are constantly asking other people to borrow money to survive,” Cecile Kabeya said, noting that her job keeps her away from home six days a week, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. “You fall into debt, and this is so humiliating. You are diminished as a person.”

Still, the couple know they are better off than many.

Although they are in their 30s, they are considered here to be young to be married. Most of their peers cannot afford a wedding. In 1995, he sold clothes and electric appliances to pay her family a $500 dowry. He also had to scrounge for the cash for their wedding garb and nuptial party.

Friends chipped in to help, a gesture for which Kabeya was grateful but which also left him sad.

“Under the old system, it was so hard to be responsible and independent as you could be in other countries,” he said. “Hopefully, this will now change.”

Like many Congolese, the Kabeyas are trying not to be overly optimistic to avoid disappointment should Kabila’s government turn out to be little better than the Mobutu regime.

Indeed, Kabeya expressed some concern over Kabila’s decision to ban public demonstrations and multi-party politics.

“On this point, I have some anxiety,” he said. “It is clear that Kabila still has a long way to go to learn about democracy. It’s not easy to change out of the jacket of a warlord and into that of a head of state.”

Jobs that pay well, public education, adequate health care, punishment for corruption--these are things the Kabeyas want from their new government. And in his recent inauguration address, Kabila pledged to deliver.

But the proof will be in his actions, as Cecile Kabeya is quick to point out.

“I’m just waiting to see what happens,” she said. “We’ve had so many promises in the past that were never kept.”