The Structural Roots of the DRC’s Current Disasters: Deep Dilemmas

The staggering dilemmas facing the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) today have their structural roots in both the near and distant past. The purpose of this brief reflection is to consider the nature of these disasters and to deflect discussion away from those hardy perennials that somehow, usually incorrectly, pass as explanations of the Congo’s problems. Ethnic tensions, corruption, and the absence of democracy all contribute in harmful ways to the current situation, but they do not tap into the deeper structural roots of the disasters besetting the DRC. More specifically, by “structural roots” I mean those features of the Congolese political landscape that seem to recur, albeit in slightly different form, across time and therefore across different political regimes as well.

I should like to emphasize here the long-term nature of these dilemmas; to do that I shall deliberately avoid the term most often associated with the Congo’s problems: crisis. This term is profoundly misleading. The original medical metaphor refers to a pathological condition that causes the body to become acutely ill. As the medical situation worsens the stricken individual becomes sicker and sicker, typically with some sort of spiking fever, until either the fever breaks or the patient dies. These medical crises are, in other words, typically short-lived and generally have either a positive or negative resolution. The Congo’s “crises,” however, have been recurring in one form or another since the early days of the country’s colonial period. They are really deep dilemmas that are best thought of as long-term, intermittently recurrent, continuities that, more often than not, have resulted in disasters for the Congolese people. Let me address several of these continuities. In doing so, I hope that such an approach will contribute toward at least a partial understanding of some of the things that are going on today in the DRC.

Continuity #1: A Struggle over Visions of the DRC’s Basic Political Order

The first continuity I would like to address concerns the struggle over visions of the DRC’s basic political order. The political turbulence and violence in the eastern Congo from the early 1990s to the present (2011) is in some ways the most recent manifestation of a long-term debate that has never really been resolved by the Congolese political class. To be sure, this tension also existed under colonialism as well-organized Katangan settlers repeatedly pressed the colonial state for greater doses of provincial autonomy. Moreover, from the earliest days of independence in 1960, there has been in the Congo a political struggle between, on the one side, those favoring a strong, unitarist government in Kinshasa and, on the other side, those favoring a substantial devolution of power to regional centers.

Immediately after independence these two tendencies were most visibly represented by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who had staked out a centralizing-unitarist vision of an independent Congo that featured a strong national state. But President Joseph Kasavubu tended to favor a more decentralized and federalist vision—composed of a weaker central government with much power residing in the provinces. The unitarist vision was derailed with the assassination of Lumumba and by the rest of the turbulence of the early years of independence, but the various secessions (most notably in Katanga) from 1960 to 1963 certainly added to a climate that made possible the emergence of the provincettes (small provinces) in the mid-1960s. Based on the older administrative districts of the Belgian colonial state, these more localized governments did not last long. The reemergence of Moise Tshombe, erstwhile leader of secessionist Katanga, as head of the national government, and then the seizure of power by Joseph Mobutu (later to rename himself Mobutu Sese Seko) in 1965, ushered in an era in which the centralizing vision held pride of place (see Young 1965). And Mobutu, of course, would remain in power until 1997.

But even at the high water mark of the Mobutu regime in the mid-1970s, the unitarist centralizing state had some very grave limitations. In some ways, its eyes were far bigger...