THE RICHEST MAN IN ZAIRE

Former Democratic Republic of Congo President Mobutu Sese Seko was said to have accumulated a massive fortune from plundering his mineral rich country’s coffers. He continued where the Belgians left off, expropriating billions of dollars while condemning his countrymen to a sub-human existence.

The way he blew his country’s fortune took on some very bizzare forms.

In Gbadolite his home town, he built an airport with a runway that could land the biggest jumbo jets. The story goes, he would drive out of home saying he was leaving for Kinshasa and head around the corner to the home of his mistress, who was the sister of his wife. She lived in the ministers’ village in Gbadolite.

After a reasonable time he would tell the pilot to take off for Kinshasa, calculating that his wife would know he had left Gbadolite. When he wanted to go back home he would call the pilot in Kinshasa and tell him to fly back to Gbadolite.

"Money was no obstacle for “the cock who left every chicken in his wake sated”....

Soon after his overthrow another urban legend grew out of the Congolese attempts to explain Mobutu. That he was not the richest man in Zaire, as it was called during his reign.

As the story goes when he wanted money from the central bank, he would give his personal assistant a chit, on it a request for say $10,000 from the central bank. The PA would add a zero to make it $100,000 and hand it over to the governor. The governor in turn would add another zero to make it a million dollars.

So when the money was withdrawn the governor pocketed $900,000, the PA $90,000 and Mobutu would get his $10,000.

This week the payout of $600,000 instead of the requested $60,000 for Ugandan students in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Corona Virus outbreak in China, reminded me of the Mobutu tale.

The government decided last month they would not evacuate our students in the blockaded Wuhan city, but would instead send them $61,800 to tide them over the period. Somewhere between the decision and wiring the money to our embassy in China $538,200 was added to the sum and we all exchanged knowing winks at this sleight of hand.

The finance ministry realizing the “error” wrote to China ordering the officials there to refund the extra money.

This episode was disturbing for many reasons but two particularly stand out for me.

The first was that knowing the processes of getting payment out of government it is not as if this money was pulled out of drawer and handed over. There is a paper or electronic trail that has to be satisfied for this money to be paid out. Several levels of authority would be needed. So even if there was a “slip of the pen” someone would have caught along the line. Or so we think...

For us mere mortals we can only conclude that many people were in on the deal, it was not a solitary figure sneaking around the corridors, working on his own. That scenario would be too scary to contemplate.

Secondly, that us the unsuspecting masses’ natural reaction was to assume someone or some people were trying to “eat”. That our confidence in our government is so low that we did not even give it the benefit of doubt. Isn’t that why government struggles to explain itself when it wants to move on an initiative, which in their wisdom they think is good for the country from vaccinations to pest control to building a hospital.

Trust makes progress easier and smoother. Mistrust causes friction, that costs time, energy and resources to overcome. Is it no wonder that beyond the slowness of government bureaucracy we can’t get anything done in a timely manner?..

But even more worrying given the Mobutu analogy is that these kind of shenanigans obviously happen all the time. The boldness to inflate a figure by a thousand percent can only come with long practice. It makes you wonder, who is the richest man in Uganda.