Nigeria’s national conference and Mobutu

He became a voracious reader while serving seven years of punishment be enrolment in the military for absence from school. He was a top student in examination scores.Journalism led Belgian and American intelligence officers to Mobutu; while his military background recommended him for being Patrice Lumumba’s head of a mutinous Congolese army. The Congolese civil […]

He became a voracious reader while serving seven years of punishment be enrolment in the military for absence from school. He was a top student in examination scores.
Journalism led Belgian and American intelligence officers to Mobutu; while his military background recommended him for being Patrice Lumumba’s head of a mutinous Congolese army. The Congolese civil war incited by Belgian officers was choreographed from a mutiny to secession by Katanga would. It drew young military officers from various newly independent African countries into a dangerous forest of NATO’s intelligence operatives.
 Mobutu’s label as a ‘’bastard’’ – because his mother was pregnant when his father married her in church – bred deep insecurity in him. As a child he became an odd pet companion a white woman in a racist Belgian colony. His subsequent skill in manipulating people into believing that he really cared for them probably went back to the social chemistry of negotiating his way in these racist and insult cauldrons. He used a brilliant mind to turn officials against each other; eliminate talented potential rivals, and wield bribery.
Mobutu has received wide and negative reviews by Euro-American commentators and scholars. In discussing the historic role of political leadership, another look at Mobutu’s record is imperative. Radical Congolese intellectuals condemn Mobutu for toppling Lumumba in a military coup; jointly with Americans aiding his assassination by Belgians in Katanga; and sabotaging development to serve his longevity in power. However, curbing Lumumba’s charismatic impulsiveness earned Mobutu vital help for keeping secessionist Katanga, Kasai, Bas-Congo and Oriental provinces inside a united Congo.  
 Mobutu also struck with economic and cultural coups. In 1973 he decreed the policy of ‘’Zaireanisation’’.  Plantations, businesses and mining enterprises owned by Belgians, Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Pakistani and other foreigners were given to Congolese. Nigeria’s economic diplomacy lacked the vision and capacity to help Mobutu in making a success of it.
He urged party members ‘’to take a little, but not too much’’, stoking a storm of officials looting the economy, ministries and government-owned agencies. Immigration officers at airports demanded bribes brazenly. Budgets for hospitals were stolen. Military top brass pocketed soldiers’ payments and ‘’they emerged from their barracks to prey on their own citizens ….adept at hijacking cars and stealing beer’’. In villages, destitute soldiers robbed chicken, cassava, potatoes, bananas, beans and other foodstuffs from women on market days. Defending citizens was abandoned.
Mobutu gave assets built with sufferings of Congolese back to the Congolese; robbing foreigners the way they had robbed the Congolese. Using state power for the enrichment of white people had been taught by Belgians; and Mobutu played the game against them. That seized farms, shops, mines deteriorated had to be blamed on Congolese being excluded from planning and administering colonial political economy. On June 30, 1960, Congolese burst into violence against Belgians –including raping Catholic nuns – to celebrate their freedom and release bottled up wrath and aspirations. Mobutu raised those reflexes to regaining the economy. Neo-colonial scholars and journalists cursed him.
Mobutu’s second coup was tagged ‘’Authenticity’’. Congolese were to return to their ancestral roots. The colonial name ‘’Congo’’ became ‘’Zaire’’. He toured his vast country three to four times annually and addressed mesmerizing huge rallies for four to five hours to preach a Zaire identity. Mobutu replaced ‘’Joseph Desire’’ with authentic ‘’Sese Seko Kukubendu Wa Za Banga’’. He wished to uproot the hold of the colonial Catholic Church through Jewish names.
 Lingala music became the most trans-African and enduring cultural export by Mubutu’s artists. Seizing nightclubs from Uganda to South Africa to Senegal, Zaire’s music chased British, French and American pop music out of Africa.  Zaire’s Tabu Ley and Misa Luba reigned supreme in music shops in New York with Cameroon’s Manu Dibango and Nigeria’s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in manifesting Africa’s authentic musical genius. Mobutu had started a cultural fire which Christian Church rituals of worship are now combating by regarding African cultural practices as occultism. Cultural neo-colonialists were bound to detest him.
On 6 April, 1994 a virus emerged from skies over Rwanda which crossed into Zaire causing a fatal regime cancer. His friend, President Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down in a plane crash in Kigali. It led to Uganda, Rwanda and Angola sending troops to carry a virus named ‘’Laurent Kabila’’ into Kinshasa. Mobutu’s army led  by 50 generals and 600 colonels in 1997 – and well armed by the United States, France, Belgium, and Britain – collapsed ‘’like a maggot-eaten fruit’’ (according Michela Wrong), as Kabila raced over 1,000km to capture power. Mobutu had undermined the military through paralysing one-tribe nepotism, internal rivalries, and greed.
Denied training in leadership skills and facing Congo’s colonial bureaucracy who fled – leaving only three university graduates at independence in 1960 – Mobutu turned to manipulating and dominating untrained manpower lacking a memory of resilience. He lacked help from Africa; including Nigeria whose military help with ending Katanga’s secession was not followed with a ‘Congo Policy’. Nigeria owes Africa schemes for training youths with orientation and skills for running ‘Empire Africana’. Africa’s diplomats should, with Nigeria’s funding support, conduct research and rewrite histories for Africa. Mobutu’s achievements deserve such attention.