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CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE IN THE DRC

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I S S M O N O G R A P H N o 148

CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE IN THE DRC DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD

The new government in the DRC is
starting to implement its governance
programme and planning to revisit
the national anti-corruption strategy.
The temptation is high to move fast
on all fronts but it is important to
assess the immediate past and,
especially, the transition period from
2003 to 2006, so that lessons which
could inform policy decisions can
be drawn. This monograph makes a
useful contribution to a review of the
transition period. It assesses the strengths
and weaknesses of the anti-corruption
institutions and laws which were in
force, evaluating their success or failure
and identifying factors that supported
or inhibited their effectiveness. It further
identifies gaps in national laws and
regulations that could be prioritised
to make them compliant with
international legal instruments. Finally,
it makes recommendations about what
measures should be prioritised with a
view to improving the legal framework
and the relevant institutions.

Price: R30.00
ISBN: 978-1-920114-43-5
CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE
This research and
publication was made IN THE DRC
possible through generous
funding received from the
Royal Norwegian DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD (2003–2006)
Government

MUZONG KODI
 The vision of the Institute for Security Studies is one of a
stable and peaceful Africa characterised by human rights,
the rule of law, democracy and collaborative security.
As an applied policy research institute with a mission to
conceptualise, inform and enhance the security debate
in Africa, the Institute supports this vision statement by
undertaking independent applied research and analysis;
facilitating and supporting policy formulation; raising the
awareness of decision makers and the public; monitoring
trends and policy implementation; collecting, interpreting
and disseminating information; networking on national,
regional and international levels; and capacity-building.

© 2008, Institute for Security Studies

www.issafrica.org

Copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Institute for Security Studies, and no
part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission, in writing, of
both the author and the publishers.
The opinions expressed in this monograph do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute,
its trustees, members of the Council, or donors.
Authors contribute to ISS publications in their personal capacity.

ISBN: 978-1-920114-43-5

First published by the Institute for Security Studies,

P O Box 1787, Brooklyn Square 0075
Tshwane (Pretoria), South Africa

Cover photo: Africanpictures.net

Language editing and layout: Page Arts +27-21-686-0171
Printing: Tandym Print, Cape Town
CORRUPTION AND GOVERNANCE
IN THE DRC
DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD (2003–2006)

MUZONG KODI

ISS MONOGRAPH SERIES • No 148, AUGUST 2008

 CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR viii

CHAPTER 1
Introduction 1

CHAPTER 2
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 3

CHAPTER 3
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 25

CHAPTER4
Combating corruption during the transition period: An analysis
of the legal framework 41

CHAPTER 5
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the
transition period 53

CHAPTER 6
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 71

CHAPTER 7
Anti-corruption in the post-election period – 2007 and beyond 86

CHAPTER 8
Conclusion 90

CHAPTER 9
Recommendations 92
 ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS

Abako Alliance of Bakongo

ACIDH Action against Impunity for Human Rights
AFDL Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the
Congo
AMF American Mineral Fields Inc
AMP Alliance of the Presidential Majority
Asadho African Association for Defence of Human Rights
AU African Union
BIC Bank Information Centre
CCIZ Zaire International Trade Center
CDC Convention of Christian Democrats
CDG Governance Contract
CDH Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Rights
CEEC Centre of Evaluation, Expertise and Certification
CELC Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission
Cenadep National Centre for Support to Development and Popular
Participation
Cepas Research Centre for Social Action
CIAT International Committee in Support of the Transition
Cifor Center for International Forestry Research
COPIREP Steering Committee in Charge of the Reform of State
Enterprises
COREMAP Public Procurement Reform Commission
CTRAP Technical Committee in Charge of Public Administration
Reform
DFID Department for International Development (United
Kingdom)
DGI General Directorate of Taxes
DGRAD General Directorate of Administrative and State
Revenues
DRC Democratic Republic of Congo
EITI Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
EIU Economist Intelligence Unit
Abbreviations and acronyms v

EUSEC European Union’s Security Sector Reform Mission in the

DRC
FARDC Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo
FEC Federation of Congolese Enterprises
FERN The Forests and the European Union ~Resource
Network
FR Forces of Renewal
GEC Global Enterprises Corporate Ltd.
Gécamines Générale des Carrières et des Mines
GTZ German Agency for Technical Co-operation
HAM High Authority of the Media
IMF International Monetary Fund
IRM Innovative Resources Management Inc.
ISS Institute for Security Studies
I-PRSP Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
JED Journalist in Danger
KPCS Kimberley Process Certification Scheme
Licoco Congolese League against Corruption and Fraud
Miba Bakwanga Mining Company
MLC Congo Liberation Movement
MNC Congolese National Movement
Monuc United Nations Mission in the Congo
MPR Popular Movement for the Revolution
MSR Social Movement for Renewal
NACS National Anti-Corruption Strategy
NDS New Trade Union Dynamics
NGO non-governmental organisation
Niza Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa
OCEP Observatory of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials
OCPT Congolese Post and Communications Office
OFIDA Customs and Excise Authority
OR Road Authority
Onatra National Transport Authority
Palu Unified Lumubist Party
PPRD People’s Party for Reconstruction and Development
RAID Rights and Accountability in Development
RCD-Goma Congolese Rally for Democracy – Goma
RCD-ML Congolese Rally for Democracy – Liberation Movement
RCD-N Congolese Rally for Democracy – National
RDC Democratic Republic of Congo
vi Confronting the proceeds of crime in Southern Africa

Regideso National Water Company

RODHECIC Network of Human Rights and Civic Education
Organisations
RRN Natural Resources Network
RTNC Congo National Radio and Television
SADC Southern African Development Community
SAESSCAM Small-Scale Mining Technical Assistance and Training
Service
SNEL National Electricity Company
Sonas National Insurance Company
Udemo Union of Mobutuist Democrats
UDPS Union for Democracy and Social Progress
UN Union for the Nation
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) for the generous financial
support that allowed me to undertake fieldwork in Kinshasa in December 2006
and January 2007. I also wish to express my deep appreciation to Hennie Van
Vuuren, the Head of the Corruption and Governance Programme of the ISS, for
his patience and encouragement. I am indebted to the many Congolese and
expatriates I interviewed during my field trip and to those who provided writ-
ten materials. It would not have been possible to write this report without their
kind support. I am, of course, responsible for the views expressed herein.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Muzong W. Kodi holds a PhD in African History from Northwestern University

in Evanston, Illinois, USA. He lectured at the National University of Zaire,
Lubumbashi Campus (presently the University of Lubumbashi) in the Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and at the University of Nairobi in Kenya
before joining the African Centre for Monetary Studies in Dakar, Senegal. He
worked for eight years at the International Secretariat of Amnesty Interna-
tional in London where his last position was Director of International Develop-
ment. At the International Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin,
Germany he served as Regional Director and headed the Africa and the Mid-
dle East Department. Since 2005, he has been based at Chatham House (for-
merly known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London where
he focuses his research and consultancy work on governance and anti-corrup-
tion issues, and coordinates the British-Congo Forum within the Africa Pro-
gramme. He is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Diamond De-
velopment Initiative International.
Introduction 1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

The last ten years have been some of the most difficult in the history of the
DRC. This vast and resource-rich country in the centre of the African continent
has been devastated by wars imposed on its long-suffering people by its
neighbours, Rwanda and Uganda. More than four million people have died
from the direct and indirect consequences of the conflict.

In spite of the devastation that has been visited on the Congo, with the assistance
of the international community elections were held in 2006 and at the beginning
of 2007, thus putting an end to a long political transition and raising the hopes
of the Congolese people. Most observers thought the country could not ever
live up to the challenge of organising democratic elections in a country that
had not held any for 40 years, and where most of the infrastructure had been
all but destroyed. This major achievement was due to the determination of the
Congolese people themselves and the support of the international community.

However, if no lessons are learned from the country’s long history of predation
and misery, and especially from the transition period (from 2003 to 2006), the
hopes of the Congolese people will be dashed as the country may again miss
a chance to gradually bring about a democratic dispensation and start
reconstructing its institutions, economy and social fabric. Indeed, the country
will run the risk of sliding back to the bad governance and conflicts that have
marked its recent history. In fact, during the elections and the subsequent
establishment of the new political institutions, signs were shown of a resurgence
of patrimonial rule and corruption in all sectors of the society.

It is now that the most difficult period starts as the government begins the
process of putting a country that has been shattered by decades of neglect,
mismanagement, corruption and wars back on the road to sustained peace
and stability and, it is hoped, development. In a country where all the institutions
2 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

have been destroyed and everything needs and deserves urgent attention, the
government has the unenviable responsibility of making difficult choices about
which programmes and actions to adopt to create the enabling environment
that will put the Congo on the path towards development.

At this crucial juncture, when the new government is starting to implement its
programmes and when the temptation is understandably very high to move
fast on all fronts, it is important to assess the transition period from 2003 to
2006 in order to draw out lessons that could be used in making decisions about
priorities and programmes. Otherwise the predatory political and governance
culture that developed under Mobutu’s long dictatorship and that was perfected
during the transition will continue, with far-reaching consequences for the
country. In fact, without such lessons none of the urgent government actions
will succeed as a minimal level of security could not be guaranteed, public
administration could not develop the capacity to deliver the basic services
that the people badly need, and state institutions would continue to lack the
capacity to properly manage the very important mining sector, raise and manage
revenue and account for its expenditure. No progress will be made, either, if
impunity for corruption and for all kinds of crimes and human rights violations
continue to be the rule and continue to be committed with impunity because
of a corrupt and ill-equipped justice sector. Hopes for development will be
dashed if Parliament, the opposition and civil society are not given the means
and freedom to play their watchdog role vis-à-vis the executive branch of
government.

This study makes a modest contribution to a review of the transition period. It

assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the anti-corruption institutions and
laws that were in force during that time, evaluates the degree of their success
or failure and identifies the factors that supported or inhibited their
effectiveness. It further identifies some of the major gaps in national laws and
regulations that could be prioritised to make national legislation compliant
with international legal instruments (specifically the United Nations Convention
against Corruption, the African Union [AU] Convention on Preventing and
Combating Corruption, and the Southern African Development Community
[SADC] Protocol against Corruption). Finally, recommendations are made
regarding what measures should be prioritised to improve the legal framework
and the relevant institutions in the short to medium term.
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 3

CHAPTER 2
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON CORRUPTION
IN THE DRC

Background

The history of the Congo since the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin Conference
in 1885 and the scramble which followed, has been marked by predation,
authoritarianism, political oppression, the commission of all kinds of crimes
with impunity, and the struggle of the Congolese people for human dignity
and social justice. King Leopold II of Belgium acquired as his personal property
a vast territory in central Africa, 80 times the size of his own kingdom and as
large as the whole of Western Europe. He called the region the Congo Free
State (Vangroenweghe 1986; Hochshild 1998; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Ndaywel
1998).

To make a quick profit from investments in this property, a most brutal regime
of forced labour was put in place whereby villagers were required to provide
set quantities of ivory and rubber to King Leopold’s agents. Cruel punishment
was meted out to those who did not meet the quotas set for them. Their villages
were burned to the ground, people’s limbs were chopped off and massacres
carried out on a regular basis. The king also leased land to companies that
committed all kinds of atrocities in turn. The combined activities of the Congo
Free State agents and the concessionary companies decimated populations in
the regions in which they operated.

By the beginning of the 1900s, information about the regime of terror and
exploitation and the suffering of the Congolese people was spread by
missionaries and other visitors to the Congo. A campaign, spearheaded by
humanitarian organisations such as Edmond Morel’s Congo Reform Association,
was joined by a number of the celebrities of the day. King Leopold II was
4 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

forced to hand over the Congo to Belgium in 1908 and the Congo Free State
was renamed the Belgian Congo.

However, the advent of the Belgian Congo only saw a marginal improvement
in the well-being of the Congolese people as forced labour, economic
exploitation and oppression continued under Belgian rule. The first challenge
to colonial rule and a first call for independence for the Congo was made in
the 1920s when Paul Panda Farnana, who had been educated in Belgium,
fought for Belgium during World War I and imprisoned by the Germans, agitated
for Congo’s independence. He represented the Congo at the 1921 Pan-African
Congress in Brussels where he was exposed to the thinking of other black
intellectuals from around the world (Kodi 1984, 1993). It was also in the 1920s
that a messianic movement was created by Simon Kimbangu in the Lower
Congo. Kimbanguism, as the movement was known, had two concomitant
goals: the salvation of the soul and the liberation of Congo from Belgian
colonialism. Kimbangu and his followers urged the Congolese to overthrow
colonial rule. The colonial authorities reacted vigorously by arresting Kimbangu
and sentencing him to life imprisonment in the distant Katanga province.
Hundreds of his followers were also arrested and imprisoned in concentration
camps throughout the country. This only helped to spread Kimbanguism
throughout the country. Kimbangu’s movement was copied by others who
preached the message of ‘Africa for Africans’ not only in the Belgian Congo
but also in neighbouring French Congo and the Portuguese colony of Angola
(Kodi 1993).

The 1950s saw the awakening of the independence movement in Congo. The
‘winds of change’ that were blowing in colonies throughout the world reached
the small group of educated Congolese, the so-called évolués (or those who
were ‘advanced’ in comparison with the rest of the Congolese). From the early
1950s, this class of educated Congolese was made to believe that in the evolving
relations between Belgium and its colony, they would gradually be promoted
to positions in the colonial administration and the private sector that had been
held thus far by Europeans. Their aspirations were frustrated by strong opposition
from some important sectors among the Belgians in the colony. To defend their
interests the évolués created associations that advocated better conditions for
themselves and their countrymen (Anstey 1970; Stengers 1978:533–538).
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 5

In 1955, a Belgian academic published a pamphlet proposing a 30-year plan

for the emancipation of Belgian territories in Africa, which at the time was
deemed revolutionary in Belgian circles. However, reacting vigorously to this
proposal (and its endorsement in August 1956 by African Conscience,1 a group
of Congolese Catholic intellectuals), Joseph Kasavubu, the leader of the
Alliance of the Bakongo (Abako),2 rejected the plan and called for the Congo’s
immediate independence. This marked the start of the agitation for
independence that culminated in the uprising of the Congolese population of
Kinshasa on 4 January 1959, after the Belgian authorities had banned a rally
organised by Abako. Faced with mounting pressures from the newly created
Congolese parties, the Belgian authorities had no choice but to put in place a
process for the devolution of power to the Congolese. To resist the demands for
change effectively the Belgian colonial administration would have required
substantial support in terms of economic aid and military presence from the
Belgian government. However, the Belgian political establishment was not
ready to provide such expensive assistance (Peemans 1997:202–212). At a
political roundtable convened by the Belgian government in Brussels in early
1960 and attended by representatives of all the existing Congolese political
parties, it was decided that elections for the national Parliament and the
provincial assemblies would be held in May that year and independence would
be granted to the Belgian colony on 30 June 1960.

A coalition of nationalist parties won the national elections and the leader of
the Congolese National Movement (MNC),3 Patrice-Emery Lumumba, was
elected Congo’s first Prime Minister. Antoine Gizenga,4 leader of the second
largest party in the coalition, became Deputy Prime Minister. In a compromise
deal, Joseph Kasavubu was elected president of the Republic of Congo.

The ruling coalition was determined to use the immense wealth of the country
to improve the wellbeing of its people, whose expectations were very high.
These hopes were soon dashed as the country descended into chaos and anarchy,
engineered by the multinationals and other foreign interests in the Congo,
including Belgium and the USA, who saw Lumumba’s nationalist rhetoric as a
threat to their continued exploitation of the country (Witte 2000; Devlin 2007).

The former colonial army (the Force Publique) mutinied two weeks after the
Congo became independent (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:95–99). This was soon
6 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

followed by the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga province, led by Moise

Tshombe, and South Kasai, led by Albert Kalonji. Lumumba appointed Joseph-
Désiré Mobutu, a former soldier in the colonial army and a close associate of
his, as Chief of Staff of the Congolese National Army5 with the rank of colonel.
At the request of the president and the prime minister, the United Nations
deployed its ‘blue helmets’ to the Congo in what would become its largest
operation in the world.

Taking advantage of his powerful position at the head of the national army
and with the full financial and diplomatic support of foreign powers, Mobutu
staged a coup d’état in September 1960 in which he dismissed Lumumba and
his democratically elected government but kept a diminished President
Kasavubu in power. From then on Mobutu became the real power behind the
weak head of state. Lumumba attempted to join his allies in Stanleyville (now
known as Kisangani) where, under the leadership of Antoine Gizenga, they
had set up a base to re-conquer the country. He was arrested by Mobutu’s
troops in Kasai and later flown to Katanga, where Belgians murdered him and
two of his colleagues, Okito and Mpolo (Witte 2000).

Mobutu staged his second coup in November 1965 and finally took over as
head of state, thus confirming the dominant position that he had occupied
since his first coup in September 1960. By the time of the 1965 coup the
country had been reunited, and the numerous rebellions that had troubled the
Congo since its independence had been defeated thanks to the robust
interventions of mercenaries and the support of the US and Belgian governments.
By this time also, the country had held its second democratic elections since
1960 and the political parties which had participated in the elections were
negotiating the formation of a coalition government since none had won the
majority of seats in Parliament. The accusation of infighting between politicians,
which Mobutu invoked to justify the second coup, was not founded. This was
the second time that Mobutu, with the support of his foreign allies, put an end
to the move toward democracy in the Congo.

Contradicting his own promises to restore democracy and give power back to
the civilians within five years, Mobutu gradually established a dictatorial
regime after eliminating many of his allies among the politicians and the
military. Mobutu acted as the king and sole owner of the Congo, which he
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 7

renamed Zaire. Like King Leopold II, he put in place a predatory regime that
was maintained by brute force and a one-party state, and that relied on foreign
powers for its defence against external threats.

The demand for base metals, such as cobalt and copper, was spurred by the
Vietnam war and boosted the Congolese economy between 1968 and 1974.
The vast revenues from these resources should have enabled the government
to move millions of Congolese out of poverty but were instead used by Mobutu
to bribe political allies in the country and abroad and to strengthen the hold of
his party, the Popular Movement for the Revolution (MPR),6 over the country.

In November 1973, in a drive to create a national bourgeoisie which, in his

own words, would spur the country’s development, Mobutu confiscated all
small and medium-sized enterprises and handed them over to his cronies. This
was a turning point in the country’s economic history. The beneficiaries of
Mobutu’s largesse had no experience nor any intention of running businesses
and merely siphoned off the businesses’ available cash and let them rot. By
1974, most of the businesses had folded and this started a downturn in the
national economy from which the country never recovered. As a result, hundreds
of thousands of workers lost their jobs and raised the high levels of
unemployment. The government lost revenue and thus the means to maintain
infrastructure, which quickly deteriorated.

On the political front, discontent was mounting not only among the masses
but also among the elites who had benefited from the regime. In 1980, in an
unprecedented move, a group of 13 members of Parliament, led by Etienne
Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, wrote a letter to Mobutu denouncing the regime’s
mismanagement and the capture of the state by a clique, and demanding
political reforms. The reaction of the regime’s repressive machine was swift
and brutal. The MPs were all arrested and tortured. In 1982, in a show of
exceptional courage and defiance of the law establishing a one-party state in
the Congo, the MPs created a party, the Union for Democracy and Social
Progress (UDPS).7 Their struggle, combined with pressure from the regime’s
allies, forced Mobutu to accept multiparty democracy in April 1990. With the
end of the Cold War, the old dictator had outlived his usefulness to his former
masters as a bulwark against communism.
8 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

Yielding to mounting pressure from the numerous political parties that were
created after the liberalisation of the political space, Mobutu agreed to convene
a National Sovereign Conference to discuss the political future of the country.
The conference played the dual role of a truth and reconciliation institution
and a constitutional conference (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:189–198). In spite of
regular disruptions by Mobutu and his camp, the conference succeeded in
reviewing the country’s history, its mismanagement by Mobutu’s regime and
the crimes committed since independence. Furthermore, it drafted and approved
a new constitution, agreed a timetable for national elections and elected
Etienne Tshisekedi as Prime Minister. It was agreed that the transition
government led by Tshisekedi would prepare for democratic elections within
a two-year period.

Mobutu and his entourage did not want to relinquish power and lose all the
privileges that they enjoyed. They did their best to disrupt the running of the
new government and then used military force to remove it from power. Thereafter,
a number of prime ministers were appointed, including Bernardin Mungul Diaka,
Jean-de-Dieu Nguz a Karl I Bond, Faustin Birindwa, Léon Lobitsh Kengo wa
Dondo and General Likulia Bolongo.

While the politicians were arguing in Kinshasa, trouble was mounting on the
eastern fringes of the country. In fact, from April 1994, because of the Tutsi
genocide in Rwanda and the war that ensued, close to a million Rwandese
refugees crossed the border into the eastern Congolese provinces of North and
South Kivu. The leaders of the Interahamwe and officers of the defeated National
Army of Rwanda used the refugee camps in Kivu to launch sporadic attacks on
Rwanda. In October 1996, using the excuse of these attacks, Rwanda and
Uganda invaded eastern Congo. They recruited Congolese proxies who acted
as rebels and as a front for this invasion. Mobutu’s demoralised and ill-equipped
army hardly fought the invaders, who literally walked across the whole breadth
of the country. There is anecdotal evidence that all along their trek, Rwandese
and Ugandan troops and their Congolese allies killed hundreds of thousands of
Rwandese Hutu and Congolese civilians and looted whatever they could lay
their hands on. In the final stages of the conquest, the Rwandese and Ugandan
troops were joined by the Angolan army, which seized the opportunity to flush
out Angolan rebels using the Congo as their base.
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 9

In May 1997, the invading troops entered Kinshasa and a few days later Laurent-
Désiré Kabila proclaimed himself president of the Democratic Republic of
Congo. Kabila was the leader of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the
Liberation of the Congo (AFDL),8 the coalition of Congolese groups allied to
the invaders.

In spite of the atrocities they committed on their way to Kinshasa, they were
greeted everywhere in the capital as liberators who, people thought, would
continue the democratisation process that had been initiated by the National
Sovereign Conference. Even opposition politicians, including Etienne
Tshisekedi, welcomed them warmly and were ready to work with them.
However, just as Mobutu had dashed the hopes of the people for a democratic
dispensation, Kabila suspended the Constitution, banned political activities
and put in place a regime that was just as oppressive as that of his predecessor.

The personality cult that had characterised the worst times of Mobutu’s regime
was reinstated by the head of Mobutu’s propaganda machine, Sakombi Inongo.
A group of inexperienced and incompetent people were appointed to ministerial
posts and top managerial positions in state enterprises. Continuing the predatory
tradition of the ruling elite under Mobutu, the newcomers started to openly
loot state resources. The United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal
Exploitation of the Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC
documented the activities of ‘unsavoury politicians’ in the government of the
DRC who personally profited from the situation (United Nations 2001a:41).
Moreover, according to the same panel, President Kabila himself created an
enduring precedent by conferring ‘legality’ or legitimacy on activities that
were clearly illegal. For instance, he granted concessions to mining companies
and speculators well before he reached Kinshasa and proclaimed himself head
of state. The United Nations experts also reported that he tolerated some unlawful
ventures as a way of rewarding his allies (United Nations 2001a:41).

In the meantime, the Ugandan and Rwandese occupying forces began to

plunder private and public assets, which were freighted by the planeload to
their home countries. The United Nations Panel of Experts reported the following:

According to the facts, accounts and information gathered, the pivotal

roles of the Ugandan leaders reside in the way in which they diverted
10 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

the primary mission of their armies from protection of their territory

and made them armies of business. By the same token, they indirectly
created within their armies conditions for top officers to put in place
networks that they controlled (United Nations 2001a:41).

Soon Kabila fell out with his protectors, whom he asked to leave the Congo.
Both Rwanda and Uganda withdrew their troops to the eastern fringes of the
Congo and from there undertook to re-conquer the country. Kabila’s regime
was only saved by the support that he received from Angola, Namibia and
Zimbabwe. The two warring camps reached a stalemate and, as a result, the
country was divided into two parts, with the Rwandese and Ugandans – who
had created a number of proxy rebel groups – occupying the eastern and
northern sections of the country, and Kabila’s central government controlling
the west and south.

The international community exerted a great deal of pressure on the belligerents,

who convened in Lusaka to negotiate a way out of the crisis. On 10 July 1999,
they signed a cease-fire agreement that provided for the withdrawal of foreign
troops from the Congo and the disbanding of non-Congolese armed groups,
including Angolan, Rwandese, Zimbabwean, Namibian, Burundian and
Ugandan rebels, and for the creation of an Inter-Congolese Dialogue. A few
months later, in November 1999, the United Nations Security Council authorised
the deployment of the United Nations Mission in the Congo (known as ‘Monuc’,
its French acronym)9 to monitor the implementation of the Lusaka agreement.

The murder of Laurent-Désiré Kabila on 16 January 2001, allegedly by one of

his own bodyguards, marked a turning point in the history of post-independence
Congo. His entourage chose his son, Major-General Joseph Kabila, as his
replacement. The new ruler of the Congo proved to be more accommodating
than his father was to the demands of the international community. The Inter-
Congolese Dialogue provided for in the Lusaka Agreement finally took place
and culminated with the Sun City Global and All Inclusive Agreement (hereafter
the Sun City Agreement), which was approved and signed at Sun City in South
Africa in December 2002 by most of the parties to the conflict.

The new government was put in place in June 2003 and was known as the ‘1+4
Formula’. It was led by Joseph Kabila, who remained president of the DRC,
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 11

and included representatives of all the parties to the Sun City Agreement, i.e.
the main former belligerents (Kabila’s government, the Congolese Rally for
Democracy [RCD] and the Congo Liberation Movement [MLC])10 and the
opposition political parties. A vice-president, seven ministers and four deputy
ministers were allocated in equal numbers to the main parties to the agreement.
Civil society was allotted two ministries and three vice-ministries, in addition
to the presidencies and boards of five institutions that were set up in support of
democracy.11 The minor rebel groups, Congolese Rally for Democracy – National
(RCD-N), Congolese Rally for Democracy – Liberation Movement (RCD-ML)
and the Mai-Mai (self-defence militias in the Kivu, Maniema and northern
Katanga provinces created mainly to fight against Ugandan, Rwandan and
Burundian troops and Congolese Tutsi militias) were granted two ministries
each and eight vice-ministries. This formula of distribution of responsibilities
among the signatories to the Sun City Agreement was also applied to seats in
the National Assembly and the Senate, ambassadorial posts and positions on
the boards of state enterprises.

According to the Sun City Agreement, the main objectives of the transitional
government were:
• To reunite, pacify and rebuild the country
• To restore the territorial integrity of the country and to re-establish the
authority of the state throughout the national territory
• To promote national reconciliation
• To set up a national army which would be restructured and integrated
• To organise free and transparent elections at the national, provincial and
local levels
• To put in place the new political institutions

In some cases the power-sharing arrangement imposed by the Sun City

Agreement made decision-making by the government rather difficult, if not
impossible, as the partners in government did not have the same vision on
how to implement these objectives. Political patronage rather than merit was
the most important factor in appointing officials to various positions. This had
the effect of further reducing the management capacity and technical expertise
12 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

in government, Parliament, the civil service, the armed forces, the police,
state enterprises and all the other bodies in which the parties to the Sun City
Agreement appointed officials. In all these bodies, as shown later in this report,
incompetent political appointees defended the interests of the sector to which
they belonged, rather the interests of the state as a whole.

The transition period lasted from June 2003, when the new government was
put in place, to 6 December 2006, when the elected president was inaugurated.
It was a rather difficult process as there was no political will on the part of the
former belligerents to go to elections. They dragged their feet on passing the
necessary laws for the electoral process to continue its normal course and for
the elections to take place. However, thanks to the pressure that the international
community continued to exert on the political elites and due to the
determination of the Congolese people to put an end to the long transition, the
referendum adopting the new Constitution of the DRC took place, as did
presidential, Parliamentary and provincial assembly elections. This was no
mean feat in an environment where most of the infrastructure had been destroyed
and public institutions had all but disappeared.

Joseph Kabila was elected president after a second round in an election that
pitted him against former Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba. The Alliance of
the Presidential Majority (AMP),12 which was the coalition of political parties
led by Kabila’s People’s Party for Reconstruction and Development (PPRD),13
had a sizeable majority in both the National Assembly and the Senate. In
addition, nine out of 11 provincial governors belonged to this coalition. Besides
Kabila’s PPRD, the AMP included, among others, the political party of the
Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga (the Unified Lumumbist Party – Palu),14 Pierre
Lumbi’s Social Movement for Renewal (MSR),15 Mbusa Nyamwisi’s Forces of
Renewal (FR),16 and Mobutu Nzanga’s Union of Mobutuist Democrats (Udemo).17

The opposition was mainly made up of a coalition of parties called Union for
the Nation18 (UN, referred to hereafter as the UN coalition), led by Jean-Pierre
Bemba’s MLC. It included the Convention of Christian Democrats (CDC),19
whose leader is Kiakwama kia Kiziki, and a number of independents. Azarias
Ruberwa’s RCD-Goma was also in the opposition although it was not a member
of the UN coalition. Veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi’s UDPS, which
boycotted the elections, remained outside the institutions and intended to
continue to play a role as an opposition party.
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 13

All the institutions have been established at both the national and the provincial
level. The new government, its programme and budget have been approved
by Parliament. It is important to note that politicians of the Mobutu era have
made a remarkable comeback on the political scene. To everybody’s surprise,
Léon Lobitsch Kengo wa Dondo, who had been Prime Minister three times
under Mobutu, stood as an independent and was elected speaker of the Senate,
thus outmanoeuvring President Kabila’s divided coalition. Two other old Mobutu
hands cleverly used their experience of wheeling and dealing to outclass the
newcomers on the Congolese political scene. Kengo’s second deputy is none
other than one of the most powerful figures in Mobutu’s intelligence apparatus,
Edouard Mokolo wa Mpombo. Another key figure of Mobutu’s era, Mario
Cardoso Losembe, was elected first deputy speaker of the Senate.

The transition period was a great disappointment to the Congolese people as

the politicians, who were solely interested in profiting from their positions,
were oblivious to their needs. The Catholic church (see CENCO 2004 and
2005), civil society (Société civile/Forces vives 2005), trade unions and the
media often appealed to politicians to pay attention to the plight of the people.
During this period the infrastructure (roads, railway, water and electricity
distribution networks, hospitals, schools) deteriorated further during this period
from neglect. Some of the crucial objectives of the transition period, as set by
the Sun City Agreement, were not met. These included the integration of the
armed groups into a national army capable of defending the national territory,
the formation of a national police force, national reconciliation, and the
rehabilitation of an independent justice system. The items of this unfinished
agenda will be among the priorities of the new government.

This historical review shows a striking continuity in the type of governance

that the Congo has known for more than a century, from the time of King
Leopold II of Belgium through the colonial period to Mobutu’s regime and to
the presidencies of both of the Kabilas. The predatory regimes that have
succeeded each other over this time have been characterised by greed,
corruption, massive violations of human rights and the commission of all kinds
of crimes with impunity. They have devastated what could have been one of
the richest countries in Africa. In the midst of vast riches one finds one of the
poorest people in the world. The Congo is again at a crossroads in its history, as
it had been at independence in 1960, after Mobutu’s second coup d’état in
1965 and when Mobutu was ousted by Rwanda and Uganda and replaced by
14 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

Kabila in 1997. Once again, the Congolese expect that this third republic will
mark the beginning of the end of their misery and suffering. The next section
will analyse just one of the factors, i.e. corruption, that explain why the
Congolese have not benefited from the political changes since Mobutu’s regime.

Corruption under Mobutu Sese Seko

The causes and consequences of corruption during the transition period can
neither be put in their right perspective nor properly understood without tracing
the scourge back to its roots in Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year rule. Most of the
adult population in the DRC today grew up under Mobutu’s regime, which is
the yardstick against which they assess the current situation. Besides, the
values held and propagated by Mobutu and his entourage have moulded the
Congolese psyche, subverted the moral values of society and left an indelible
mark on the institutions of Patrice-Emery Lumumba’s country. The neo-
patrimonial regime that Mobutu established in the heart of Africa with the
benevolent support of his foreign masters continues to be the model of
governance for the ruling elite. It is no wonder that Lumumba’s Deputy Prime
Minister and the present Prime Minister, Antoine Gizenga Funji, has made the
fight against corruption one of his priorities.

Mobutu maintained his hold on power not only by using brutal force and guile,
but also by using the power of money. The armed forces of the country were
there for the protection of Mobutu and his entourage. He used them and the
extensive intelligence establishment he had put in place to intimidate and
keep the people under control, as he had learned how to do in the colonial
army. He was also an adept Machiavellian and a formidable manipulator who
knew how to divide and rule his people. In addition, he excelled in using
money to make new allies and enjoy the support of his network of friends
within and outside of the country. To raise the vast amounts of money that he
needed, he required unlimited access to all the resources of the country, which
he achieved by turning the country’s assets into his personal property and by
gradually establishing a neo-patrimonial regime. He was emulated by the
ruling elite who, like their president, saw their positions in the state
establishment not as a duty to the country but as an opportunity to enrich
themselves and their relatives (Diangitukwa 2001 and Nzongola-Ntalaja
2002:157–160).
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 15

In the armed forces, which were the backbone of the regime, corruption was
rampant. Officers regularly embezzled the pay of their soldiers or they declared
large numbers of ‘ghost soldiers’ whose salaries they pocketed. They even sold
their equipment and rations. They also assigned their soldiers to the protection
of rich expatriate entrepreneurs in exchange for pay. Many of these foreigners
were involved in criminal activities, including importing counterfeit bank
notes and smuggling timber, gold and diamonds out of the country. The
protection money they paid army officers put them above the law (Nzongola-
Ntalaja 2002:153–157).

Interviews with former high-ranking officers under Mobutu (who requested to

remain anonymous) brought to light that, just as under Belgian colonial rule,
soldiers were taught to consider civilians as unintelligent and undisciplined
and, therefore, as inferior human beings. This is corroborated by Jean-Claude
Willame (1972:57–76) who asserts that from the very beginning of Belgian
colonisation, ‘the military organisation of the colony rested upon the fragile
basis of an army whose troops were alienated from Congolese society as a
whole and its tribal origins in particular’. Soldiers were allowed to fleece at
will the people they were supposed to protect.

An elitist spirit was created within the colonial army and this was preserved
after independence. This is documented by an army publication (Bulletin
Militaire), cited by Willame (1972:60), which advised that:

The best remedy for subversion and corruption in the army is the isola-
tion of the troops by inculcating a positive zealotry toward their craft
and the nobility of military ideals [and by teaching them] to despise
the masses, who lack military discipline.

Like the Force Publique, the post-independence soldiers’ mindset was that of
an occupying force, which kept its distance from the people. In spite of the
low salaries paid irregularly by the army, young people flocked to join because,
with their uniforms and arms, they could raise all kinds of illegal ‘taxes’ from
civilians (Schatzberg 1988:52–70; Braeckman 1992:50–57).

As reported above, from 1968 to 1974 vast amounts of revenue accrued to

Mobutu’s Zaire because of the rise in the prices of copper and other base
metals. In fact, the demand for these metals by armament industries that
16 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

supplied the US army in Vietnam increased prices to the highest historical

levels on the world market (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:148). The revenues, which
should have been used to develop the country, created instead an opportunity
for the elites to enrich themselves. All kinds of schemes were invented to steal
money from the state. It is no mere coincidence that this was the period in
which the country saw a mushrooming of numerous very costly ‘white elephant’
projects. The Inga-Shaba power line, the Zaire International Trade Center
(CCIZ),20 and the Maluku steel plant were two of the projects that were
launched during the heady days of the early 1970s. They provided opportunities
for Mobutu and his cronies to pocket huge bribes and for their foreign partners
to enrich themselves immensely.

It is also during this period that Mobutu embarked on a scheme which, he

declared, would help create a Congolese bourgeoisie. The new national
bourgeoisie, he argued, would spearhead the development of the country. To
create this new class, in 1973 he decided to confiscate the properties of small
and medium-sized enterprises belonging to expatriates and to hand them over
to his clients. This drive, which was called ‘Zairianisation’, failed miserably as
the beneficiaries of this state-sponsored theft had no business experience. As
mentioned above, most sold any assets they could dispose of, sacked their
staff and abandoned the businesses. Realising the damaging effect that Zairianisation
had had on the national economy, Mobutu requested that the businesses be handed
back to their owners, very few of whom were willing to return to Zaire.

From the mid-1970s, the country started feeling the consequences of the
economic downturn. The decrease in state revenue meant that even the little
that had been devoted to the maintenance of the physical infrastructure
disappeared, the state was less able to pay regular salaries to civil servants
and the armed forces, and schools and hospitals were no longer maintained.
This led to a phenomenal growth in the informal sector, in which millions of
unemployed workers found a means to eke out a miserable living. The growth
in the informal sector was also spurred by the high costs levied on formal
businesses by a plethora of public services in the form of illegal taxes. This
state of affairs discouraged entrepreneurship and contributed to the fast decline
of the formal sector.

The banking sector was gradually marginalised as more and more money
circulated in parallel networks in order to avoid possible control. As the national
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 17

currency depreciated rapidly, with the exchange rate changing several times
in a day, the US dollar was increasingly used not only as a refuge currency but
also as the preferred currency in normal commercial transactions. The almighty
dollar could only be found in the informal currency market called ‘Wall Street’,
in which all the regime’s barons (i.e. the president’s relatives and friends and
all those in the higher echelons of government and the army who benefited
from Mobutu’s largesse) and their clients openly speculated. Even companies
resorted to the informal currency market to procure the foreign currency they
needed for imports (Braeckman 1992:193–212).

For the majority of the people, a fight for survival became the order of the day.
One had to be ‘resourceful’ (débrouillard) to survive and provide for one’s
family. It was in this context of utter destitution that the moral values of the
society were challenged and turned upside down. Corruption became an
accepted and tolerated reality. Corrupt individuals, who flaunted their ill-
acquired riches, were admired and became role models. An appointment to a
government position or a high position in the armed forces of public
administration, which gave the appointee access to state coffers, was greeted
as a blessing by the relatives and associates of the person. They indeed expected
to benefit from the appointee’s corrupt activities. Those who refused to partake
in corrupt activities were derided by their community and considered as misfits
and as utopians who dreamt about changing the world. They were advised to
steal like everybody else. This is indeed the most enduring legacy of Mobutu’s
32-year regime, which will be a major challenge for those who intend to fight
corruption in the DRC. The notion of public good, of which the government
and public institutions were the stewards on behalf of the national community,
became meaningless. It was common to hear people say in Lingala, ‘ezali
eloko ya Leta, ya moto te’. This means: ‘a public good does not belong to
anybody’. In other words, public goods are free for all and can be looted with
impunity. This legacy underscores the challenges facing the DRC today.

In such a context, where negative moral and ethical values prevail, it will not
be possible to eradicate corruption with technical remedies alone. Strong
institutions and a strong legal framework will not be a solution either. Well-
paid civil servants and soldiers may also continue to request bribes. Indeed,
for any anti-corruption programme to produce the desired effects, the issues of
moral values and behavioural change need to be factored in.
18 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The general tolerance of corruption under Mobutu was reflected not only in
people’s attitudes but also in the languages of the country. So, for instance,
corruption was referred to as ‘coop’, an abbreviation of cooperation, or as
‘madesu ya bana’, which means children’s beans, or ‘mbuengi’, a type of
beans. Proverbs, which are normally used to transmit ancestral wisdom, were
also used to convey the acceptance of corruption as a legitimate activity. In
Kikongo, for instance, people would say ‘ku usadilanga, ku udilanga’, which
means, ‘you eat where you work’. In other words, it is acceptable to ‘eat’, that
is to steal, where you work. It was reported that Mobutu, in one of his 1973
speeches, while denouncing the state employees who embezzled large amounts
of money, advised them in Lingala, ‘yiba na mayele’, which means ‘be smart
while you are stealing’. For the public this meant that it was fine to steal from
the state as long as one was not caught.

Public administration was the institution where the consequences of this general
tolerance and acceptance of corruption as a normal way of life was experienced
the most. No document could be issued and no service delivered without a
bribe. Civil servants multiplied ploys to force the public to part with money for
services that they were expected to provide as part of their normal work. Those
who refused to pay bribes were either denied the service or had to wait a long
time. As the nomenclature of taxes was unknown to the public, public servants
made up all kinds of taxes and inflated the existing ones. People had nobody
to complain to as the corrupt networks were organised and controlled by the
authorities, who were supposed to ensure the good management of the services.

Immunity was guaranteed to the barons of the regime and their clients as the
justice sector was not spared the corruption that was rampant in the country.
The justice sector was controlled by the executive branch of government and
the corrupt networks that had captured the state apparatus. Gérard Kamanda
wa Kamanda, one of the barons of the regime and a trained lawyer himself,
had this to say about the justice sector (Tshilombo 2007):

The justice sector incarnates injustice, corruption, tribalism,

skulduggery…the Zairian or the foreigner who is to be tried comes to the
court shaking because he does not know what is going to happen to him.

Judges and magistrates were appointed by the Minister of Justice who could
dismiss them at will. Paid menial wages, they were demoralised and vulnerable
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 19

to corruption. Even in some quarters where integrity survived, they lacked the
resources to do their work properly.

By the end of the 1970s, the international backers of Mobutu’s regime had
tried everything to stop the slide of the economy with no noticeable results. In
1978, measures were then taken at the bilateral and multilateral levels to put
the country’s economic organs under direct international control. Erwin
Blumenthal was appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to head
the Banque du Zaire, the central bank of the country. Belgium and France,
Mobutu’s unshakable friends, sent groups of experts to manage the Ministry of
Finance and the Customs and Excise Authority (OFIDA),21 the customs authority.
In spite of all the controls that were put in place, it was reported that 50–75%
of foreign exchange continued to elude the central bank as the regime’s corrupt
networks continued to circumvent all rules and regulations (Nzongola-Ntalaja
2002:151–2; Wrong 2000:189–194). By 1979, Blumenthal, who had been
threatened several times by army generals, gave up and returned to Washington,
DC. In the report that he wrote after his stint in Kinshasa, he concluded (Wrong
2005):

There has been – and there still is – one single major obstacle wiping
all prospects: the corruption of the team in power.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja explained the failure of this experiment in economic

tutelage by the international community as follows (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2005:152):

The tutelage of foreign experts was based on major fallacy, the view
that mismanagement was a technical problem. This was a false view,
for what was wrong with the country under Mobutu, as subsequently
under Kabila, was not so much the lack of technical skills among
nationals as the use to which the skills available were put. The frequent
purges of competent young officers in the armed forces had their parallels
in the staffing policies and practices within the other branches of the state
apparatus. For those who thrived on corruption and incompetence, medi-
ocrity was preferable to excellence, and immorality to integrity.

In November 1982, Kengo wa Dondo was appointed Prime Minister by President

Mobutu. He immediately announced his intention to undertake a wide range
of reforms to salvage the economy. Among the first measures was the arrest of
more than a hundred high-ranking civil servants and politicians suspected of
20 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

corrupt activities. However, he was accused of waging a selective war against

his political enemies and ignoring his own corrupt allies. With the support of
the international community, he took a series of economic measures that merely
had the effect of making him very unpopular even within the ranks of the
regime’s barons. The austerity measures dictated by the Bretton Wood institutions
worsened the situation of a population already living in abject poverty. By
1986, Kengo had become one of the most disliked leaders in the country and
a liability to Mobutu, who had no choice but to get rid of him.

By 1990, Mobutu had outlived his usefulness to his Western backers. The old
dinosaur was no longer needed as the Cold War had ended and there was no
longer any need for a bulwark against the Marxist-Leninist regimes in
neighbouring Angola and Congo-Brazzaville. His former friends and protectors
seized the opportunity presented by the massacre of students at the Lubumbashi
campus of the National University in May 1990 to cut off external aid. As the
economy was already in dire straights, the withdrawal of foreign assistance
reduced substantially the sources of income that the corrupt barons could
access. State enterprises and especially the customs authority and the tax
collection agencies were captured by the ruling class and managed as private
concerns. The state gradually lost control of the enterprises to these corrupt
networks (Braeckman 1992:198–203; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:157–160).

The liberalisation of the political scene in April 1990 created new opportunities
for corrupt activities. Dozens of political parties were created overnight with
the sole purpose of selling votes in the National Sovereign Conference. Some
individuals were bribed by Mobutu’s camp, which had been deserted by many
of its members who then formed their own political parties. These parties were
empty shells that had no constituencies. Many young and promising
professionals, who had not participated in the running of the country, impressed
people with their articulate analyses of the ongoing crisis and were also bribed
to join Mobutu’s party. There is anecdotal evidence that a lot of ‘brown
envelopes’22 circulated among the participants in the National Sovereign
Conference, thus once again dashing the hopes of those who had believed
that this historical event would lead to a new country free of the vice of
corruption (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:189–198).

In 1992, the National Sovereign Conference, after analysing the ills that afflicted
the Congo, concluded that the ongoing crisis was primarily moral. Among the
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 21

vices that had destroyed the moral fabric of the society, the Conference
especially denounced corruption, which had become the keystone of Mobutu’s
Second Republic. To remedy this situation, the Conference recommended,
among other things, that a national declaration of ethical principles be drafted
and a national ethics council be put in place.

By the mid-1990s, external assistance had been reduced to humanitarian aid

and the economy had all but collapsed, so the state budget dwindled and
formal employment declined rapidly. While many people resorted to the
informal sector to survive, the political and business elites found new ways to
keep up their living standards and maintain their patronage networks by
criminalising the economy. The abuse of entrusted power for the personal gain
of the elites took several forms, including organised fraud, money laundering,
clandestine printing and circulation of counterfeited bank notes, stripping of
state mineral and forest assets, etc.

Under pressure from the World Bank, in 1995 Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo
undertook to privatise state enterprises with a view to raising money to service
the country’s external debt and to get the economy back on its feet again. As
part of this move, negotiations were started with various mining companies,
which culminated in the signing of joint venture contracts between Gécamines
and a number of mining companies, including the Lundin Group, Anvil Mining
and Union Minière. Parts of Okimo, the state-owned gold mining enterprise,
were sold to Mindev and Barrick Gold Corporation. A contract was also signed
between the partially state-owned Sominki, 23 mining enterprise, and a
consortium made up of Banro Resources Corporation and Mines d’Or du Zaire,
a Belgian company (RDC 2005:5–7). As the negotiations took place while the
Eastern provinces of the country were being invaded by Rwanda, Uganda and
Burundi, and the country needed cash urgently to buy arms and ammunitions
for the national army, the government had very little room to maneuver. The
terms and conditions of the contracts, which were negotiated in very opaque
circumstances, were one sided and unfavourable to the DRC (RDC 2005:5–7).
International observers in Kinshasa feared that some of these deals might have
involved corruption (Human Rights Watch 2005a:14).

By the time the Congo was invaded by Rwanda and Uganda in October 1996,
the national army had become so disorganised and demoralised that it could
22 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

not protect the country. As mentioned above, soldiers’ meagre salaries were
embezzled and their equipment sold off by high-ranking officers from Mobutu’s
entourage. The officer corps had become full-time ‘businessmen’, using their
uniforms to smuggle arms to Jonas Savimbi’s guerrilla fighters in return for
diamonds (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:153–157). They provided protection to foreign
smugglers of diamonds, gold and other minerals from the country. Corruption,
mismanagement and tribalism had devastated the armed forces so much that
Mobutu’s Zaire, as the popular saying went, was a ripe fruit waiting to be
picked. Corruption, on which Mobutu had built his regime, had gradually
eaten away at the very foundation of the regime and led to its collapse. It was
a sad end for a man who had vowed never to be addressed as ‘the former
president of Zaire’. During his 32 years in power, Mobutu and the barons of his
regime had created a culture that was characterised by tolerance of corruption
at all levels of society, the blurring of the line between private and public
property, mismanagement, lack of respect for human rights, and impunity for
all kinds of crimes. It is this culture that continued during the regime of Laurent-
Désiré Kabila, his son, Joseph, and the transition period that followed.

Corruption under Laurent-Désiré Kabila

Before he even reached Kinshasa, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who needed a lot of

money to equip the invading armies and keep up his entourage, emulated
Kengo wa Dondo by offering mining concessions to a number of companies
that had deserted Kinshasa to negotiate with him in Goma and then Lubumbashi.
The first beneficiaries of mining contracts that were signed amid rumours of
corruption included American Mineral Fields Inc. (AMF) (a Canadian junior
enterprise), the Zimbabwean company Ridgepointe Overseas Development,
Australia-based Resources Russell Group and American Diamond Buyers, a
subsidiary of AMF (Dunn 2002:59-60).

As mentioned in the previous section of this report, the people of the DRC
greeted the Rwandese and Ugandan invaders as ‘liberators’ who, in the name
of Pan-Africanism, had come to save them from Mobutu’s kleptocratic regime.
All those political opponents who had agitated against Mobutu since the time
of the National Sovereign Conference hoped that the resolutions of the
conference would be revived and implemented, which is why so many of
them collaborated with the invaders. Even Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba
A historical perspective on corruption in the DRC 23

greeted Kabila with open arms and offered to collaborate with him, hoping
that he would be reinstated as Prime Minister. Kabila’s first public statements
encouraged the people to dream of a new dawn. In fact, in the speech that he
gave on the 37th anniversary of independence, he declared his intention to
make fundamental changes to the governance of the country. He further stated
(Ndaywel 1998:882):

The anniversary that we are celebrating today has this particular char-
acteristic that it comes after a long period of dictatorship during which
the country, having lost its soul, was diverted to the point of no longer
having a State, of not being governed any longer, worse still having
no other future than a slow and permanent death. This anniversary
therefore marks the renaissance of our country and the return to life of
our people. [Author’s translation]

People were soon disillusioned, however, as Kabila not only reinstated the
type of dictatorial regime under which the country had laboured before the
April 1990 political liberalisation. Instead of the sound, transparent and efficient
management of the economy that he had promised, his actions showed an
uncanny resemblance to the bad governance that had characterised Mobutu’s
rule. Wrong (2000:299) aptly summarised this situation as follows:

Despite the Leopard’s departure, there has been no renewal, no change

in mentalities. Mobutu ruled thanks to the support of a mono-ethnic
security force. So does Kabila. Mobutu destroyed the formal economy.
Kabila has gone even further, choking off the informal economy.
‘Kabila’, as one European politician astutely remarked, ‘has simply
replaced Mobutu with Mobutuism’.

Assets were openly looted by the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian occupying
forces and Kabila’s own entourage, who seized any property they fancied. The
political activists and adventurers from the Congolese diaspora in North America
and Western Europe who had joined Kabila were appointed to high positions
in government and other key institutions, in spite of their lack of experience or
expertise. They also quickly learned the ropes of how to benefit from their
positions, just as Mobutu’s barons had done before them. The embedded corrupt,
elite networks of Mobutu’s followers reorganised themselves and joined Kabila’s
inner circles (Wrong 2000:293).
24 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

When the short-lived alliance between Kabila and his Ugandan and Rwandan
mentors broke up in August 1998, the country was invaded a second time by
the same coalition. As a result, the country was divided into two. While the
western half of the country remained under the control of Kabila’s central
government and his allies (Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Chad), the northern
and eastern fringes of the country were divided up among the proxy warlords
supported by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. The pretext for the invasion at the
beginning of this second war was security along the common borders, which
was threatened by Ugandan and Rwandan rebels, and the protection of the
Tutsi minorities in Kivu. This was soon forgotten as Congo’s eastern neighbours
vied with each other to exploit its natural resources. In the territory controlled
by the central government, the foreign allies started to engage in similar
ventures. The modus operandi was the same throughout the country. The new
masters of the Congo were granted mining concessions and exonerated from
taxes for all their business activities and they signed joint venture contracts.
Moreover, they systematically plundered the stocks of minerals, timber, coffee
and cattle they found in the occupied territories. As the state had all but
collapsed this was a golden opportunity for all kinds of adventurers and other
criminals to plunder the country with impunity (Turner 2007:40–42).

The war economy, which was established throughout the country, allowed the
warlords and their foreign allies to raise substantial revenues and to fund the
war. It was dominated by armed actors who collaborated closely with local
and foreign companies, criminal elements and local political authorities. As a
result, comprehensive commercial networks were set up that relied on violent
predatory strategies to exploit resources, fix prices and prey on the people.
Given the prevailing unstable and uncertain situation in which they operated
because of ongoing violence, the elite networks focused their activities on
ventures that required few investments but from which they could reap quick
profits. Included among these activities were levying illegal and exorbitant
taxes on trade and exploiting natural resources that had high returns, such as
gold, diamonds, cassiterite, cobalt and copper (Kodi 2007:9). The panel of
experts put in place by the United Nations Security Council in July 2000 to
investigate the illicit exploitation of the DRC’s natural resources gave a wealth
of details on the elite networks, connected with international criminal networks,
which had captured the country and plundered its resources to the detriment
of its people and which also fuelled the ongoing conflict (United Nations
2001a, b; 2002, 2003b).
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 25

CHAPTER 3
CORRUPTION DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD
(2003–2006)

This section provides an overview of corruption in key areas, including public

finance management, public administration, the justice sector, state enterprises,
the mining sector, the armed forces, the education sector and the electoral
process. This will illustrate the extent to which the heirs of Mobutu Sese Seko
and Laurent-Désiré Kabila perpetuated the enduring legacy of kleptocracy.

At the end of the transition period, the Observatory of the Code of Ethics for
Public Officials (OCEP)24 – an organ created by a Presidential Decree-Law in
2002 to promote and monitor the implementation of the code of conduct of
public officials – carried out a landmark survey of corruption in the DRC. The
preliminary results of the survey were announced in December 2006 as part of
the celebration of the first anti-corruption week in the Congo – but were not
made available in a publication. Of the 30 public institutions included in the
survey, the most corrupt were found to be the offices of the president and the
four vice-presidents (known in French as l’Espace Présidentiel) followed by the
justice sector and the customs authority. Corruption topped all the negative
values found in the Congolese public administration.25

Power-sharing and corruption

As reported above, a ceasefire was signed in Lusaka, Zambia, on 10 July

1999, at the end of a conference that brought together all six countries involved
in the conflict in the DRC, i.e. Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe
and the DRC. However, the Lusaka Agreement did not have the envisaged
results as the ceasefire continued to be violated by all sides.
26 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

In an attempt to address the political aspects of the Lusaka Agreement and put
an end to the conflict, an Inter-Congolese Dialogue was launched at the behest
of the international community. This initiative was to bring to the negotiation
table representatives of the Kinshasa government, all the rebel movements,
the unarmed political opposition and civil society organisations. A first meeting
held in Addis-Ababa in October 2001 was followed by a more sustained effort
in Sun City, South Africa, under the combined mediation of South Africa and
the United Nations from February 2002. This culminated in the signing of the
Sun City Agreement, which complemented the Lusaka Agreement and put in
place a two-year power-sharing arrangement. The agreement provided that
Joseph Kabila would remain president and would be deputised by four vice-
presidents. A government and two-chamber Parliament would be formed and
would be made up of appointees from the Kinshasa government and the rebels’
movements, the unarmed political opposition and civil society organisations.

The Sun City Agreement made a mockery of good governance, accountability

and merit. In fact, it provided a power-sharing arrangement for the transition
period (2003–2006) whereby all the signatories were allocated a proportionate
share of government ministries, seats in the national assembly and the Senate,
top positions in the state enterprises, ambassadorial positions and high-ranking
positions in the army and police. The appointments to these positions were
carried out by the signatories to the Agreement, i.e. the president and the four
vice-presidents. The appointees were only accountable to their leaders, who
were also given the full powers to remove them. This created a strange situation
wherein the head of state and his four vice-presidents could not be sanctioned
by the Senate or the National Assembly during the transition. Ministers could
be summoned by one of the chambers to answer questions on their performance.
The power to sanction them remained with the leaders of the ‘components’ to
whom they were exclusively answerable. All the checks and balances on
which good governance is based were effectively removed by the Sun City
Agreement and the resulting power-sharing arrangement.

The power-sharing arrangement created new opportunities for corrupt activities

and guaranteed immunity to all the office-holders as long as they maintained
good client relations with their leaders. Political patronage was more important
than merit in the appointment of officials. As a result, the management
capacities of state organs, which had already been substantially diminished
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 27

by 32 years of neo-patrimonial rule under Mobutu, were further reduced by an

influx of incompetent political operatives. As a rule, the appointees defended
the interests of their respective ‘components’ and made any consensual
management and decision-making impossible. As detailed in a later section,
even those institutions that were supposed to ensure that good governance
standards were upheld and to lead the fight against corruption, such as the
Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (CELC), were not spared.

For the preparation of the forthcoming elections, politicians needed a great

deal of money. Therefore, the primary objective of the new rulers of the Congo
was to raise substantial amounts of money from all the positions in ministries,
state enterprises and tax-collecting organs that were allocated to them. Money
had to be found to fund the electoral campaigns and, in case the elections
were lost, to fight for power by starting another war (Kabungulu:60–6126).

Most of the former belligerents – including Joseph Kabila and vice-presidents

Azarias Ruberwa and Jean Pierre Bemba – kept a sizeable number of their best
soldiers out of the process of integrating the national army (ICG 2006:4).
According to figures in a Swiss Peace report (2006:12), President Kabila’s
presidential guard was said to include up to 15 000 soldiers who were kept out
of the security forces integration process. Vice-President Bemba was alleged
to have under his direct command about 2 000 troops in Kinshasa and in the
Equateur province. It is believed that Vice-President Ruberwa could count on
the loyalty of between 11 000 and 20 000 soldiers of the former army of RCD-
Goma, scattered mainly in North and South Kivu provinces but also in Maniema,
Orientale and Kasai Oriental provinces. One of his former commanders, Laurent
Nkundabatware, was said to have 2 000 troops from the former army of RCD-
Goma under his control in North Kivu. They therefore needed to raise cash for
the maintenance of these troops, which were under their own direct command
(International Crisis Group [ICG] 2005:4; Kibasomba 2005:15; Human Rights
Watch 2005a:8–10; Swiss Peace 2006:12; Braeckman 2006:11). With the coffers
of the state wide open and all the controls neutralised, the looting of state
assets was carried out openly and reached heights that could not have been
imagined even in the worst times of Mobutu’s kleptocratic rule.

The warlords turned politicians not only helped themselves to the coffers of
the state but also continued to benefit from the war economy that they had put
28 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

in place. It can be rightly argued that the proxy warlords and their external
masters signed the Sun City Agreement because, among other things, it did
not raise the economic issues relating to the illicit exploitation of the resources
of the country and did not touch their privileges (Nest 2006:31–62). Human
Rights Watch (2005b) and Global Witness (2004, 2006), for instance, have
extensively documented how the warlords continued to plunder the sections
of the country that remained under their control (mainly the northern half of
the Equateur Province, and the Orientale, Maniema and Kivu Provinces) even
after they had joined the central government in Kinshasa.

Corruption in public finance management

Analysing the disastrous management of public finances from 2001 to 2004,

Professor Mabi Mulumba (2006b:1, 3), the then-president of the Court of
Auditors, concluded that it was characterised by a complete lack of respect
for budget estimates – which were not made available to the public or even to
civil servants – and total disregard for the rules and regulations governing
public accounts. He noted, in the same article, that the substantial budget
deficits that resulted from such practices were financed by credits from the
Banque Centrale du Congo well beyond the limits set in its statutes. More
unbudgeted expenses were incurred than those provided for in the budget.

The rules and regulations governing public procurement were simply ignored,
with single-source procurement and over-billing being systematically applied.
To make matters worse, public officials in charge of procurement lacked the
necessary skills. As a rule, all the stages of procurement were managed by a
single individual.27As the internal and external oversight mechanisms were
weak or dysfunctional, it was difficult to identify breaches in the system and
prosecute corrupt officials. Given the difficulty of gathering evidence in such
circumstances and the lack of staff with the necessary technical skills, no
corruption case relating to procurement was ever referred to a court.28 The
government did not account to Parliament on the performance of the budget
during the period under review (Mabi 2006b:6; Mukwayanzo & Tona 2005:138).

It is because of the intractable problems of public finance management and

the lack of sustained efforts on the part of the government to tackle them that
the IMF and DRC had rather difficult relations during this period. In fact, from
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 29

2001 – when structural co-operation with the international community restarted

– and the end of the transition period in 2006, the IMF requested that measures
be taken to remedy a list of governance problems that remained practically
the same throughout (IMF 2004, 2005b, 2006, 2007):
• The implementation of a new budget classification system in the budget
• The rationalisation and reinstatement of the full expenditure chain
applicable to all types of expenditure, including commitment, liquidation,
payment orders, and payment
• The implementation of a computerised exchange of information between
the treasury and the central bank
• The production of monthly budget execution reports at each stage of the
budget process
• The auditing of the government budget execution by the Court of Accounts
• The reform of the procurement process
• The prior authorisation of the Ministry of Finance for the financing of
government expenditure by the central bank
• The reduction of the share of the budget allocated to defence, security
and political institutions (mainly the president and the four vice-presidents)
in favour of pro-poor spending
• The implementation of a comprehensive tax reform, elimination of tax
exemptions and improvement of tax compliance and collection

The maintenance of a dysfunctional public finance management system and

the lack of controls made it possible for corrupt practices to thrive. In all its
reports for the period, the IMF identified corruption as one of the major obstacles
to improving the management of finances in the DRC.

As preparations for the electoral campaign started in 2005, large fiscal slippages
were recorded. Wage increases and unbudgeted expenditure in favour of
political institutions and the military led to overruns in current spending to the
tune of 2.5% of GDP. The Banque Centrale du Congo, contravening its own
rules and regulations, intervened to finance the deficit (IMF 2006). The structural
reforms to which the government had committed itself were no longer a priority.
30 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The IMF acknowledged that corruption remained a major problem (IMF 2006).
These problems prevented the conclusion of the review of the IMF Poverty
Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) arrangement with the DRC, which expired
on 31 March 2006.

The Congolese authorities requested that the IMF assist them in implementing
a staff-monitored programme that would allow them to preserve macro-
economic stability during the elections (April to December 2006) and establish
a track record of policy implementation. The successful implementation of
this programme would then pave the way for them to negotiate another PRGF
(IMF 2006). The measures included in the programme were meant to reduce
corruption, which the IMF considered as deeply ingrained and a major obstacle to
the improvement of both public resource management and the business climate.

The review of the implementation of this staff-monitored programme in

February–March 2007 concluded that most of the quantitative and structural
benchmarks that had been agreed with the government were not met. The
outgoing government continued to overspend its budget to meet the demands
of the political institutions. The Banque Centrale du Congo went on financing
the unbudgeted expenditures of the government (IMF 2007). The
mismanagement of public finance during the transition period resulted in a
difficult macroeconomic situation, which the post-election government would
have the unenviable task to remedy.

Corruption in public administration

Corruption in public administration was rampant during the transition period.

Although the public paid a heavy tribute, they tolerated the vice, which they
considered as a survival mechanism for poorly paid civil servants. People felt
obliged to pay bribes to civil servants as a way to ‘motivate’ them. This state
of affairs was due not only to civil servants’ greed but also to poor remuneration
and working conditions (RADD 2004:82). In fact, in 2004, salaries ranged
from US$5.95 for the lowest-ranking civil servants to US$25.74 for the highest
level, namely that of the Permanent Secretary, making Congolese civil servants
among the lowest paid in the world. In the same period, it was estimated that
a family of seven persons needed a minimum of US$380.05 to survive in the
DRC (RADD 2004:45). Besides, according to the IMF the wage bill of the DRC
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 31

(including the armed forces) as a share of GDP was much lower than in
neighbouring countries, which, except for Angola, are less well endowed than
the DRC in natural resources (IMF 2005a:34). To compound the problems faced
by civil servants, their meagre salaries were paid irregularly. With their legendary
sense of humour, which has allowed them to survive all kinds of miseries, the
Congolese called the civil servant’s salary SIDA, which stands for ‘Salaire
Insuffisant Difficilement Acquis’ and means ‘insufficient salary which is painfully
earned’. SIDA also happens to be the French acronym for AIDS (CELC 2006a:7).

Not only were civil servants paid menial salaries, they were also very poorly
equipped and trained. Recruitment and promotions were carried out in complete
anarchy with politicians giving jobs to their faithful clients. The already inflated
numbers of civil servants were increased by anarchic recruitments during the
wars and the transition period. Many civil servants who had reached retirement
age were still waiting for their final benefits to be paid many years thereafter
and, therefore, remained on the payroll. In 2005, the number of people who
were in this situation was estimated at 100 000, or 17% of the total number of
civil servants (IMF 2005a:37). In any case, even if they were offered their
retirement benefits, most of them would refuse to retire because of the rather
insignificant amount to which they were entitled. Fictitious or ‘phantom’ civil
servants were added to the payroll and their salaries were pocketed by managers.
The preliminary results of a census of public administration personnel in Kinshasa
alone showed that in 2005, more than 20% of the payroll was paid to unrecorded
employees (IMF 2005a:37–38). The former warlords also created parallel services
in order to reward faithful clients, thus creating further confusion in the organisation
chart of public administration and making it more inefficient. The actual number
of civil servants was not known and fluctuated from month to month.

As no jobs were available elsewhere , civil servants clung to their posts and
undertook to reap maximum profits from their positions. Elaborate mechanisms
and networks were put in place to embezzle as much money as possible from
the state coffers. This was conducted with impunity since everybody at all
levels participated in these corrupt activities, the loot was shared and protection
was guaranteed from the highest echelons of the public administration. State
assets were used for the private gain of civil servants and rules and procedures
were systematically ignored. As no controls existed, civil servants easily got
away with their corrupt practices. Even in the rare instances when cases of
32 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

corruption, tax evasion or fraud were uncovered, no sanctions were ever

enforced.

Corruption in the justice sector

Even though it was one of the rare sectors in which posts were not shared
among the signatories of the Sun City Agreement, the justice sector functioned
so poorly and was so steeped in corruption that it failed even to try cases of
petty corruption. The harshest criticism of the justice sector was made on 30
November 1999 during Mobutu’s era, by the First President of the Supreme
Court, Kakese Mbiango Bruno, but it still applied to the transition period.

With unusual and striking candour, he said:

Yes, for many years now, we judges, public prosecutors, clerks of the
courts, barristers…we have almost banished [justice] from the courts
and have replaced it with all sorts of behaviours and dealings which
make a parody of justice. All of this has corrupted, perverted, tar-
nished and depraved justice (Tshilombo 2007). [Author’s translation]

Just like civil servants, judges and magistrates worked under very difficult
conditions. With their menial salaries they could not make ends meet and
were therefore quite vulnerable to corruption. They were very poorly equipped
and most of them lacked even the basic documentation on the laws of the
country. Impoverished and demoralised, they ignored the numerous human
rights violations, arbitrary arrests and detentions, extrajudicial killings, torture
and other crimes. When cases were actually tried, they were often expeditiously
carried out with complete disregard for due process, and reports were falsified
or people were unjustly condemned. As a result, the legacy of impunity from
Mobutu’s era continued unabated during the transition period. Even those who
had committed some of the most serious war crimes and crimes against humanity
were rewarded with high-ranking positions in the armed forces.

Although Article 147 of the Constitution of the transition period provided that
the judiciary was independent from the legislative and executive branches of
government, in reality the Minister of Justice ran the justice sector as if it was
one of the departments of the ministry. Not only did the Minister appoint all
the judges and magistrates but he could also demote, transfer or fire them at
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 33

will. Interference from the minister, the president’s office or the numerous
intelligence services were common occurrences against which the judges and
magistrates had no recourse (Human Rights Watch 2005a:14–15; Tshilombo 2007).

Corruption in state enterprises

The government of the transition period inherited 53 state-owned enterprises.

Under the previous regimes these had been the geese that laid golden eggs for
the corrupt elite networks that ran them as their personal properties. The
mismanagement of these enterprises worsened during the transition period as
the power-sharing formula of the Sun City Agreement was applied to them.
Each one of the signatories to the Agreement was allotted a proportional number
of these enterprises. They were allowed to appoint members of their own interest
groups to the boards of state enterprises and to the top management positions.
There is anecdotal evidence that many of the appointees lacked relevant
experience and technical capacities. Appointees were accountable first, to
the leaders of their respective interest groups and only secondly, if at all, to
the ministers in charge of the sectors in which they operated. They could only
be dismissed with the consent of their leaders.

It was from the coffers of these enterprises that the political parties created by
the former warlords collected the funds they needed for electoral campaigns.
All kinds of devices were put in place to extract the maximum amounts of
money and resources from state enterprises. All the appointees to juicy positions
in the institutions of the transition period (i.e. government, parliament, state
enterprises, etc.) were under obligation to contribute to the financing of the
political parties of the former belligerents. According to one researcher
(Kabungulu 2006:59), RCD-Goma, MLC and PPRD, the former belligerents’
parties, required contributions amounting to 10% of their appointee’s salaries.
In RCD-Goma, those who also occupied executive positions within the party
had to chip in 20% of their salaries. Political activists reported that for
appointees to hold on to their positions depended on how much money they
could contribute to the coffers of their parties. This led to all kinds of abuses.

An audit of state-owned enterprises revealed in 2005 that the CEOs had

connived with their boards of directors to pay themselves extravagant salaries.
For instance, the head of the Centre of Evaluation, Expertise and Certification
34 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

(CEEC)29 earned US$25 000 a month while his counterpart in charge of the
inefficient national water company came a close second with a monthly salary
of US$23 050. The chairs of the boards of directors were also paid hefty monthly
salaries – as much as US$16 800 at Onatra, the national transport authority
(Mabi 2006a:5). Besides these huge salaries, the managers paid themselves
substantial allowances. To cite just one example, the CEO of Cohydro, the
DRC’s national oil company, paid himself annual holiday allowances
amounting to US$67 000 and US$70 000 in 2003 and 2004 respectively.30

The government drastically reduced the salaries of all the managers and boards
of the state enterprises after the audit report was discussed in Parliament and
published in the local press (Mabi 2006a:6). However, it was rumoured that
this loss was compensated for by increases in various allowances and other
benefits in kind.

Corruption in the mining sector

Corruption in the mining sector deserves a special attention because of the

importance of this sector for the Congo’s economy. During the transition period,
several mining contracts were negotiated and signed by the government in
very opaque conditions that did not involve any international invitations to
tender. Critical analyses carried out by various bodies, including the Lutundula
Commission, Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), and the law
firms Duncan & Allen and Ernst & Young, draw the following conclusions about
the characteristics of these contracts (RAID 2007, 11.11.11 et al 2007,
Rosenblum 2007):
• The assets of the contracting parties were not assessed before the contracts
were signed
• The terms of the contracts vary widely between the many partners of the
DRC government. There is no rationale, for instance, as to why the shares
of the DRC in joint ventures were set at 49% in some contracts and at
17.5% in others
• There is no mechanism for ensuring that private companies that are parties
to these contracts adhere to the terms and conditions of the contracts. No
state organ, for instance, checks the tax declarations submitted by joint
ventures
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 35

• The interests of the DRC state are not protected in the contracts in which
it is a minority stakeholder. The majority stakeholders, for instance, take
decisions in the absence of the DRC state
• Joint venture companies refuse to circulate information on their activities,
thus making it difficult to assess the legality or equity of their activities

A study conducted recently by a group of Congolese experts at the request of

the Forum de la société civile de la RDC (the Forum of DRC civil society) on a
sample of 12 major contracts between DRC state enterprises and private
companies raised doubts about the competence, devotion and integrity of
those who signed the contracts on behalf of state enterprises (Cepas 2007).
Since many of the companies that signed joint-venture contracts with Congolese
state enterprises were registered offshore in tax havens, their identities and
those of their shareholders could not be clearly established. The Congolese
law against money laundering was thus violated.

These joint venture contracts have been decried by many international NGOs
(including the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (Niza), 31 Bank
Information Center (BIC), Global Witness, Human Rights Watch and Rights &
Accountability in Development (RAID), as well as Congolese NGOs including,
to name just a few, National Centre for Support to Development and Popular
Participation (Cenadep),32 Natural Resources Network (RRN),33 Research Centre
for Social Action (Cepas), 34 Action against Impunity for Human Rights
(ACIDH),35 Congolese League Against Corruption and Fraud (Licoco)36 and
African Association for Defence of Human Rights/Katanga Branch (Asadho/
Katanga)37 – and the Congolese political class. Among the key contracts, one
could cite the following (Global Witness 2006:37):
• The Kolwezi Tailings copper and cobalt project signed in October 2003
between Gécamines and Adastra (later taken over by First Quantum),
which allocated to state-owned enterprise and the Congolese state shares
of only 12.5% and 5% respectively for a 40-year period
• Another such agreement related to the Kamoto mine, the Dima-Kamoto
concentrator and the Luilu hydrometallurgical plant and was reached in
February 2004 between Gécamines and Kinross-Forrest. In this deal,
Gécamines and Kinross-Forrest were allocated shares of 25% and 75%
respectively
36 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

• In June 2004, with regard to the Ruashi copper and cobalt mine, a joint
venture contract was signed with Metorex and Sentinelle in which
Gécamines only retained 15%
• In September 2004, in the contract relating to Kamoto Oliveira Virgule
open-pit mine and Kananga and Tilwizembe deposits, Global Enterprises
Corporate Ltd (GEC) was granted 75% of the deal and Gécamines only
got a 25% share of the project over 35 years
• Finally, in this series of one-sided contracts one could also include the
one relating to the Tenke-Fungurume copper mine for which Phelps Dodge
and Canadian Tenke Mining scooped 57.75% and 24.75% ownership
respectively, while Gécamines only received 17.5%

These contracts relate to enormous quantities of minerals. For instance, the

ones Gécamines signed with Kinross-Forrest, GEC and Phelps Dodge are
estimated to cover 70% of the Congo’s known copper reserves (Global Witness
2006:37). There are concerns that they may have involved corruption, with
government officials pocketing hefty bribes that could be used to fund their
election campaigns and buy votes. These contracts, which bind the Congo for
up to 40 years in some cases, deny the government access to the resources
that it so badly needs to rebuild the country (11.11.11 et al 2007).

In the transition period the mining sector was beset by high levels of corruption
in its operation. The IMF continuously warned that ‘corruption remained a
major problem, particularly in natural resource management’ (see for instance
IMF 2006). Large quantities of minerals were exported illegally to neighbouring
countries. Government and customs officials connived with traders to evade
taxes. At the end of the period, it was estimated that three quarters of the
minerals mined in the formal sector in Katanga were exported illicitly by
traders who were protected by local authorities (Global Witness 2006:4). The
same could be said about other regions of the DRC, especially the Ituri region
of the Orientale Province (Human Rights Watch 2005b) and North and South
Kivu (Global Witness 2005).

Rampant corruption also affected the informal mining sector throughout the
country. A plethora of state organs, including the Ministry of Mines, the armed
forces, customs, intelligence services and local administrative officials, all
collected illegal taxes from artisanal diggers. In this system of institutionalised
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 37

corruption, diggers were exploited even by the officials of the associations who
were supposed to protect them from such practices (Global Witness 2006:5). More
is said about corruption in the mining sector in later sections of this report.

Corruption in the armed forces

The integration process of the various militias into the national army also
involved widespread corruption. It is alleged that the former warlords realised
that by keeping their soldiers under their direct command, they could reap
substantial benefits from the funding provided by the international community
for the army’s integration process. Another way of making money from the
process was by inflating numbers with ‘ghost’ soldiers and pocketing the surplus
from the salary budget. In fact, in 2005, the payroll of the Ministry of Defence
showed that 340 000 soldiers were paid out of the national budget. However,
the partial census carried out by the South African Defence Force and the
Military Integration Structure38 of the Congolese army revealed that 30–55%
of soldiers on the payroll were fictitious (Amnesty International 2007:14). Some
commanders simply lined their pockets with the money allocated to soldiers’
salaries or deducted a fraction allocated to soldiers’ pay for themselves. The
amounts embezzled each month from soldiers’ salaries were estimated at 25%
or more of the total budget (Human Rights Watch 2005a:9).

Generals and high-ranking politicians are also said to have profited from other
budget lines of the Ministry of Defence. It was alleged, for instance, that
US$30 million was embezzled from the budget allocated for the defence of
the North and South Kivu provinces (Human Rights Watch 2005a:9–10). Ill
equipped and lacking the most basic supplies, soldiers of the national army
had no choice but to extort money and procure other resources from the people
they were supposed to protect. This was one of the major causes of indiscipline in
the integrated units, of insecurity and of massive human rights violations committed
by the national army throughout the country (Amnesty International 2007:13–14,
Swiss Peace 2006:13, Human Rights Watch 2005a:7–8).

Corruption in the education sector

The education sector was not spared by the scourge of corruption during the
transition period. As teaching and administrative personnel from nurseries to
38 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

institutions of higher education were not regularly paid their meagre salaries,
they extorted as much money as possible from students and their parents. It
was generally reported that administrative staff invented several charges for
registering newcomers and maintaining students on the school rolls. Students
complained that they were required to buy their professors’ lecture notes in
order to take part in and even pass the end-of-year examinations. It was alleged
that final year students in institutions of higher education had to bribe lecturers
and professors for the latter to supervise them and give them passing marks for
their dissertations. There was anecdotal evidence that administrative staff in
registrars’ offices in universities and other institutions of higher education made
substantial amounts of money from taking bribes from students to change the
marks given by lecturers and professors.

The situation became so alarming that the Minister of Public Administration

spoke plainly while denouncing corruption and negative values before a retinue
of rectors and directors-general of institutions of higher education at the closing
ceremony of the first anti-corruption week in the DRC in December 2006. She
said:

In fact, everybody knows that a plague of unknown origin is rampant

in our universities and institutes of higher education. This virus mani-
fests itself under various forms, including:
1. ‘Marks that are sexually transmitted’ (PST).39
2. ‘My man or my woman’: marks are no longer given on merit. They
are given along ethnic and tribal lines.
3. ‘Operation dissertation’: professors write dissertations for their
students.

Briefly, our institutions of higher education and universities have be-

come places where indescribable promiscuity prevails (RDC, Ministère
de la Fonction Publique 2006b).

Corruption during the elections

The electoral campaign at the end of the transition period saw a spectacular
upsurge in corrupt activities.40 The Congolese media was full of articles about
leaders of political parties and individuals standing as independent candidates
Corruption during the transition period (2003–2006) 39

who were allegedly bribed to join one of the two major coalitions, the AMP or
the UN coalition. As membership of these coalitions was not based on shared
visions or political ideologies, it constantly changed during the campaign. In
fact, political parties and individuals moved from one coalition to the other
depending on the amounts of money that changed hands or on the promises of
lucrative positions in government or state enterprises. It was no surprise that
the IMF announced in October 2006 that the government had overspent the
July to September 2006 budget. In September alone, the deficit amounted to
US$40 million (Le Potentiel 2006).

The elections at the national and provincial level took place amid rumours of
corruption. This was epitomised by the indirect elections of senators and
provincial governors by provincial assemblies. The media was rife with stories
of provincial assembly deputies who received up to US$50 000 to cast their
votes for particular candidates. In Kinshasa, Bas-Congo, Western and Eastern
Kasai provinces, where the opposition UN coalition had the majority of seats,
candidates of the president’s AMP coalition were elected governors. For most
people, this turn of events could only be explained by the substantial amounts
of money that were paid to deputies to buy their votes (Tshingombe and Milandu
2007, Ben-Clet 2007). In the Bas-Congo province, the people protested against
the election of the AMP candidate as governor and were brutally repressed on
31 January and 1 February 2007 (Van Woudenberg 2007).

Conclusion

As this overview of corruption during the transition period has shown, Mobutu’s
legacy of kleptocracy continued to be the model of governance many years
after his demise. The collapse of the state and the invasion of the country by its
neighbours created new opportunities that allowed elites to continue to loot
the country in collaboration with foreign corrupt and criminal networks. The
new situation created by the wars that devastated the country allowed those
in positions of power to strip state assets with impunity. Extensive mineral
resources were smuggled out the country. State mining enterprises were stripped
of their assets through joint-venture contracts signed in non-transparent
circumstances. Many of these contracts, whose signing was alleged to have
involved bribery of high ranking Congolese officials, contain terms and
conditions that could deprive the Congo of the substantial revenue that it
40 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

needs to alleviate the abject poverty of its people. By the end of the transition
period, corruption had permeated all facets of Congolese people’s lives and
had deepened their suffering.
Combatting corruption during the transition period 41

CHAPTER 4
COMBATING CORRUPTION DURING THE
TRANSITION PERIOD: AN ANALYSIS OF THE
LEGAL FRAMEWORK

This section focuses primarily on the broad legal framework in force during the
transition period. To avoid repetition, the legal provisions relating to individual
anti-corruption bodies are dealt with in other sections. The two specifically
anti-corruption laws in the period under review are the Anti-Corruption Law
and the Law Against Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (referred
to hereafter as the money-laundering law). The Mining Code and the Forest
Code are also briefly analysed below. In fact, the importance of the mining
and forest sectors for the economy of the DRC cannot be overemphasised.
Besides, various reports by United Nations panels and international NGOs
have clearly documented the link between the illicit exploitation of the mining
sector and the corruption that fuelled conflicts in the Congo for over a decade.

The Anti-Corruption Law

In the period under review the DRC had specific anti-corruption and anti-
money laundering laws aimed at preventing, detecting and punishing
corruption. The National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS), which was finalised
before the transition period – and which will be analysed in a later section of
this report – recommended that a specific anti-corruption law be enacted. The
National Assembly implemented this recommendation by amending and
completing provisions of Article 147 of the Penal Code (a decree from colonial
times, dated 30 January 1940). The new law (no. 5/006) was promulgated on
29 March 2005.

The Anti-Corruption Law domesticated some of the provisions of the SADC

Protocol against Corruption (SADC 2001) and the African Union Convention
42 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

on Preventing and Combating Corruption and Related Offences (AU

Convention) (African Union 2003). Compared with the pre-existing provisions
of the Penal Code, it included important new aspects such as:
1. It adopted and widened the AU Convention’s definition of public official
to include ‘any official or employee of the State or its institutions, including
those who have been selected, appointed or elected in order to perform
activities or a function in the name or in the service of the State, at any
level of the hierarchy’ (Article 147).
2. It introduced clear definitions of confiscation of the proceeds of corruption
(referred to in the law as ‘assets’), borrowed from the AU Convention
(Article147).
3. The scope of application of the law was clearly defined and in line with
that of the AU Convention, except for three items, which are omitted:
‘any act or omission in the discharge of his or her duties by a public
official or any other person for the purpose of illicitly obtaining benefits
for himself or herself or for a third party’ (Article 4c); ‘the diversion by a
public official or any other person of property belonging to the State or its
agencies, to an independent agency, or to an individual’ (Article 4d); and
‘participation in the commission of any of the acts covered in the
provisions of the article relating to the scope of application’ (Article 4i).
4. It increased the penalties for committing acts of corruption to a maximum
of two years imprisonment and a fine of 100 000 constant Congolese
francs (Article 148), and provided for aggravating circumstances for which
the maximum penalties would be doubled (Article 148).
5. For acts of corruption committed by public officials, penalties were set at
15 years imprisonment and a fine of one million constant Congolese francs
(Article 149).
6. It prescribed additional penalties, including confiscation of the proceeds
and instrumentalities of corruption, suspension of civic rights, banning
from employment in civil service and state enterprises, banning from public
procurement and deportation for foreign nationals (Article 149a).
7. It defined offences that are related to corruption, i.e. trading in influence
and culpable omissions (Article 150 and 150e).
Combatting corruption during the transition period 43

8. It criminalised obstruction of investigations (Articles 149 and 150).

9. It provided for the protection of witnesses, experts and whistleblowers
against any form of intimidation or reprisals (Article 149).

This law was definitely an improvement on the antiquated provisions of the

1940 version of the Penal Code. While an effort was made to domesticate
some provisions of the AU Convention, the exercise was incomplete. The
provisions included in the new Penal Code need to be elaborated further while
ensuring that they are easy to understand and to apply, and enforcers’ discretion
must be eliminated. Besides, some very important provisions were left out of
the new Penal Code and should be included in a new specific anti-corruption
law. These relate to:
• Access to information
• The funding of political parties
• Civil society
• The media
• Extradition
• Bank secrecy
• Cooperation and mutual assistance
• International cooperation
• Minimum guarantees for fair trials
• The laundering of the proceeds of corruption
• The embezzlement of property in the private sector
• Conflicts of interest
• The corruption of an official of a foreign state
• Public procurement and management of public finances
• The liability of legal persons
• The judiciary and prosecution services
44 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

• Compensation for entities or persons who have suffered damages as a

result of acts of corruption
• Asset recovery
• The national authority or agency specialised in combating corruption and
responsible for making and receiving requests for assistance and
cooperation

It is important to consider domesticating these provisions, which are part of

the anti-corruption instruments of the organisations of which the DRC is a
member, i.e. the AU Convention, the United Nations Convention against
Corruption (United Nations 2003a) and the SADC Protocol against Corruption.

While the promulgation of the revised Penal Code was hailed as an important
step in the right direction in the fight against corruption, it was not enforced.
In fact, it was promulgated at a time (March 2005, i.e. three months before the
original date of the elections) when the priority of all political actors was to
collect as much money as possible, including through embezzling state finances
and assets and through corruption. The development partners of the DRC ignored
acts of corruption (Human Rights Watch 2005a:3, 17–18; ICG 2005:4). Besides,
as mentioned earlier, the justice sector had no means to enforce such a law.
An informal survey of public prosecutors and judges carried out by the National
Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission in 2006 in Kinshasa revealed that they
had heard about a new law being promulgated but were not familiar with its
content (CELC 2006d:57–58).

The Law against Money Laundering and the Financing of

Terrorism

On 19 July 2004, the president promulgated Law no. 04/016 against Money
Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism, which was intended, among other
things, to contribute to the fight against corruption. The DRC, a failed state
with porous borders with nine countries (Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi,
Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African
Republic) and a predominantly informal and cash economy, provided fertile
ground for money laundering and possibly the financing of terrorism. The law
was drafted in accordance with international norms and laid out in detail the
Combatting corruption during the transition period 45

provisions relating to the prevention and detection of money laundering and

the financing of terrorism, protective and coercive measures, and international
cooperation.

The money-laundering law did not take into account the realities of a country
in which the banking system had virtually been replaced by the informal
sector and where, as a result, cash was used in all transactions. People
mistrusted the banking system, through which their hard-earned money was
lost because of the continuous devaluation of the Zaire currency in the last
days of the Mobutu regime.

No attempt was made to implement the money-laundering law. The Congolese

political actors, who were allegedly involved in money laundering activities,
could not be expected to put in place controls and institutions that would
bring their lucrative operations to an end. The Banque Centrale due Congo put
in place a Financial Intelligence Unit, as required by the provisions of the
law. However, this unit could not become operational because the relevant
draft laws that the Banque Centrale du Congo submitted to the government
were not even considered by it. An informal survey conducted by the national
Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (CELC)41 showed that the relevant
officials in the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance, money transfer
companies and magistrates were not familiar with the content of the law.42

The Mining Code

The DRC has been dubbed a ‘geological scandal’ because of the variety and
quantities of minerals with which it is endowed. This wealth has made it the
envy of world powers and its immediate neighbours but has been a source of
suffering for its people. The Congo has large deposits of copper, cobalt and
coltan (columbite-tantalite)43 and sizeable reserves of gold and diamonds. The
DRC has an estimated 12% of the world’s copper reserves and almost half of
the cobalt reserves (RAID 2007:3). Other minerals in Congo’s treasure trove
include cassiterite (tin), heterogenite44 (a third of the world’s reserves), silver,
cadmium, magnesium, coal, uranium and zinc (IMF 2005a:47–51).

The DRC also produces 8.5 to 10 million barrels a year of crude petroleum,
principally offshore in the Atlantic Ocean (IMF 2005a:46). There are prospects
46 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

for substantial production onshore in the central Congo basin and in the basin of
Lakes Albert and Edward, on the border with Uganda (Lugerero 2007:72). However,
petroleum is excluded from the Mining Code and so is not discussed here.45

The importance of the mining sector for the DRC lies in the fact that it has
historically been the mainstay of the country’s economy. In fact, before the
onset of the political turmoil and conflict, the share of the extractive sector in
the total export earnings of the DRC was about 75% – 25% of the country’s
GDP and 25% of its fiscal revenue (RAID 2007::3). The recovery of this sector
is crucial to provide the necessary resources for the reconstruction and
development of the Congo. Besides, according to the IMF (2005a:51):

Overall, it seems plausible that, in addition to the estimated 800 000

people employed in artisanal diamond sector, at least another 150 000
are involved in other artisanal mining activities. Hence, about 20 per-
cent of the population is dependent on artisanal mining.

The Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP)46 of the DRC strongly
recommended, among other measures, that a new investment code be adopted.
In an effort spearheaded by the World Bank, a mining code was quickly drafted
and promulgated by Law no. 007/2002 of 11 July 2002. The Mining Regulation47
providing the application modalities of the Mining Code was enacted by Decree
no. 038/2003 of 26 March 2003. These were the main legal instruments that
regulated the mining industry during the transition period.

The Mining Code48 aimed to bring transparency to the regulation of the mining
sector. To do so, it incorporated the available international best practices in
the area. It also purported to create a level playing field for private investors
in the sector (RDC Ministère des Mines 2005). In order to exclude the plethora
of institutions intervening in mining activities and to reduce rampant corruption,
Article 16 of the Code usefully identified and defined the roles of the main
players in charge of regulating the mining sector. These now included the
president, the Minister of Mines, the Mining Registry,49 the Directorate of Mines
and the department in charge of protecting the mining environment. The Mining
Code also laid out in detail the procedure for acquiring mining rights.

To put an end to the rampant extortion in the mining sector, Article 220 of the
Mining Code established an exhaustive list of the taxes, charges and fees and
Combatting corruption during the transition period 47

customs duty payable to the Congolese treasury by operators in the sector. The
Mining Code eliminated another source of conflict between the central
government and the provinces and a possible opportunity for corrupt activities
by setting the percentages of the mining revenue that the respective spheres
could receive: 40% for the provinces and 60% for the central government. A
host of other measures aimed at attracting investors to the DRC were included
in the Mining Code, which is one of the reasons why it has been criticised for
being too favourable to mining operators and insufficiently emphasising the
economic development of the DRC. For instance, the new code took out the
provision of the former mining code which made it an obligation for mining
companies to meet the development objectives defined by the government
(Mazalto 2004:5). It was replaced with a requirement for the mining company
to submit, as part of its application for an exploitation permit, ‘a plan as to
how the project will contribute to the development of the surrounding
communities’ (Article 69g). Mining companies were therefore allowed to
undertake development-related initiatives on a voluntary basis.

Just like the other laws that were in force during the transition period, the
Mining Code was largely ignored in the negotiation and implementation of
mining titles. As reported earlier in this study, in 2005 the government
authorised the signing of contracts between Gécamines and three international
mining companies behind closed doors, in violation of the Mining Code. In a
leaked memorandum, a World Bank official said that contracts were signed
without any prior ‘thorough analysis and evaluation’ (11.11.11 et al 2007:4).
There was no evidence that an international tendering process took place, in
spite of the fact that the contracts related to a huge percentage of the country’s
copper and cobalt reserves. It was thus not surprising that the analysis carried
out by an expert showed that these joint venture contracts were ‘genuinely
disadvantageous to Gécamines or the Congolese State’ (11.11.11 et al 2007:5).
Moreover, an evaluation of the implementation of the Mining Code by a group
of Congolese activists found that in violation of the code, many of the contracts
signed during the transition period exempt the holders of the mining titles from
taxes (Radio Okapi 2007).

No effort was made by the authorities to familiarise the population in the

mining areas with the provisions of the Mining Code. This led to people being
unnecessarily abused by the holders of mining titles in collusion with corrupt
48 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

local authorities in some regions. The lack of capacity to monitor the

implementation of the Mining Code made possible continued corruption in
the granting of mining rights (Kuediasala 2006).

The Forest Code

It is estimated that the forests of the DRC, which make up the second largest
rainforest in the world, cover an area of 2 000 000 km2 (Counsell 2006:7).By
comparison, the total surface area of South Africa is only 1 219 090 km2 (GCIS
2005:7). The DRC’s forests account for 10% of all the tropical forests of the
world and more than 45% of African forests. They include closed high rainforests,
open forests and woody savannah, and represent the fifth most biodiverse
environment in the world as they contain around 10 000 species of plants, 409
species of mammals, 1 117 species of birds and 400 species of fish (Counsell
2006:7).

About 40 million people in the DRC (about 67% of its total population of
around 60 million) depend for their livelihood on forest resources, which provide
them with food, medicines and fuel wood, and represent an important source
of income (Debroux and Topa 2007:ix). The DRC forests also play an important
role in regulating world climate processes. In fact, through the exchange of
water and energy in the atmosphere, they are said to influence atmospheric
circulations. Since they represent an immense carbon sink, they could play an
important role in current efforts to combat climate change (Hoare 2007).

As in many other areas, the law that regulated the forest sector until 2002 was
obsolete, dating back to 1949. The regulatory framework governing the forest
sector had thus not taken into account the various international conventions
and agreements that had been put in place since then. Over the years, it had
become difficult to enforce given the country’s changing economic, political
and social situation. The World Bank took the lead in developing a new legal
framework that promised to provide incentives to investors and to ensure that
the sustainable exploitation of the forest would contribute to the economy of
the DRC and the improvement of the wellbeing of its people.

From 2002 the DRC made some progress toward defining a forest policy. The
first two important steps toward this end were the development of the Forest
Combatting corruption during the transition period 49

Code and the Priority Agenda for re-launching the forest sector.50 The Priority
Agenda may be described as:

a set of simple, corrective, preventive or foundational measures in-

tended to clean up the legacy of the past and to regulate the re-launch
of the timber sector. It targets problems which, if not resolved quickly,
would risk harming the environment and communities irreversibly, and
depriving the DRC of the benefits of its own forests. It emphasises the
application of laws and contracts, transparency as a means of eradi-
cating corruption and stimulating dialogue, and finally accountability
(Kalambayi wa Kabongo 2007; author’s translation).

The Forest Code was an important step toward developing a vision of forest
management in the DRC. Promulgated as Law no. 011/2002 of 29 August
2002, it aimed to:

promote rational and sustainable management of forest resources in

order to increase their contribution to the economic, social and cul-
tural development of the current generations, while at the same time
preserving the ecosystems and biodiversity of the forests for the future
generations (Kalambayi wa Kabongo 2007; author’s translation).

It detailed a number of measures that guaranteed full consultation with the

local population before granting rights in relation to forest resources. It
introduced some transparency in the procedures for granting forest concessions
by making invitations to tender mandatory and single-offer contracts exceptions
to the rule, which could only be resorted to in exceptional circumstances.
Furthermore, it established a detailed list of taxes and fees that applied in the
forest sector. It also provided that the central government would allocate 40%
of forest revenues to local communities.

The promulgation of the Forest Code was also important considering that such
a large proportion of the population depend on forests for their livelihood. It
was estimated that, with the right incentives and legal framework, the annual
timber production of the DRC could be increased from 100 000 to 6 million
m3. It was also thought at the time that sustainable and transparent management
of the DRC forests could lead to substantial job creation and provide sizeable
revenues to the cash-strapped government and to the local communities
(Mutamba 2006).
50 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

However, the measures were not implemented because of a lack of capacity

and technical skills in the environment ministry and a weak and thin presence
on the ground. The ministry was over-staffed at the centre in Kinshasa, with
several special services with overlapping responsibilities (Counsell 2006:25).
However, at the provincial and local level, it was thinly represented and civil
servants were not properly equipped, inadequately informed about the legal
developments in their sector and irregularly paid (Greenpeace 2005; Sakata
2007:15).

The lack of basic technical skills at all levels of this ministry was another
major hindrance to the proper administration of the sector and the
implementation of the relevant laws and policies. (Counsell 2006:25).In order
to successfully implement the reform of the forest sector, the ministry needed
the continued commitment of the president’s office and Parliament, which
unfortunately also lacked capacity and technical knowledge of the sector,
and, above all, lacked the necessary political will (Debroux and Topa
2006:xvii).

Furthermore, the set of implementation decrees that were required for the
effective application of the measures provided in the Forest Code were not
fully drafted and approved. At the beginning of this 2008 the environment
ministry reported that only nine of the required 42 implementation decrees
had been issued (Kalambayi wa Kabongo, 2007). It was reported elsewhere
that a larger number of such decrees has been approved by either the
environment minister or the president, but that only one of these was published
in the Official Gazette51 (Counsell 2006:23).

With the assistance of the World Bank a tax review of logging contracts was
undertaken. As a result of this exercise, 163 non-compliant contracts covering
25.5 million hectares, were cancelled (Greenpeace 2007:23). Thereafter, at
the request of the World Bank, the DRC government declared a moratorium
on new logging titles and on the renewal or extension of existing ones. According
to Greenpeace, in spite of this measure, by April 2006 corrupt government
officials had signed 107 new logging contracts which covered 15 million
hectares (Greenpeace 2007:23–25). According to international experts, of the
21 million hectares that have been granted to logging companies, at least
three million hectares were granted illegally. Another 15 million hectares
were ‘exchanged’ in violation of the law, as logging companies, for instance,
Combatting corruption during the transition period 51

swapped marshes or areas with little potential for forests with highly valued
trees. It is estimated that titles were legally issued on only the remaining three
million hectares (Agence France Presse 2007).

In response to a further request by the World Bank, the president promulgated

a decree in October 2005 that extended the moratorium. The decree provided
that the moratorium would end after completion of the evaluation of the 156
forest contracts that had not been cancelled. This task was assigned to a group
that included an inter-ministerial committee, the private sector and civil society.
The evaluation was not completed at the end of 2006 and has been taken up
by the new post-election government. Greenpeace has reported that of the
156 contracts to be reviewed, 107 were signed after the May 2002 moratorium
and should therefore have been cancelled (Greenpeace 2007:23–25). Worse
still, there were indications that a number of concessions that were being
exploited were not included in the list of the 156 contracts. The information
provided by the corrupt local administration was not reliable.

As in other areas, the government of the transition period had no political will
to implement an externally imposed Forest Code and reduce corruption in the
sector. Besides, the lack of institutional capacity and qualified forestry
professionals, and poorly equipped and poorly paid civil servants, were all
obstacles to an adequate implementation of the Forest Code. As a result, logging
has not had the positive effect that it was supposed to have. Its contribution to
the increase in corruption has been appropriately summarised as follows:

In an environment of endemic corruption, logging companies inevita-

bly operate beyond the rule of law. In the DRC, the logging industry
continues to feed the networks of corruption that are obstacles to genu-
ine development. Through support for an extractive industry-based
model of development, donor countries and agencies such as the World
Bank are effectively undermining their own rhetoric on establishing
good governance and alleviating poverty (Greenpeace 2007:33).

To such criticism, the World Bank has responded that it is not encouraging
commercial logging in the Congo. It states that, on the contrary, its advice to
the government of the DRC has been ‘NOT to expand industrial logging, and
NOT to allocate any new concessions until satisfactory standards of governance
and management are achieved in existing concessions and the country is able
52 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

to enforce laws’ (World Bank 2008:2). The World Bank has also drawn the
attention of the government to ‘a high risk of unregulated expansion of logging
driven by the return of peace and rush to rehabilitate infrastructure’ (World
Bank 2008:2). In areas where logging is already taking place, the World Bank
is assisting the government to ensure that sustainable practices are adopted,
social provisions are included and the rights of the forest-dependent people,
including the Pygmies, are respected. With regard to the indigenous people of
the DRC, including the Pygmies, the World Bank has committed itself to
broadening its support to them. Its plans in the forest sector in the DRC will
focus on building the capacities of Congolese institutions and civil society
organisations with a view to enabling them to improve the implementation,
enforcement and monitoring of the Forest Code (World Bank 2008:2-3).

Conclusion

One can conclude that, in spite of some weaknesses, the legal framework that
was in force during the transition period could have allowed the country to
make some progress in the fight against corruption. The laws in place included
those that are specifically related to anti-corruption and a number of others
that aimed at improving transparency, accountability and controls. However,
as they were all imposed by the development partners of the DRC, there was
no ownership by the Congolese political class. Among other obstacles to the
implementation of these laws was the lack of political will in the Congolese
political class, which was riddled with graft. The Sun City Agreement, which
governed the institutions of the transition period, had put in place a power-
sharing arrangement that practically removed all institutional controls and
facilitated the looting of the country. Lacking in capacity and expertise,
impoverished Congolese civil servants could not deliver on the implementation
of laws whose very existence most ignored. Furthermore, the international
development partners of the DRC only gave lip service to the fight against
corruption as they feared that it could jeopardise the achievement of their
most important goal for the transition period, i.e. the elections.
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 53

CHAPTER 5
INSTITUTIONS TASKED WITH COMBATING
CORRUPTION DURING THE TRANSITION PERIOD

While an anti-corruption legal framework was developed during the transition

period, the bodies that were responsible for enforcing it were rather
dysfunctional. Some of them had been created under Mobutu’s authoritarian
regime and thus suffered from the heavy legacy of this kleptocratic era. In
fact, as mentioned earlier, a number of institutions were created to control
corruption in the second half of the 1980s in an effort to save Mobutu’s regime
from complete collapse. These were the Office of the Auditor-General,52 through
the Court of Auditors, and the General Inspectorate of Public Finances.53 This
section focuses on these two institutions as well as Parliament and the CELC.
The combined control activities of these bodies were meant to prevent, detect
and combat corruption during the transition period.

The Court of Auditors

The Court of Auditors, the supreme auditing institution of the country, was
created by Law no 87–005 of 6 February 1987. Its mandate was:
• To independently audit the general public finances and the execution of
the government budget
• To audit the accounts and management of public enterprises
• To monitor the reimbursement of loans due to the state
• To audit public procurement procedures and contracts
• To audit tax collection and expenses incurred on the government general
budget

This remit was confirmed by the Constitution of the transition in its Article 165.
54 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The Constitution also provided that the Court of Auditors reported to the National
Assembly and that its members were appointed by the president on the
recommendation of the National Assembly. In addition to annual reports submitted
to the president and the National Assembly on the audits of public institutions, the
Court was also required to report to the relevant ministries, the prime minister and
the National Assembly on their management.

With the limited information to which the Court of Auditors could have access, it
regularly submitted audit reports to the National Assembly, as provided by law.
However, these audit reports, which were duly published in the Official Gazette
of the DRC,54 were neither discussed nor acted upon. The only exception was a
special report (which is discussed in the next section) on an audit that the Court of
Auditors produced at the request of the president in 2004. Therefore, its activities
were largely unknown to the public.

Some of the problems that plagued the Court of Auditors were the same as
those already mentioned with regard to other public institutions and organs
during the period under review: inadequate remuneration, lack of opportunities
for personnel for further training, lack of financial means and human resources
to properly fulfil their responsibilities, overdependence on external sources of
funding even for the operating budget, and the fact that many of the staff were
well beyond retirement age.55 More specifically, while the Constitution and
the implementation decrees governing the Court of Auditors required it to
report to the National Assembly, in reality it continued, as under the Mobutu
regime, to come under the purview of the president’s office and to be considered
part of it.56 This practice reduced the Court’s perceived and real independence
vis-à-vis the president. The lack of accountability that characterised the
institutions of the transition period made it difficult, if not impossible, for the
Court to have access to the information that it needed from the government
and the various state enterprises, which reported first and foremost the leaders
of the ‘components’ and ‘entities’ to which they belonged. For the same reasons,
the National Assembly, to which it was supposed to report, completely ignored
the few reports that it produced57 (Abolia 2005:351–362; Umba-di-Ndangi
2006:377–393).
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 55

The General Inspectorate of Finance58

The Inspectorate was responsible for auditing all public bodies, including the
Ministry of Finance, of which it was a special unit. For a short period, from 2002
to 2003, it was placed under the purview of the president’s office. Candidates to
the posts of General Inspectors of Finances, who made up this unit, underwent a
competitive and rigorous examination and were appointed by the president on
the recommendation of the ministers of finance and public administration.

The Inspectorate was expected to undertake audit missions at the request of

the finance minister, the president or any ministry, or it could initiate a mission
on its own. However, it was required to have its annual programme approved
by the finance minister. This supervision by the finance ministry was, during
the transition period, a source of tension between the inspectors and the ministers
and reduced the formers’ autonomy and credibility (Abolia 2005:380–388;
Umba-di-Ndangi 2006a:378–379). The Inspectorate was mandated to:

• Control the implementation on a day-to-day basis of the budgets of the

government and of decentralised administrative bodies

• Ensure that the internal audit units in ministries and decentralised

administrative bodies were well organised

• Audit the financial operations of state enterprises, organs and private enterprises
which were subsidised by the state or of which the state was a stakeholder

• Control tax, customs and accounting situation of any person or body that
was liable to taxation, at the request of the finance minister, the president
or the vice-president in charge of the Economic and Financial Commission

• Ensure that all the units in charge of collecting taxes and spending state
revenue complied with and applied the legal and regulatory provisions as
well as instructions relating to the posting of operations (Ordonnance no
87–323 du 15 septembre 1987, Article 2bis)

In an environment that was deeply averse to any kind of control, the

Inspectorate was marginalised and deprived of the necessary resources to play
its role fully. For most of the transition period, it could not access its operational
budget. It was often manipulated by the ministers in charge to settle their
56 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

scores with political enemies. The bodies that it was supposed to audit ganged
together against it. There were even instances when audit missions were publicly
prohibited by these powerful institutions. In the rare cases where the audits
were carried out, the Inspectors’ recommendations were ignored.

Inspectors had neither the means nor the opportunities to be properly trained. Their
technical capacities were limited as a result and their knowledge did not keep up
with developments in their area of expertise. They also lacked the most basic
equipment. Their paltry remuneration made them vulnerable to corruption.59

Parliament

The Constitution of the transition period (Article 98 and 104) provided that
Parliament not only voted the government budget but also controlled its
implementation by the government and state enterprises and organs. In order
to exercise this control and secure information, the Constitution provided in
Article 112 that both the Senate and the National Assembly could:
• Ask any one of these institutions an oral or written question
• Ask for information on a topical issue
• Summon a minister or the head of one of the state enterprises to be
questioned by Parliament
• Establish investigation commissions

However, the Constitution also made it clear that none of these means of
control could lead to votes of no confidence against the government.

The Minister of Finance was required by the Finance Act60 to submit an annual
report to Parliament on the national accounts, the general situation of the
treasury and the consolidated accounts of the state and the decentralised
administrative entities. Based on this information Parliament could assess the
performance of the national budget.

In this control exercise, Parliament was supposed to rely on the support and
expertise of the Court of Auditors, which, after auditing the national accounts,
could point out irregularities and weaknesses in accounting or administrative
organisation. With this information, Parliament could play its oversight role
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 57

more effectively. The capacity of Parliament to hold the Executive to account

for its management of the country’s economy depended on the quality of the
reports that the government submitted to it and the advice that it received
from the Court of Auditors. However, as explained earlier, the Court of Auditors
reported to the president, whose office supervised it but with very limited
capacity. Besides, the government, decentralised administrative entities and
state enterprises never provided the information that the Court of Auditors
needed to produce high-quality audit reports. For these reasons and the negation
of accountability to which the power-sharing arrangement amounted,
Parliament did not fully play its oversight role on the Executive. Even the few
initiatives that were taken by its regular and special investigation commissions
were ignored by the Executive, as the next section shows.

The provisions of the code of conduct for public officials, the implementation
of which is monitored by the OCEP, requires Parliamentarians to disclose their
assets and interests. Unfortunately, these provisions were not enforced during
the transition period.

The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission

A resolution of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue in Sun City, South Africa61 provided

for the creation of the CELC. It was created by the Constitution of the transition
period, under Article 154, as one of the five citizen commissions that supported
democracy. (The other four commissions were the Independent Electoral
Commission,62 the National Observatory of Human Rights,63 the High Authority
of the Media64 and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.65)

Article 155 of the Constitution defined the main mission of the CELC as promoting
the practice of moral and republican values. Article 156 of the Constitution
provided that the citizen commissions had their own legal personality and
were independent from each other and from other institutions of the Republic.

The remit of the CELC was defined as follows by the implementation law
promulgated by the president on 30 July 2004:66
• To promote good governance
• To make the public and private sectors more ethical
58 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

• To build the management capacity of state institutions and the private

sector with regard to developing and implementing their respective
professional codes of ethics
• To put in place networks and cooperation relations with state institutions
at the local, national and international levels which have similar objectives
• To combat negative values, such as money laundering, influence peddling,
embezzlement of funds and bribery
• To promote the development of a positive Congolese value system
• To investigate violations of ethical values and acts of corruption in all
sectors of the nation and to propose appropriate measures to the authorities
• To advocate for the introduction at all levels of the national curriculum
the teaching of practical moral and republican values
• To promote transparency in political party financing
• To make concrete proposals to the government on its anti-corruption policy
and strategy

As provided by its implementation law, the CELC was managed by an Executive

Board (Bureau) made up of eight members representing the signatories of the
Sun City Agreement. The President of the Executive Board was elected by
civil society. Pamphile Badu-wa-Badu, who was chosen to occupy this position,
was a well-known businessman and the president of the Bas-Congo provincial
branch of the Federation of Congolese Enterprises (FEC),67 the country’s main
business federation, which, during the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, was an active
member of Congolese civil society (CELC 2006a:17).

A 46-person cabinet was formed to support and implement the decisions of the
Executive Board. At the top of the governance structure was the Plenary
Assembly,68 which supervised and set the policy directions of the Commission.
Its 13 members were also appointed by the signatories of the Sun City Accord.
The President of the Executive Board also chaired the Plenary Assembly.

The members of the various bodies of the Commission could not be arrested or
prosecuted during or after their term of office for any opinions expressed within
the framework of their duties. They could only be prosecuted if they were
caught in the act and after the Plenary Assembly had lifted their immunity.
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 59

Furthermore, because of the delicate nature of their responsibilities, the

members of the Commission were protected by security forces.

Cases could be submitted to the Commission through formal complaints or

denunciations. The Commission was also allowed to initiate investigations on
its own.69

The CELC faced major difficulties in its operations, as revealed by a number of

sources70 (Hussmann and Bunga 2005:15–23; Evaluation de la Transition par la
société civile/Forces vives).

In fact, because of the power-sharing arrangements of the transition period,

the signatories of the Sun City Accord could appoint anyone to the Commission
without taking due consideration of their expertise. As a result, most of the
members of the Commission had no experience in the anti-corruption arena.
They were mostly people who had missed juicy positions in the government,
Parliament and state enterprises, who tried to reap the maximum financial and
material benefit from the positions to which they were appointed. They were
embittered people who were not interested in the training that was provided
by consultants.71 As a result, the Commission’s managerial competence and
the capacity to think strategically were limited. With the assistance of a United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) consultant, a strategic plan was
developed for the Commission. Though a plan of action was drafted by the
members of the Cabinet, it was not owned by the rest of the Commission
members. At the professional and technical level, nepotism prevailed with
clients and relatives of the CELC members being recruited and useless positions
being created, such as protocol advisers and hostesses.

In interviews with CELC staff in December 2006 and in discussions with other
people (Hussmann and Bunga, 2005:20), infighting within the various bodies
of the Commission was openly talked about, with each group trying to have
the largest share of professional staff appointed from the ranks of their parties.
The discussions in the Executive Board and the Plenary Assembly were
dominated by issues relating to salaries and benefits. All kinds of rumours
circulated in the Commission on unethical behaviour by key members of the
Commission. This resulted in deep mistrust and antagonism between the
members and also made any substantive discussions about anti-corruption
almost impossible (Hussman and Bunga 2005:21).72
60 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

To add to the internal difficulties encountered by the Commission, the

government dragged its feet in submitting the relevant laws to Parliament and
the latter took a great deal of time to pass them. The law governing the
organisation, attributions and operations of the CELC was only promulgated
on 30 July 2004, more than a year after the start of the transition period. The
Plenary Assembly adopted the standing orders of the Commission four months
later, on 30 November 2004, and its internal administrative and financial
regulations only on 10 June 2005. Besides, the Anti-Corruption Law was
promulgated on 29 March 2005, just 15 months before the end of the transition
period. The establishment of the legal framework within which the CELC could
operate normally was therefore seriously delayed and the Commission only
had a few months to deliver on its mandate. Even in the best circumstances,
this was too short a time to be able to have a lasting impact on the rampant
corruption in the DRC.

Another major difficulty was the lack of financial resources. As in other state
institutions, the salaries of the members of the Commission were paid irregularly.
The operating budget (about US$2 400 per month in 2004 and US$3 000 in
2006) allocated by the government was inadequate and seldom paid73 (Hussman
and Bunga 2005:16). The CELC thus depended on funding from development
partners, including the Department for International Development (DFID) of
the UK, and the UNDP. After unsuccessful attempts to get the Commission off
the ground, the development partners gave up and reallocated the funding
earmarked for the Commission to other programmes. Funding would later be
resumed but at a more modest level. The development partners allegedly feared
that activities of the CELC that focused on investigations into and repression
of corruption could be abused for political reasons and, therefore, jeopardise
the political process (Hussman and Bunga 2005:21–22).

The prevailing cynicism with regard to efforts to combat corruption complicated

the Commission’s task. In fact, a number of previous efforts to combat corruption
had failed miserably. These included the Commission against Corruption, Fraud
and Smuggling as well as Counterfeiting of Currencies and Brands,74 which
was created by Presidential Decree no. 116/2002 of 26 August 2002 and
launched a few months before the beginning of the transition period. The
members of this Commission were very competent individuals drawn from all
walks of life. The reports on the many investigations that they carried out were
confidential and exclusively submitted to the head of state. However, by the
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 61

time this Commission was disestablished seven months after its creation to
give way to the CELC, none of its recommendations had been followed up.75
This is one of the reasons why, besides the enduring tradition of impunity,
people were sceptical that the CELC would do any better.

The CELC generally had a rather negative reputation because of allegations of

unethical behaviour by some of its key members and because of the rivalry
within the organisation (Hussman and Bunga 2005:20). This explains why it
was difficult for the Commission to form any solid working relationship with
other anti-corruption bodies. The Independent Electoral Commission kept it
out of the organisation of the referendum on the new Constitution, which was
held in December 2005, and the elections that followed from June to October
2006. According to the CELC’s own assessment of its work, it managed to
establish ‘contacts’ with the office of the Auditor-General, the Central Bank,
the planning ministry, the Steering Committee in Charge of the Reform of
State Enterprises (COPIREP)76 and the Technical Committee in Charge of Public
Administration Reform (CTRAP)77 (CELC 2006a:24). The CELC also reported
having signed partnership agreements with a number of NGOs working in the
areas of ethics and anti-corruption, including Innovative Resources Management
Inc. (IRM), Licoco and Transparency Africa (CELC 2006a:32–33).

The CELC carried out a number of activities in a rather ad hoc manner, without
prior strategic thinking or adequate analysis and understanding of the
phenomenon of corruption in the DRC. The UNDP and DFID, who were the
main partners of the CELC, endeavoured to get the Commission off the ground
but soon realised that the members of the CELC’s executive organ, the Bureau,
were not capable of developing a unified vision and approach to the
implementation of its mandate, nor could they agree on the Commission’s
plans and priorities. To build the capacities of the Bureau and help resolve
conflicts within it, the UNDP and DFID recruited consultants to train them in
team building, strategic planning and organisational restructuring. This effort
failed miserably (Hussmann and Bunga:24).

With regards to raising awareness of corruption, it is worth mentioning that the

CELC organised workshops to familiarise the public with its implementation
law, the Anti-Corruption Law and the Code of Ethics of Public Officials.78 It
also organised the first anti-corruption week in the DRC in December 2006 in
collaboration with the OCEP. In an effort to improve ethical behaviour, the
62 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

CELC organised conferences and seminars for students and lecturers at the University
of Kinshasa and for the managers of state enterprises (CELC 2006d:19–21).

In its evaluation of its activities, the CELC reported that, in collaboration with
other state bodies, it had actively participated in the repression of corrupt
activities. It mentioned, for instance, that it had broken up a major corrupt
network operating at the border posts in Bas-Congo and Katanga. It also
participated in uncovering tax evasion by a number of state and private
enterprises (CELC 2006d:59–60).

In December 2006 and January 2007, in order to mark the end of its operations
and to assess its activities and the implementation of the NACS (see section 6
below), the CELC produced a number of studies that have been cited in this
section (CELC 2006a, b, c and d). Although they were a result of a rather
belated effort to advocate for reinstating the CELC after the transition period,
they are a valuable contribution to the analysis of the challenges of fighting
corruption in an environment in which the scourge had permeated the whole
of the social and economic fabric, including the institutions that were supposed
to lead the fight against it. These studies also compiled some of the most
important laws relating to anti-corruption, which was a valuable contribution
in a country in which archives had been looted many times.

Observatory of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials

The OCEP was created by Presidential Decree-Law no. 017/2002 of 3 October

2002 relating to the Code of Conduct of Public Officials. The decree-law
assigned to OCEP the following mission:
• To promote, disseminate and popularise the Code of Ethics for Public
Officials and monitor its implementation
• To ensure the adequate implementation of the Code and recommend to
the relevant authorities appropriate measures to prevent and punish those
who violate the provisions of the Code
• To publish annual reports on the implementation and effectiveness of the
Code

A later Presidential decree79 governed the organisation and operations of OCEP,

Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 63

granted it administrative and financial autonomy and placed it under the

purview of the public administration minister, to whom it reported. The decree
also provided for a Supervisory Council in charge of monitoring the management
of the OCEP and submitting to the minister the annual plans of action, draft
budgets, activity and financial reports.

The Code was developed to improve ethics in public administration.80 The

Presidential Decree-Law no. 017/2002 defined ‘public official’ as ‘any person
who holds a public office and/or is a salaried employee of the State’. This very
wide definition includes, among others, the head of state, members of
Parliament, government ministers, magistrates, all civil servants, ambassadors,
members of the national army and the police, the management and staff of
state enterprises, and employees of private enterprises carrying out duties on
behalf of the state.

Article 2 of the Code defined the rules of conduct relating to moral integrity
and professional ethics. It aimed at helping public officials to uphold these
rules and facilitate the good management of the state. It was also designed to
fight against negative values, which, according to Article 16, include
corruption, misappropriation of public funds, misuse of labour, favouritism,
nepotism, influence peddling, etc. Furthermore, it provided guidelines for
dealing with conflicts of interest and corruption, and outlined disciplinary
measures to be taken against public officials who contravened the provisions
of the Code. It is also important to note that Article 9 required that on taking
up their posts and, subsequently, every year and at the end of their term in
office, public officials should submit declaration of assets to the OCEP. By
December 2006, OCEP had collected the declarations of a small number of
civil servants. However, the vice-presidents, ministers, parliamentarians and
senior civil servants had not complied. The president did declare his assets in
December 2006, after his inauguration, but submitted his declaration to the
Supreme Court of Justice, as provided for by the new post-transition Constitution.

One cannot overemphasise the role that an organisation like OCEP could play
in an environment where ethical behaviour was no longer the norm and negative
values prevailed. However, the implementation of the Code was hampered by
a lack of resources, which was a reflection of a lack of political will in the
government to promote ethical values.81 With an operating budget of around
US$200 per month in 2005 (Hussman and Bunga 2005:16), OCEP could not
64 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

recruit and properly train the staff that it badly needed. It had to operate from
a tiny office that lacked even the most basic equipment. It could not even
acquire the necessary documentation on ethics and anti-corruption.

After a rather laborious beginning, the OCEP was given a push from 2005 by a
committed public administration minister, Matenda Kyelu, and a dedicated
director general, Professor Mwendambali Saint Augustin. With the limited
resources provided by the public administration ministry, the African
Development Bank, the World Bank, UNDP, the Belgian Technical Cooperation
Mission to the DRC, and the South African public administration ministry, it
organised workshops and seminars throughout the country to raise awareness
of the Code and of ethical problems. Its staff gave talks on radio and television on
corruption, its negative impact and the need to fight it. Following the publication
of the 2005 Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International, the OCEP
carried out a survey on corruption in the DRC, which, as mentioned earlier, ranked
the offices of the president and the four vice-presidents as the most corrupt
institutions in the country. In collaboration with CELC, it successfully organised
the first anti-corruption week in the Congo in December 2006.

During that week, the public administration minister announced the launch of
OCEP’s new programme code-named ‘LICOFI’.82 It would include the following
elements (RDC Ministère de la Fonction Publique 2006a:4–5):
• To continue and intensify the popularisation of the Code of Ethics for
Public Officials
• To ensure that all public officials declare their assets
• To punish harshly all corrupt acts by building the capacity of the
Disciplinary Board of Public Administration and to submit cases of
corruption or embezzlement of public funds to judicial authorities
• To use measurement tools for moral integrity and good governance in
public administration
• To create and build up synergy between actors involved in the promotion
of integrity and the prevention and fight against corruption

This ambitious programme can only be implemented if the problems that

hampered the OCEP during the transition period are solved. In fact, the political
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 65

will to improve ethical values and fight against corruption have to be shown
not only in the public administration ministry but also in the offices of the
prime minister and the president. Adequate resources need to be made available
to allow the OCEP to acquire the necessary equipment and documentation
and to train its personnel. Furthermore, it is only if OCEP is properly tooled
and equipped, and backed up by strong political will at the highest levels of
the state, that it can effectively fulfil its mandate and tackle the terrible ethical
hangover and the kleptocratic legacy left by Mobutu’s long reign, by numerous
wars and years of looting by warlords turned politicians.

Other watchdogs

A number of other organisations and institutions play an important role in the

fight against corruption. What follows are some brief observations on Congolese
civil society, the media, churches and the international community.

Civil society

Congolese civil society played an important role during the National Sovereign
Conference in the early 1990s and the period that followed the failure of the
liberalisation of the political space by President Mobutu. During the National
Sovereign Conference, many of the outspoken representatives of civil society
were ‘bought’ by politicians and others became interested in playing active
roles in politics, using their civil society positions as stepping stones. The lines
between political parties and civil society organisations were further blurred
when, after the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, civil society organisations agreed
to share power with politicians and take up political positions in government
and Parliament. Civil society organisations were even allocated managerial
positions in state enterprises. As the civil society activists-turned-politicians
continued to hold onto the leadership of their organisations, civil society lost
its credibility in the eyes of the public. It could no longer play an independent
watchdog role, as it could not be both judge and party. Worse still, in the 2006
elections many civil society activists stood as candidates. Under the banner
of civil society, a political party, the MSR, was formed and won the third
largest number of seats in Parliament. It joined the incumbent president’s AMP
and its leader, Pierre Lumbi, was appointed senior minister in the post-election
government.
66 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

Some civil society organisations continued to do excellent work in a rather difficult

environment. More specifically, in the anti-corruption arena, the Anti-Corruption
Observatory,83 which was created in 2002, had a very promising beginning. With
the financial support of the German Agency for Technical Co-operation (GTZ) and
later of DFID, it organised a number of workshops and seminars and published
reports on corruption in the DRC (Observatoire Anti-Corruption 2003). However,
after just a few years of activity, it was marred by internal infighting and virtually
ground to a halt. Other organisations, such as Asadho/Katanga, Licoco and
Transparency Africa soon joined the fight against corruption.

It is worth noting that a number of organisations working in the minerals and

forest sectors, human rights, and the environment, took up issues relating to
governance and transparency. With the assistance of international organisations,
such as RAID, Broederlijk Delen, Human Rights Watch, Global Witness,
Greenpeace, Rainforest Foundation, Niza and the Open Society of Southern
Africa, these local organisations built up their advocacy and research capacities.
The local organisations included, to name a few:
• The RRN84
• Cenadep
• Asadho/Katanga
• Ocean85
• A new network coordinated by Cepas
• ACIDH
• The Centre for Human Rights and Humanitarian Rights (CDH)86
• The New Trade Union Dynamics (NDS)87
• The Network of Human Rights and Civic Education Organisations
(RODHECIC).88

The work of these organisations and their international counterparts deserves an

in-depth analysis, which is not possible within the limited confines of this report.

The media

The media’s important role in promoting good governance and fighting corruption
is well documented. In the wake of the liberalisation of the political space in
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 67

1994, the media sector developed very rapidly. By 2004, there were 231
newspapers and magazines, 126 radio stations and 52 television channels in
the Congo (Institut Panos 2004:85).In the following years, these figures increased
further. For instance, the available figures for a later period (October 2007) but
which could be an indication of the numbers at the end of the period, show a
tally of 298 radio and television stations (Agence France Presse 2007).

Most of the newspapers were published in Kinshasa but only a few were
published regularly. As they are mainly published in French, their readership
was limited to a small elite (Institut Panos 2004:44). The largest daily newspaper
was Le Potentiel, which had a daily circulation of 8 000 copies in 2006 (EIU
2006:21). All newspapers are privately owned and some were considered as
pro-opposition (including Le Potentiel, Le Phare, Tempête des Tropiques and La
Référence Plus) while others were said to have pro-government leanings
(including Le Palmarès and L’Avenir) (EIU 2006:21). Most of the radio and
television stations also belonged to private entrepreneurs. There is also a state-
run radio and television network (Radio-Télévision nationale Congolaise, RTNC)
which had ceased to have a national coverage in the 1990s and only broadcast
in some parts of the country. The radio station with the largest coverage was
Radio Okapi, which had been created by Monuc in early 2002 (EIU 2006:21).

During the period under review, the media in the DRC was governed by laws
that could have allowed it to make a significant contribution to the fight
against corruption. Article 27 of the Constitution of the transition period
guaranteed freedom of expression. It also provided that the right to freedom of
expression implied the freedom to express one’s opinions and feelings in speech,
in writing and in images, as long as public order and other people’s rights and
accepted standards of good behaviour were respected.

Freedom of the press was guaranteed by Article 28 of the Constitution of the

transition period. The Constitution further provided that the law could only
restrict freedom of the press in order to protect public order, accepted standards
of good behaviour and other people’s rights.

The right to information was guaranteed by Article 29 of the Constitution,

which also upheld the freedom to broadcast by radio, television, the press or
any other means of communication. In addition to the Constitution of the
transition period, Law no. 96/002 of 22 June 1996 concerning the details of the
68 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

implementation of press freedom continued to apply. This law, which was

adopted in the wake of the liberalisation of the political space under Mobutu,
established freedom of the press and ended the state monopoly over the media.
It also stated that public audiovisual communication was pluralistic and could
not be monopolised in favour of one single opinion or a group of people and
provided for journalists’ access to information. A major weakness of the law,
however, was the vague definition of the violation of the press laws, which
could thus be interpreted in many different ways and consequently abused.
Unfortunately, this law was unknown to the public and even to most media
professionals, which left the latter at the mercy of politicians and other powerful
people . These freedoms were guaranteed on paper but were hardly implemented
in an environment where laws were violated and rights were routinely abused.

During the transition period, the Congolese media did not have the means or
the political space to play its role fully. In fact, newspaper sales were limited
mainly to Kinshasa and other major cities. Even then, they were a luxury for
most people. The limited number of copies sold and the few advertisements
published hardly provided the resources needed to allow the newspapers to
thrive. Given the difficult financial situation of most newspapers, journalists
could only be paid very low salaries and were, therefore, vulnerable to
corruption. It was quite common for journalists to ask to be paid to publish
articles. Journalists who were invited to cover an event expected to be paid a
‘per diem’ by the organisers. In such circumstances, those politicians who had
the means could easily buy out the newspaper owners and individual journalists.

Those journalists who were brave enough to report on corruption cases were
threatened with physical violence or ran the risk of being prosecuted for defamation.
Several were killed by armed gangs, who were frequently identified as members
of the armed forces or the national police. The victims included renowned journalists
such as Franck Ngyke Kangundu and his wife, who were killed in November 2005
(JED 2006a) and Bapuwa Mwamba, who was murdered in July 2006.

The press releases of the journalists’ defence NGO, Journaliste en danger (Journalist
in Danger) were replete with cases of arbitrary arrests of journalists and other
media professionals (see, for instance, JED 2004, 2005, 2006a and b).

The High Authority of the Media (HAM),89 which was responsible for ensuring
press freedom and the neutrality of the media, was, just like other institutions
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 69

of the transition period, toothless and often overruled by the information minister,
who belonged to the President’s camp. For the sake of illustration, in August
2005 the minister instructed the general manager of the state-owned television
network not to broadcast a programme on political parties that had been
produced by HAM. The minister ignored the HAM president’s protestations
about the government’s interference in matters of his independent body (Congo
Actualités 2005).

As it appeared clearly during the electoral campaign, the national radio and
television network was captured by the incumbent president and his camp.
The other powerful broadcasting networks were owned by politicians, including
some of the main political actors of the transition period. Vice-President Jean-
Pierre Bemba effectively used his private media network in his electoral
campaign.

The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, through regular and adept analyses of social, economic
and political developments, denounced the predominantly unethical behaviour
of the politicians and the looting of the country’s resources. This very often put
the Church at loggerheads with the political class, who could not ignore its
criticisms as the majority of the Congolese people are Catholics. Besides, the
Catholic Church was the only body whose organisation more or less survived
the devastation that had been visited on the Congo. In fact, it could reach its
followers in all parts of the country. An East-West divide appeared within the
leadership of the Church during the presidential election campaign, with bishops
of the Eastern provinces openly campaigning for Joseph Kabila, a fellow Swahili
speaker, who was pitted against the Lingala-speaking Jean-PierreBemba.

The international community

The international community could have brought pressure to bear on the

Congolese authorities to take the fight against corruption seriously. In fact, as
it provided the funding for the elections, the international community had a
great deal of leverage. However, as mentioned earlier, the members of the
International Committee in Support of the Transition (CIAT)90 took a laissez-
faire attitude in all matters relating to governance. They were convinced that
70 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

there was a risk that the electoral process, which was their main priority,
would be jeopardised if they took a firm stand on the need to tackle corruption.
Thus, mere lip service was given to the issue from time to time. At the end of
the transition period, when the international community representatives felt
that the increasing levels of corruption could scuttle the electoral process,
discussions were held within CIAT to agree on a common position about
governance. Meetings were held in June and July 2006 to discuss how to
introduce the issue of good governance in the debates during the electoral
campaign. Even this last-minute effort was abandoned as it was felt that such
action would lack credibility in the eyes of the Congolese people.91

Conclusion

To conclude, the overriding negation of good governance and accountability

that characterised the power-sharing arrangement of the transition period, made
it impossible for anti-corruption bodies to operate effectively. They were deprived
of the necessary financial resources and even basic equipment to play their
role as watchdogs of the management of the country by the Executive. To
survive, they had to depend on the DRC’s international development partners
for financial and material assistance. The legal framework that governed these
institutions could have allowed them to operate with a certain degree of
effectiveness but it was violated or simply ignored by the government. The
lack of political will to fight corruption and promote ethical values, combined
with the impoverishment of the staff of these institutions, doomed anti-corruption
efforts to inescapable failure.
Institutions tasked with combating corruption during the transition period 71

CHAPTER 6
ANTI-CORRUPTION INITIATIVES DURING THE
TRANSITION PERIOD

As articulated above, the political actors of the transition period were averse
to any form of accountability and transparency. There was therefore no political
will to tackle either corruption or the negative values inherited from previous
regimes. On the contrary, in their efforts to amass the maximum amounts of
money, political actors deepened the prevailing kleptocratic culture.

To ensure that bad governance and corruption did not threaten the completion
of the electoral process, the international community from time to time put
pressure on the government to take initiatives to avoid the complete collapse
of the country. In fact, the international development partners of the DRC had
come to believe that the delicate issue of corruption could only be addressed
after the elections had taken place.

The initiatives taken included the NACS (which was finalised in 2002 but was
still in force during the transition period), investigations by Parliament, the
Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative (EITI) and some aspects of public sector reforms related
to governance and anti-corruption. These are discussed in turn below.

National Anti-Corruption Strategy

In 2002, a few months before the beginning of the transition period, the Congo
completed its I-PRSP. In the consultation process that preceded the drafting of
the paper, the overwhelming majority of the people interviewed in four
provinces identified corruption, economic mismanagement, the poor quality
of public service and social and economic infrastructure among the main
72 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

causes of poverty in the Congo. The analysis undertaken at the end of this
process drew the following conclusion:

Being an obstacle to sustainable development, corruption is therefore

an absolute evil that any government must resolutely endeavour to
eradicate considering its negative impact. It basically explains the
deepening of poverty in society (RDC 2002:6).

Based on this analysis, the I-PRSP emphasised the fight against corruption, which
was considered an essential pillar in the effort towards economic recovery and
addressing the DRC’s political and social problems. To this effect, the paper
recommended that a national strategy against corruption be developed.

An inter-ministerial committee in charge of drafting the strategy was put in

place in 2002. It benefited from the technical assistance of the World Bank.
The Ministry of Planning and Reconstruction provided the committee’s technical
secretariat. The committee’s approach was participative and included
consultations with the population, led by ministers through the media, focus
groups involving civil society, public institutions, the private sector and the
international community, a seminar to synthesize the results of the consultations
and a technical workshop. Finally, also in 2002, a seminar bringing together
decision-makers concluded the series of meetings, agreed on directions and
outlined the content of the strategy. It is interesting to note that this seminar
acknowledged the role that the mismanagement of state enterprises played in
fuelling corruption. It also identified impunity, clientelism and insufficient
political will as contributing factors to corruption.

To successfully fight against corruption, the seminar participants recommended

that the national strategy emphasise the need for political commitment and
will, concrete actions, strengthening controls, the drastic reduction of
discretionary powers, decentralisation, good management of enterprises and
the fight against clientelism, especially in the army (RDC 2002:7–8).

The objective of the NACS was defined as follows (RDC 2002:11):

…to strengthen the institutions of the republic with a view to the opti-
mal functioning of democracy based on the transparent management
of political and public institutions, and of the whole of the economy
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 73

which will result in durable development, the sine qua non condition
for reducing poverty. [Author’s translation]

The NACS was assigned four strategic directions (RDC 2002:11):

1. Prevention, awareness raising and raising of moral standards, including
putting in place anti-corruption institutions.
2. Reforming public institutions, including public administration, the judiciary
and the revenue authorities.
3. Repression of corruption.
4. Building a partnership between the public sector, the private sector, civil
society and the international community.

Under each strategic direction, the NACS listed a number of activities that
needed to be carried out by various institutions. It is worth noting that it
recommended that the Commission in Charge of the Fight against Corruption,
Fraud, Smuggling, and Counterfeiting of Currencies and Brands92 (the anti-
corruption commission that was created before the transition period and
succeeded by the CELC) be given the responsibility to develop, promote and
implement a national anti-corruption law in collaboration with other national
and foreign institutions. The NACS also recommended that the investigation
responsibilities and capacities of the Commission be strengthened and that
representatives of public institutions, civil society and the private sector be
included in its membership.

Other actions recommended by the NACS included:

• The promulgation, promotion and implementation of an anti-corruption
law
• The creation of independent anti-corruption NGOs
• The reform of public finance management and public procurement
• The rationalisation of the chain of payments
• Regular audits of state enterprises

This was the first attempt by the DRC to develop a national anti-corruption
strategy. The participatory approach taken by the inter-ministerial committee
74 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

in charge of developing the NACS was appropriate and could facilitate local
ownership of the final product. However, the consultation was limited to
Kinshasa and did not involve the rest of the country. Another major weakness
was that the exercise was donor-driven. In fact, there was no political will on
the part of the Kabila government to engage in the fight against corruption.
On the contrary, corruption increased and immunity was guaranteed for the
powerful corrupt networks that had captured the state.

As mentioned, the NACS was based on the diagnostic of the I-PRSP, which
showed the role that corruption had played in increasing poverty. However,
the strategy was not based on a more systematic analysis of the underlying
causes of corruption rather than just its symptoms. Further, a thorough analysis
of the ethical issues related to corruption should have been undertaken and its
findings used to recommend remedies. To complement this information, the
existing anti-corruption legal framework and institutions should have been
assessed in order to identify the strengths that could be built upon and the
weaknesses that needed to be remedied. Previous attempts at fighting corruption
should have been evaluated with a view to determining what worked, what
did not and the reasons why.

On the positive side, the NACS had a detailed action plan with clearly defined
responsibilities and timeframes for implementation. There were, however, no
clear priorities set and no sequencing of the actions recommended. Further,
the actions were not measurable and neither monitoring nor evaluation
mechanisms were built into the strategy.

The NACS was finalised in November 2002, i.e. one month before the signing
of the Sun City Accord in South Africa in December 2002. The transition period
government that came into power thereafter did not consider the NACS as its
own and ignored it. During the field mission for this report in December 2006
and January 2007, it was difficult to find a copy of the strategy or an official
who could discuss its implementation in the Ministry of Planning and National
Reconstruction – which had provided the secretariat for the inter-ministerial
committee in charge of designing the NACS. In any case, the prevailing
political environment characterised by open tolerance of corruption would
have made the implementation of such a strategy very difficult.
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 75

Audits of state enterprises

As of July 2006, the Congolese state wholly owned 53 enterprises whose

activities were very important for the Congolese economy (RDC, Ministère du
Portefeuille 2006)and encompassed a wide range of economic sectors: mines,
energy, industry, agriculture, transport, communication, finance, service, trade,
construction, research, forestry and training. Furthermore, they were either
monopolies or the dominant players in some key sectors. For instance,
Gécamines, based in the Katanga Province, dominated the mining sector and
was virtually a state within a state during the colonial period and most of the
post-independence period. In the energy sector, the National Water Authority
(Regideso)93 and National Electricity Company (SNEL) 94 controlled the
distribution of water and electricity respectively. National Insurance Company
(SONAS)95 was the only insurance company in the country. Postal services
were the monopoly of the Congolese Posts and Telecommunications Office
(OCPT).96 Road building and maintenance were the exclusive responsibility of
the Road Authority (OR),97 (RDC, Ministère du Portefeuille 2006). They were
placed under the dual purview of the sectoral ministries and the portfolio
ministry.98

In accordance with the Sun City Agreement, the management of these

enterprises was allocated to the signatories of the Agreement. The managers
appointed by the former warlords helped themselves freely to the coffers of
the enterprises that were allotted to them while the ministries in charge of the
enterprises regularly tapped their resources. Pressured by the international
development partners of the DRC, President Kabila requested the Court of
Auditors to audit a number of state-owned enterprises, in collaboration with
other organs that were responsible for auditing public bodies, including the
General Inspectorate of Finance, the Supreme Council of the Portofolio99 and
the Permanent Council of Accounting of the Congo.100 The finance minister
refused to let the team audit the revenue authorities (General Directorate of
Taxes, DGI,101 and the General Directorate of Administrative and State Revenues,
DGRAD102) and OFIDA, whose managers had been appointed by the president’s
camp. In spite of the limited time (14 days) that it was given to complete work
covering a 27-month period (from 1 January 2002 to 31 March 2004), the team
uncovered massive looting of state enterprises by the management and
governing boards appointed by the former warlords (Mabi 2006).103
76 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

In February 2005 the audit team’s finding were submitted by the government
to the Economics and Finance Committee of the National Assembly, led by
Professor Bakandeja wa Mpungu. A report of this committee was debated in a
plenary session of the National Assembly the same month. The committee
reported that, of the 20 state enterprises audited, only 12 had boards of directors,
revealing very weak corporate governance in these institutions. However,
where boards of directors did exist, they took over the day-to-day management
of the enterprises. Members of some boards granted themselves ‘loans’ which
were never reimbursed, thus infringing the 1978 law governing the functioning
of state enterprises. With one exception all the enterprises audited had kept
no accounts for two to seven years, making a proper audit impossible. Board
members were paid monthly salaries amounting to up to US$16 800 in addition
to substantial allowances. They were also paid exorbitant allowances for the
missions that they carried out regularly on behalf of the enterprises (Mabi 2006).104

In violation of the law and regulations governing state enterprises, which

required the prior authorisation of the minister in charge, the management
teams routinely decided on their own remunerations and various benefits. In
one of the enterprises, CEEC, the CEO earned US$25 000 per month in addition
to numerous generous allowances, many of which were invented by the
beneficiary himself. His monthly salary was reduced by the government to
US$8 300 thereafter (Mabi 2006:6).

The managers of the enterprises also went on long missions for which they
received very high allowances, way beyond the levels allowed by the
regulations. In an extreme case of abuse, a member of a management team
went on 14 missions abroad in one year for a total of seven months.105

Furthermore, the management teams colluded with the representatives of the

trade unions whose role was no longer to defend the rights of the workers but
to keep them in check so that the looting of the enterprises could continue.
Trade unionists were bribed to prevent industrial actions by workers, who were
paid irregularly.

It is important to note that none of the enterprises reviewed had internal auditors.
At the time of the audits, some of the state enterprises had not drawn up
balance sheets for seven years. In the rare cases where annual accounts were
produced, none had been audited either internally or externally. The ministers
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 77

in charge ignored the mismanagement of state enterprises as long as they also

benefited from this parlous state of affairs. It was not surprising that the
contribution of state enterprises to the state budget dropped from 10% in 1969
to about 1% in the early 1990s and to almost nothing by the end of the transition
period (Vibidio 2007).

Faced with the publicity given to this scandal in the national media and the
public outrage that it caused, in February 2005 the President suspended six
ministers – who, according to the audit reports, had participated in the plundering
of the state enterprises – and the management boards of ten state enterprises.
This measure was hailed as a turning point in the fight against corruption in the
DRC. However, to the public’s disappointment none of the corrupt officials
were prosecuted. Furthermore, the requests of the public and Parliament for
the audits to continue in other state enterprises and in other parts of the country
were ignored by the authorities.

During the discussion of the 2007 budget in the National Assembly in June
2007, Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga, in his assessment of the performance
of the state enterprises during the transition period, called them ‘useless
monopolies’ which had turnovers amounting to millions of dollars but that
contributed nothing to the state treasury (Ben-Clet 2007).

The Lutundula Commission

Resolution no. DIC/CEF/04 of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, adopted in April

2002, requested that the Parliament of the transition period establish a special
commission to review the validity of the economic and financial conventions
signed during the wars of 1996–1997 and 1998–2003 (commonly known as the
Lutundula Commission).106 This issue had already been raised in the preliminary
meetings of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue in August 2001 and it had then been
agreed that there was an urgent need to examine all the conventions and
contracts signed during the wars with a view to:
• Establishing the truth about the conventions and contracts and the
responsibilities of the individuals who negotiated them
• Evaluating the economic and financial damages that the wars had caused
to the country
78 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

• Re-establishing the rights of the Congolese people and salvaging the

national interests
• Stopping the massive outflow of the wealth of the country
• Putting an end to irregularities and impunity
• Laying the foundations of the rule of law in the DRC

In keeping with the resolution, the National Assembly created the Lutundula
Commission whose missions were:
• To make an inventory of all the conventions
• To examine them
• To assess their economic impact
• To validate or reject these conventions

The Lutundula Commission was requested to recommend appropriate measures

for reparations for damages caused by the conventions and contracts to the
Congolese state. It was also tasked to propose measures to prevent the illegal
exploitation of natural resources.

The Lutundula Commission was led by Christophe Lutundula Apala (who

represented the non-armed political opposition) and included 16 other members
drawn from all the ‘components’ and ‘entities’ represented in the National
Assembly. Lacking adequate financial resources, the Lutundula Commission
encountered all kinds of difficulties. Its members were threatened and many
of the former belligerents refused to co-operate with it. Some of the countries
whose companies had signed contracts with rebels or the central government
denied access to the information it needed for its investigations. In spite of all
these difficulties, the Lutundula Commission finalised the first part of its work
and submitted a report to the Speaker of the National Assembly in June 2005.

The report revealed that many of the contracts and conventions were illegal,
one-sided or unfavourable to the Congo. The Lutundula Commission therefore
recommended that they be either rescinded or renegotiated to ensure better
terms for the DRC. It further recommended that no contracts be signed during
the rest of the transition period. It suggested the prosecution of some Congolese
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 79

officials and foreign companies involved in signing the contracts.

However, the international community and the Congolese authorities allegedly

put a lot of pressure on the Speaker of the National Assembly to prevent him
from tabling the Commission’s report for discussion in the National Assembly.107
In fact, it was feared that an open discussion of the report would cause a great
deal of trouble and even scuttle the electoral process. The report was brought
to the attention of the public only when it was finally leaked and posted on
websites of international NGOs. Thereafter, it was circulated to members of
the Congolese Parliament but, for unknown reasons, it was not discussed.108

The Government did not heed the Commission’s recommendation to suspend

the signing of mining contracts for the rest of the transition period. It signed
further contracts with multinational mining companies that have been criticised
by both local and international NGOs. Most of these contracts related to joint
ventures with state mining enterprises, including Gécamines, Bakwanga Mining
Company (MIBA)109 and Kilo-Moto Mining Company (OKIMO).110 Investigations
carried out by experts showed that these deals were negotiated, approved and
signed with a total lack of transparency and even against the advice of IMC
Group Consulting Ltd., appointed by the World Bank on behalf of the Congolese
government to review some of the contracts (11.11.11 et al 2007). In section 2
above, some of these contracts have been briefly described and their
significance for the economy and the future of the Congo (up to 40 years in
some cases) has been analysed. The various one-sided contracts were approved
and signed in spite of the existence of the Mining Code, which was promulgated
in July 2002, before the transition period, and was still in force.

Public administration reform

Considering the important role that public administration could play in the
development of the DRC, the development partners of the country, and
especially Belgium and South Africa, undertook to assist the government to
reform this sector. Following an evaluation of the public administration sector
by Belgian and South African experts, in collaboration with Congolese
counterparts, the following directions for reform were approved by the Congolese
government in 2003:
80 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

• To enhance the use of public resources

• To improve personnel management and remuneration by conducting a
census of civil service and building up the capacity to manage payroll
• To streamline and rationalise organisational structures (Kita 2006)

As corruption was considered too delicate an issue, no specific programme

was put in place to tackle it. However, it was assumed that by ‘fixing’ the
technical problems rampant corruption would be reduced. OCEP, which was
in charge of promoting the implementation of the ethical code of public servants
and the fight against corruption, was given a minor role in the reform process.

By the end of transition period, the census of the civil service had progressed
in Kinshasa and had revealed a large number of ‘ghost’ employees. The exact
figures of this exercise were being worked out at the time of the field research
for this report.111 However, a major weakness of the reform was the lack of
attention to issues relating to the professionalisation of the civil service and
the establishment of recruitment criteria, procedures and controls to prevent
political appointments and nepotism.

Reform of public finance management

As part of the reform of public finance management the NACS recommended

that particular attention be paid to the payment chain with a view to reducing
opportunities for corruption. During the transition period, efforts were made to
implement this recommendation with the assistance of the country’s foreign
partners. However, at the end of the period under review, the CELC was of the
opinion that the system put in place was not yet effective because of
administrative red tape (CELC 2006d:24). The Auditor-General believed that
corruption was a major obstacle to the reform of public finance management.112

Public procurement was also identified by the NACS as a priority in terms of

fighting corruption. A presidential decree dated 13 October 2004 put in place
a public procurement reform committee113 and a national working group,114
which were both put in charge of leading the reform of public procurement. A
tender system was put in place to prevent the prevailing practice of single-
sourcing procurement and the corruption that it fuelled. However, the personnel
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 81

in charge of the procurement system had not been trained and lacked the
skills to manage it properly. Moreover, by the end of the transition period, no
tender boards had been set up in the provinces. The blacklist of dishonest
bidders, which had been recommended by the NACS as a way of excluding
corrupt entrepreneurs, had not been established (CELC 2006d:27–28).

Security sector reform

As mentioned in an earlier section of this report, the embezzlement of the

salaries of soldiers in the integrated national army (Armed Forces of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, FARDC115) was one of the causes of indiscipline
and harassment of the population by soldiers. Massive human rights violations
by the army represented mounting threats to the electoral process and needed
to be urgently addressed. The monthly bill for soldiers’ salaries amounted to
US$8 million (Swiss Peace 2006:12), payable to the 300 000 soldiers who had
been declared by the former belligerents. The actual number of soldiers was
130 000, the balance being ‘ghost’ soldiers whose pay was pocketed by corrupt
army officers. Worse still, even the 130 000 soldiers were not regularly paid
their salaries, which started at US$10 (Swiss Peace 2006:12–13).

The European Union’s Security Sector Reform Mission in the DRC (EUSEC),
which had been created at the request of the Congolese government, was
asked in December 2005 to put in place a chain of payments that would be
independent of the chain of command and would supposedly reduce corruption
in the army. The mission was also to address other issues relating to the soldiers’
appalling conditions of service (ICG 2006:19–20). By the end of the transition
period, however, the efforts of the EUSEC team of 27 experts had not succeeded
in significantly reducing corruption in the FARDC. This was due mainly to the
fact that the mission encountered serious logistical problems (Swiss Peace
2006:12–13). One could imagine that they also met stiff resistance from corrupt
generals.

Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

In March 2005, Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba attended the second

symposium on EITI in London. He seized this opportunity to announce the
82 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

intention of the Congolese government to join this initiative and to implement

its principles and criteria. This was an important step in the fight against
corruption. In fact EITI, which was launched by the UK government in 2002,
aims to improve accountability and transparency of governments and
companies in resource-rich countries. To this effect, it requires companies
operating in the oil, gas and mining sectors to fully publish – on a voluntary
basis – their payments to governments, while the latter are meant to publish
their revenues from these sources in turn.

At a forum convened by the Minister of Planning, held in Kinshasa in May

2005 on the theme ‘Natural Resources, Transparency and the Reconstruction
of a Prosperous Congo: The Stakes and Perspectives,’ the vice-president made
a statement affirming the determination of the government to implement EITI.
Congolese and international civil society organisations, the private sector and
the Congo’s development partners participated in this forum.

In August 2005, the planning minister, who was in charge of the implementation
of EITI, signed two departmental orders establishing the EITI Provisional
Committee and appointing its members who were drawn from government
departments, civil society and the private sector. The Committee was requested
to develop the relevant legal framework, to propose a plan of urgent action
and to identify funding sources. Based on its proposals and the conclusions of
a workshop held in late August and early September 2005, a National EITI
Committee was created116 and put in charge of ensuring the implementation of
EITI (RDC 2005). It included a steering committee and a technical committee
and its members were appointed by the planning minister in May 2006 (RDC,
Ministère du Plan 2006). However, as this was the end of the transition period,
the imperatives of the forthcoming elections soon took over and the initiative
was shelved.

The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme

The KPCS was launched in November 2002 as a joint government, international

diamond industry and civil society initiative. Its main objective is to stop the
flow of conflict diamonds (also known as blood diamonds), i.e. diamonds that
are mined in rebel-held areas and the sale of which finances rebels’ fights
against legitimate governments. The scheme was born of the realisation of the
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 83

link between the trade in blood diamonds and the devastation and corruption
that had been visited on African countries, including the DRC, Angola, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, and, more recently, Côte d’Ivoire.

The KPCS is a voluntary system that imposes extensive requirements on the

participating states and regional economic integration organisations that have
fulfilled its minimum requirements and are eligible to trade in rough diamonds
in accordance with its rules. Participants commit themselves to implementing
internal controls in order to prevent blood diamonds from entering the arena of
legitimate trade, in which trade can only be undertaken with other participants
in the scheme. A KPCS certificate must accompany all exports of rough
diamonds.117

The DRC is one of the biggest producers of diamonds by volume in the world
and diamonds provide a sizeable percentage of state revenue. Most of the
diamonds produced and exported from the country are mined by artisanal
diggers. During the transition period, MIBA, the majority of whose shares (80%)
were held by the Congolese state, almost went bankrupt because of its
mismanagement by corrupt political appointees. It owed its survival to usurious
loans contracted in rather opaque conditions. The other operator in the formal
sector was Sengamines, which was created in 1999 as a joint venture between
MIBA and Oryx Natural Resources representing the interests of President Joseph
Kabila’s Zimbabwean allies. The conditions under which the company was
created were tainted with corruption and were one-sided in favour of Oryx. It
ceased its activities in 2005 for reasons that are still to be fathomed.

The DRC joined the KPCS in May 2003. The scheme’s implementation is
governed by Ministerial Decree no. 193 dated 31 March 2003. By Presidential
Decree, the CEEC was put in charge of implementing the KPCS and, more
specifically, of supervising the activities of diamond buyers and making sure
that diamond are exported in accordance with the terms and conditions of the
KPCS. The Small-Scale Mining Technical Assistance and Training Service
(SAESSCAM),118 which was set up in March 2003 within the Ministry of Mining,
also had the responsibility to monitor the flow of diamonds with a view to
bringing diamonds from artisanal production into the formal sector. The DRC
soon had, at least on paper, all the controls that were required under the
scheme (Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada 2004:8–11).
84 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The implementation of the KPCS was bedevilled by numerous problems. While

there was an increase in the volume of diamonds exported through official
channels, smuggling through the neighbouring countries continued. Inaccurate
valuations of the exported diamonds allowed tax evasion. The lack of capacity
in the provincial offices of CEEC and the Ministry of Mining made it difficult
to control the production and marketing of diamonds, which are mined mainly
by 700 000 diggers scattered over the whole of the expanse of the country. The
activities of the Ministry of Mining and CEEC officials on the ground were not
properly coordinated (Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada 2004).

While the figures relating to smuggling are difficult to estimate, it should be

said that during the transition period the DRC recorded an increase in the
volumes of diamonds going through official channels. It has been reported
that in 1995, the DRC’s diamond exports were valued at US$331 million while
by 2005 the official exports had climbed to US$895 million. This is the highest
figure since the discovery of diamonds in 1907 (Partnership Africa Canada
2006:2). That is not a mean achievement considering the fact that, as the main
mining company was almost bankrupt, most of the diamond production came
from the alluvial fields mined by diggers in a vast country with porous borders
and a weak public administration.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anti-corruption initiatives reviewed here either failed or

achieved limited success. The reasons are manifold.

Firstly, most initiatives were inspired and imposed by the international

community and were not owned by the Congolese ruling elites. Even in those
schemes that were initiated within the framework of the implementation of
the Sun City Agreement, there was no political will to carry them out.

Secondly, the international community itself only gave lip service to the fight
against corruption as it feared that robust action could jeopardise the electoral
process. The Congolese ruling class knew also that the country’s development
partners did not have a common position on this matter and that they put the
interests of their individual countries before those of the international
community.
Anti-corruption initiatives during the transition period 85

Thirdly, all the initiatives reviewed above were undertaken in an ad hoc manner
and were usually taken out of fear of seeing the electoral process unravel.
They were not based on a thorough analysis of the situation and were not part
of an overall anti-corruption strategy. The Congolese ruling elites, who knew
that the international community lacked the political will and unity to follow
through on these initiatives, only went through the motions to placate their
international partners and made sure the initiatives failed.

Fourthly, the Congolese political actors knew corrupt activities could be

conducted with impunity as the international community had adopted a laissez-
faire attitude toward corruption and all other crimes to make sure that the
electoral process was not derailed. Anyway, they were also aware that the
power-sharing arrangements that they put in place in Sun City disabled all
checks and balances and guaranteed impunity for the whole of the transition
period.
86 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

CHAPTER 7
ANTI-CORRUPTION IN THE POST-ELECTION
PERIOD – 2007 AND BEYOND

The DRC has reached another fork in the bumpy road leading to democracy
and the rule of law. After the first democratic elections since 1965, institutions
have been put in place under the new democratic political dispensation. A
new government under Antoine Gizenga’s leadership is set to begin to implement
the programme that the National Assembly approved in March 2007.

Most observers thought the country could never live up to the challenge of
organising democratic elections in a country that had not held any for 40
years and where most of the infrastructure had been destroyed. The fact that it
did was a major achievement and was due to the determination of the
Congolese people themselves and the support of the international community.
It is now, however, that the most difficult period starts as the government
begins the process of putting a land that has been shattered by decades of
economic decline, mismanagement, corruption and wars back on the road to
sustained peace and stability – and, it is hoped, development. In a country
where state capacity has been destroyed and everything needs and deserves
urgent attention, the government has the unenviable responsibility of making
difficult choices about programmes and actions that will create the enabling
environment to put the Congo on the path towards development and prosperity.

The urgency to rebuild the infrastructure, schools and hospitals, to rehabilitate

agriculture, to rehabilitate the economy and to create jobs is fully
acknowledged. However, none of these urgent actions will be implemented if
a modicum of security does not exist; if the administration does not have a
minimum of capacity to deliver the basic services that its people have been
denied for decades; if there is no clear strategy for economic development; if
state organisations do not have the capacity to properly manage the most
important economic sectors (mining, agriculture, forestry and embryonic
manufacturing), or to raise and manage revenue and account for its expenditure.
No progress will be made, either, if corruption, all kinds of crimes and human
rights violations can continue with impunity and continue to be the rule because
Anti-corruption in the post-election period – 2007 and beyond 87

of a graft-riddled and ill-equipped justice sector. Hopes for development will

be dashed if Parliament, the opposition and civil society are not given the
means and political space to play their watchdog role vis-à-vis the executive
sector freely. If the Congolese people are to start to enjoy the dividends of
relative peace, the long-term and constructive engagement of the international
community through Monuc and the DRC’s development partners will also be
crucial.

The international community has unfortunately not learned from the mistakes it
made during the transition period by not promoting local ownership of anti-corruption
initiatives. In fact, it has imposed on Antoine Gizenga’s government its own
governance plan entitled ‘Towards Governance Compact in the DRC,’ which was
discussed by Congo’s development partners in meetings held in Washington, DC
and Brussels in June and July 2006. The government has adopted verbatim the
relevant sections of this document in its Governance Compact (CDG).119

With regard to the fight against corruption, the CDG sets three main priorities
(RDC, Gouvernement 2007:8):
1. Public decisions which have a significant financial impact.
2. Key sectors, such as mining, forestry, public finance management, public
enterprises management and procurement.
3. Building the capacity of institutions such as the Court of Auditors and the
General Inspectorate of Finance.

To its merit, the CDG undertakes, among other things, to publish extensive
information regarding public revenues and expenditure on a biannual basis,
and to publish all future mining and forestry contracts to which the government
or public enterprises are a party. It also promises that the government will
make public a series of audits, including on the use of highly-indebted poor
country savings, the tracking of expenditure in key social sectors, financial
management in large public enterprises, the Banque Centrale du Congo, and
mining and petroleum revenues. Another important action in the CDG is a
plan to build up the capacity of key watchdog institutions, namely the Court
of Auditors and the General Inspectorate of Finances. It is also important to
note that the CDG promises to take action against persons and entities involved
in corruption in high-visibility cases.
88 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

With regard to natural resources management, the CDG acknowledges that

the sector constitutes a major economic asset for the recovery of the country
but also a potential source of corruption and conflict. It further undertakes to
develop and adopt an action plan for the implementation of the principles and
criteria of EITI. Another noteworthy action is the publication of key elements
and analyses of existing partnership agreements in the mining sector and the
renegotiation of these agreements if possible and appropriate. The CDG also
prioritises the development and adoption of adequate transparent procedures
for awarding new mining rights (for both exploitation and production).

While the CDG identifies the appropriate priorities and lists the relevant actions
to implement these priorities, it suffers from the same problems as the initiatives
taken during the transition period. The CDG, which had not been discussed
with all the relevant stakeholders before it was presented to the National
Assembly in March 2007, is not owned by the people and institutions that are
supposed to implement it. The CDG document, nonetheless, identifies ownership
by local authorities of the compact as one of the main conditions for its
successful implementation. One wonders why lessons were not learned from
other similar post-conflict experiences where the inclusive participation of all
the stakeholders in the development of such a compact has been a determining
factor in its successful implementation. Besides, the assessment of the various
donor-driven initiatives during the transition period in this report has shown
that lack of ownership by the Congolese was one of the main contributing
factors to their failure. The process of designing such a strategy or a plan of
action is, indeed, as important as its contents.

Another major weakness of the CDG is that it does not define a clear governance
strategy with well defined objectives. Furthermore, it does not clearly assign
to ministries and other state organs the responsibilities for its implementation,
monitoring and evaluation. Without this, the actions presented in the document
seem to be a collection of points proposed in a brainstorming session. There is
urgent need for the government to develop - in a participatory process including
all the stakeholders – a global strategy for the implementation of the various
governance reforms that will be based on the PRSP. It will also need to take
into account the lessons learned from the transition period and the new
democratic dispensation and realities. It is hoped that this will be done at the
end of the seven-month period of the implementation of the CDG, which
expires in December 2007.
Anti-corruption in the post-election period – 2007 and beyond 89

Based on this global strategy, a new national anti-corruption strategy will be

developed in a participatory manner with all the stakeholders. The lessons
learned from the lack of implementation of the NACS during the transition
period and the capacity of the various organs and institutions to implement it
should be taken into consideration in the design of the new strategy. It is thus
important to develop a comprehensive diagnostic of corruption and its
manifestations in the DRC. It is recommended that:

The proposed diagnostic will assess the national integrity system (NIS)
of the DRC in theory (law and regulatory provisions) and practice (how
it works). It will therefore not only map the accountability relation-
ships between the various elements of the national integrity system
but also the policy and operational relationships that define how in-
tegrity is pursued and protected in practice. It will also analyse the
social and cultural values that explain how power is exercised. It will
signal areas requiring priority action and form the basis from which
stakeholders may assess existing anti-corruption initiatives. Further-
more, it will help explain which “pillars” (institutions or core rules/
practices) have been more successful and, why and whether they are
mutually supportive and what factors support or inhibit their effective-
ness. Finally, the study will assess where the emphasis should be put
to improve the system and what factors are required to support the
overall development of the NIS (Kodi 2007:18).

The mining sector deserves special mention among the priorities of the new
government of the DRC because of its importance as the source both of conflict
and of much-needed revenue for the country’s reconstruction The government
has inherited a sector that is in shambles. To cite just one illustration of the
problems that beset this sector, in a recent statement, Professor Mabi Mulumba,
former Auditor-General and present Chair of the Economy, Finance and
Governance Committee of the Senate, revealed that ‘of the 207 mining
companies established in the province of Katanga, only 20 are registered with
the Ministry for Economy, and only six publish their production statistics’ (Lukoki
2007). Another urgent matter is the review of the mining contracts signed
during the wars and the transition period. The way the government deals with
these issues and finally launches EITI and implements its terms will give an
indication of its political will to live up to its own pronouncements on good
governance and to turn a page in Congo’s long history of predation and
mismanagement.
90 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

CHAPTER 8
CONCLUSION

The history of the DRC has been marked by predation of its enormous wealth
and the oppression of its people by foreigners and its own elites. Many
opportunities to remedy this situation were missed in the post-colonial period.
Independence in 1960, Mobutu’s coup in 1965, the National Sovereign
Conference in the early 1990s and the demise of Mobutu’s kleptocratic regime
in 1997 were all events on which the Congolese people pinned their hopes for
a better future. They all turned out to be great disappointments as each time
there was more continuity than change in the prevailing corruption and
mismanagement of the country. The 2006 elections, the first in 40 years, were
another crucial juncture in the history of the DRC.

In spite of all the problems encountered during the electoral process, the new
democratic dispensation that has allowed the Congo to put in place all the
institutions that make up a modern state could mark a new beginning for the
Congolese people, a prosperous future for which they have so long dreamt. For
this dream to become a reality, the scourge of corruption, which is one of the
factors responsible for the abject poverty of the Congolese, needs to be
addressed. The fight against corruption should be integrated in all governance
reform programmes. Furthermore, the negative values that the country inherited
from Mobutu’s long reign and that were deepened over the years of the transition
period need to be tackled as a matter of priority. For this to happen, political
will at the highest levels of the state will need to be built up by concerted
actions from civil society and the development partners of the DRC.

If the status quo ante persists under the new government, the mineral sector
will continue to enrich the Congolese elites and their foreign accomplices,
insecurity will continue, massive human rights violations will continue unabated
and thousands more innocent people will die. The instability in the DRC will
also affect all its nine neighbours.

The signs of a significant change in the way the country is governed will come
from the way in which the government resolves the important issue of the
Conclusion 91

review of the one-sided mining contracts signed between Congolese officials

and multinational companies.
92 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

CHAPTER 9
RECOMMENDATIONS

The Congolese Government

1 At the highest levels, the government needs to show its political will to
fight corruption and its commitment to implement governance reforms by
taking concrete actions. These actions will send a clear message that
corruption is no longer tolerated and no corrupt individual at any level of
the state apparatus will enjoy immunity.

2 To set an example of transparency, the asset declarations made by all

members of the Executive in compliance with Article 99 of the Constitution
should be made public. The Constitutional Court, which receives them,
should be given the right and resources to check the declarations and to
monitor them.

3 The evaluation of the implementation of the CDG should be transparent

and include members of Parliament and representatives of civil society
and the private sector. The results of this evaluation should be published
and discussed with the public and in Parliament.

4 The Government should urgently develop – in a participatory process

including all the stakeholders – a global strategy for the implementation
of the various governance reforms. This strategy should take into account
the lessons learned from the transition period and the new democratic
dispensation and realities. The objectives of the strategy should be clearly
defined. A timetable for the implementation of the strategy and benchmarks
should also be articulated. The coordination, monitoring and evaluation
mechanisms with well defined responsibilities should complete this strategy.
Recommendations 93

5 Based on this global strategy, a new national anti-corruption strategy should

be developed in a participatory manner with all the stakeholders, with a
view to explicitly integrating the anti-corruption variable in all governance
reforms. The development of the strategy should be informed by a
diagnostic on the forms and dynamics of corruption. It should also use the
results of an evaluation of both the theory and practice of the national
integrity system of the DRC, i.e. all the institutions, laws and practices
which help prevent and combat corruption. A coordination mechanism
for the anti-corruption strategy, with responsibilities clearly assigned to
the relevant institutions, should also be designed.

6 The role and objectives of a national anti-corruption commission should

be defined in the new anti-corruption strategy. Its responsibilities and
relations with other state organs should be clearly defined. Its independence
vis-à-vis other institutions should be guaranteed.

7 The existing Anti-Corruption Law should be redrafted in order to strengthen

it and fill the gaps that have been identified.

8 The government should put in place and implement a communication

strategy with a view to informing the people, regularly and honestly, about
the projects being undertaken and the results achieved. This should allow
the government to mobilise the public and to manage its high expectations.

9 The security sector reform will not succeed if the human rights violations
committed by the integrated soldiers and the police continue to be
committed with impunity. Criminal elements should be excluded from
the ranks of the armed forces. The census of soldiers should be continued
in order to identify ‘ghost soldiers’ and reduce corruption. Ethical norms
and moral values should be part of the core training of the armed forces
and the police with the view to ridding them of the mentality of an
occupying army that considers predation on civilians as part of its normal
remuneration.

10 While continuing to introduce basic administrative systems, rules and

procedures, civil service reform should now prioritise measures to increase
the salaries and improve the terms and conditions of employment of civil
94 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

servants, and to put in place mechanisms for merit-based appointments

and promotions.

11 The rules and regulations governing public procurement should be updated.

This should include a clear definition of the responsibilities of the various
institutions. In building the capacities and technical knowledge of the
staff in charge of procurement, ethics and good governance should be
important components of the training programme.

12 The review of the ongoing mining and forest concessions contracts should
be conducted in a transparent manner. Information on the contracts should
be made available annually to civil society organisations and Parliament,
whose independent opinions on the contracts should be taken into
consideration by the review team.

13 The government should implement the recommendations of the special

commission led by Christophe Lutundula Apala on the validity of the
financial and economic conventions signed in the 1996–1997 and 1998–
2003 wars. The companies and individuals named in the report for partaking
in corrupt activities should be prosecuted.

14 Given the importance of the diamond sector for the Congolese economy,
the government should take measures to clarify the roles of the Ministry
of Mining, the CEEC and the Mining Registry to avoid unnecessary overlap
and confusion. The various organs in charge of enforcing the internal controls
that have been adopted under the KPCS should be given adequate
resources to build up their capacity in their provincial offices. Measures
should be taken to end inaccurate valuations, illegal taxes and extortions.

15 The launch of the EITI in August 2007 should be followed by the full
implementation of the principles of the initiative. Besides representatives
of civil society organisations and the private sector, members of Parliament
should be included in the bodies that lead the implementation.

16 Instead of creating new control organs, the government should allocate

adequate human and financial resources to the Court of Auditors and the
Inspectorate General of Finance. Their respective reporting relations with
the president’s office and the Ministry of Finance should be reviewed
Recommendations 95

with a view to guaranteeing their independence from the Executive. The

government should also ensure that these two organs receive on time the
data that they need for regular audits of government ministries, the
decentralised entities and state enterprises.

17 The government should finalise the process for ratifying the main
international anti-corruption instruments, including the AU Convention
on Preventing and Combating Corruption and the SADC Protocol Against
Corruption, and publicise and domesticate them into the relevant national
laws.

18 The government should use these various instruments to seek assistance

from other states parties to launch a campaign for the return of the country’s
stolen assets.

19 The government should engage in a regular dialogue with civil society

organisations, the private sector and the media on matters relating to
good governance and the fight against corruption.

20 The government should take measures to put an end to threats, arbitrary

arrests and extra-judicial killings of human rights defenders, anti-corruption
campaigners and journalists. Those soldiers and policemen proven guilty
of such acts should be punished.

The Congolese government and international development

partners of the DRC

1 The government of the DRC and its development partners should include
other stakeholders in the discussion and finalisation of the priority areas
of the long-term government’s governance compact for the period starting
in 2008. The compact should include an action plan, a clear timetable
and benchmarks, and a monitoring and evaluation mechanism.

2 The commitments of the government and its development partners under

the governance compact should be publicised in order to raise awareness
and make it possible for Parliament, civil society and the public at large
to demand accountability from the government.
96 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The Congolese Parliament

1. Parliament should discuss the report of the Lutundula Commission, which

investigated the validity of the financial and economic conventions signed
by the government and ‘rebels’ during the 1996–1997 and 1998–2003
wars. Parliament should monitor the government’s implementation of the
recommendations made by the Commission. It should also set up a
commission that would complete the Commission’s by investigating
financial and economic conventions signed between 2003 and 2006.

2. Parliament should request that adequate means are given to the Court of
Auditors and that the government, the decentralised entities and the state
enterprises provide it with the relevant data on a timely basis. The Court
of Auditors should report directly to it and not to the president’s office.

3. The various standing committees of Parliament should be given the

appropriate levels of human resources and equipment. Means should also
be provided for technical expertise to be availed to Parliament through its
own research staff and external consultants.

4. Parliament should discuss the decisions of the teams in charge of reviewing

mining and forest concessions contracts.

5. Parliament should take a keen interest in the KPCS and EITI and monitor
their implementation.

6. Parliament should take steps to form a national chapter of the African

Parliamentarians’ Network against Corruption (APNAC) and learn from
the anti-corruption experiences of other Parliaments, especially in post-
conflict situations.

The Congolese and international civil society organisations

1. Congolese civil society organisations working in the governance and anti-

corruption areas should form a coalition and coordinate their activities
with a view to building synergies and avoiding unnecessary duplication.
Recommendations 97

2. Congolese civil society organisations should design plain-language versions

of the mining and forest codes in French and the four national languages
(Lingala, Kikongo, Swahili and Tshiluba). Training sessions should be
organised throughout the country. This would empower people to exert
pressure and demand accountability from the government at all levels in
these two important sectors.

3. In order to improve their credibility and the impact of their work,

Congolese civil society organisations should endeavour to draw a clear
distinction between political parties/activists and civil society
organisations. They should also develop the necessary expertise to collect
and process data to inform evidence-based advocacy. They should explore
possibilities of collaboration with academics and other researchers to
analyse data.

4. Congolese civil society organisations should prioritise building their

capacity to conduct independent perception surveys on service delivery
and corruption and tracking surveys on public expenditure to inform their
advocacy work and make it more credible.

5. Other important areas in which monitoring and evaluation capacity should

be developed by civil society organisations include budget transparency,
public contracting and declarations of personal assets by politically
exposed persons.

6. Civil society organisations should work with local communities to monitor

corruption in the decentralised territorial entities (including sectors and
chiefdoms).

7. International civil society organisations should continue to coordinate

their advocacy and research work with their Congolese counterparts. They
should also support the efforts of the Congolese civil society organisations
in capacity building with a view to creating genuine partnerships between
the Congolese and international organisations.
98 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

The development partners of the DRC

1. The DRC’s development partners have to draw lessons from their experience
of working with the Congolese government during the transition period,
which showed that donor-driven initiatives lacked local ownership and
therefore stood very little chance of being implemented.

2. The DRC’s partners should develop a better knowledge of the history and
the present political, social and economic context in the Congo. They
should explore ways of analysing the data collected by Monuc in various
areas and sharing the results among themselves and with the Congolese
government, institutions and public.

3. Donors should speak with one voice while harmonising the priorities of
the governance reform programmes and benchmarks with the Congolese
government. Civil society organisations and the private sector should be
involved in such discussions.

4. Donors should move from the laissez-faire attitude that they adopted toward
corruption during the transition period. They should ensure that anti-
corruption measures are included in all the reform programmes undertaken
by the government and that they are applied.

5. In collaboration with the Congolese civil society organisations,

development partners should map out the reformers and non-reformers in
the Congolese political establishment. They should then develop a strategy
and targeted actions to achieve local ownership and overcome resistance
to the governance and anti-corruption programmes.

6. Donors should prioritise efforts to support capacity building programmes

for civil society organisations, Parliament, the Court of Auditors, the
General Inspectorate of Finance and the media.

7. The development partners of the DRC should put pressure on the neighbours
of the DRC to stop fuelling conflict in the Congo and to discourage the
smuggling of natural resources into their territories.
Recommendations 99

The private sector

1. The Congolese and foreign private sector should actively participate in

the fight against corruption.

2. The private sector should also support efforts to clean up the corruption
that has bedevilled the key sectors of mining and forestry.

3. The private sector should declare zero tolerance of corruption and

implement the principle in its activities and in its relations with the
government at all levels.

4. Foreign companies operating in the DRC should apply the provisions of

the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials
in International Business Transactions. In addition, the Congolese should
be encouraged to report bribery involving foreign multinational corporations
so that OECD member states and those that are party to the UNCAC are
forced to investigate and prosecute such crimes. They should ensure that
their staff familiarise themselves with and apply the OECD Risk
Management Tool for Investors in Weak Governance Zones.

Notes
1 Conscience Africaine
2 Alliance des Bakongo
3 Mouvement National Congolais. The MNC had the largest number of deputies
and senators in the coalition.
4 President of the Parti Solidaire Africain (African Solidarity Party, PSA).
5 Armée Nationale Congolaise
6 Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution
7 Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social
8 Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo
9 Mission des Nations Unies au Congo
10 RCD stands for Rassemblement des Congolais pour la Démocratie, which is the
rebel group led by Azarias Ruberwa and supported by Rwanda and which
occupied mainly the Kivu and Maniema provinces, and part of northern
100 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

Katanga. The MLC is the Mouvement de Libération du Congo, led by Jean-

Pierre Bemba and supported by Uganda. It occupied mainly the northern
section of the Equateur province and part of Orientale province.
11 Namely, the Independent Electoral commission, the National Observatory of
Human Rights, the High Authority of the Media, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission.
12 Alliance de la Majorité Présidentielle
13 Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie
14 Parti Lumumbiste Unifié
15 Mouvement Social du Renouveau
16 Forces du Renouveau
17 Union des Mobutistes Démocrates
18 Union pour la Nation
19 Convention des Chrétiens Démocrates
20 Centre de Commerce International du Zaire
21 Office des Douanes et Accises
22 A slang term for bribes.
23 Société Minière du Kivu
24 Observatoire du Code d’Ethique Professionnelle
25 Interview: S A Mwendambali 2006
26 And interviews: N K H Kabungulu, July 2006; R Minani, June and December
2006; and M Mabi, December 2006.
27 Interviews: M Mabi, December 2006 and R Umba-di-Ndangi, December 2006.
28 Interviews: C Kambale, December 2006 and P Badu-wa-Badu, June 2006
29 Centre d’Evaluation, d’Expertise et de Certification des Substances Minérales
Précieuses et Semi-précieuses. A public service that was established in 2001
and is in charge of implementing the Kimberley Process in the DRC.
30 Interview: M Mabi, December 2006.
31 Nederland Instituut voor Zuid Africa
32 Centre Nationale d’Appui au Développement et à la Participation Populaire
33 Réseau des Ressources Naturelles
Recommendations 101

34 Centre d’Etudes pour l’Action Sociale

35 Action contre l’Impunité pour les Droits Humains
36 Ligue Congolaise contre la Corruption et la Fraude
37 Association Africaine des Droits de l’Homme
38 Structure Militaire d’Intégration
39 Points Sexuellement Transmis. This can be translated as sexual favours for good
school marks.
40 This section of the report is based on the author’s observations and interviews
in Kinshasa in June–July 2006, in December 2006 and in January 2007.
41 Commission de l’Ethique et de la Lutte contre la Corruption
42 Interview: C Kambale, December 2006.
43 Coltan is used in steel alloys and electronic equipment, including mobile
telephones.
44 Heterogenite is mainly used to produce cobalt.
45 Loi no. 007/2002: Article 2, states that ‘the preliminary work, exploration and
extraction of liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons, as well as the activities or
operations relating to thermal or mineral waters, are excluded from the scope of
application of the present Code. They are governed by special laws.’
46 Work on this started in 2002 and was finalised in May 2004.
47 Règlement Minier
48 Code Minier
49 Cadastre Minier
50 Agenda Prioritaire pour la relance du secteur forestier
51 Journal Officiel de la République Démocratique du Congo
52 Cour des Comptes
53 Inspection Générale des Finances
54 Journal Officiel de la République Démocratique du Congo, 24 June 2005,
December 2005.
55 Interview, M Mabi, December 2006.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
102 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

58 This section is based on the information that the author collected in interviews
in Kinshasa in December 2006 and the writings of two General Inspectors of
Finances (Abolia 2005 and Umba-di-Ndangi 2006a). The Inspectorate was
created by Ordinance no. 87–323 of 15 September 1987, which was later
modified and completed by Ordinance no. 91–018 of 6 March 1991 and by
Decree no. 034–B/2003 of 18 March 2003.
59 Interview: R Umba-di-Ndangi, December 2006.
60 Loi financière no 83–003 du 23 février 1983, Article 39, 44, 45 and 46
61 Resolution no. 25/DIC/April 2002 of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, Chapter V,
para 4a, b and c.
62 Commission Electorale Indépendante
63 Observatoire National des Droits de l’Homme
64 Haute Autorité des Médias
65 Commission Vérité et Réconciliation
66 Loi no. 04/020 du 20 juillet 2004
67 Fédération des Entreprises du Congo
68 Assemblée Plenière
69 Loi no 04/020 du 20 juillet 2004, Article 6g
70 Interviews: CELC staff, June, July and December 2006; and O Blake, June 2006.
71 Interviews: CELC staff, 2006.
72 Interviews: CELC staff 2006; P Badu-wa-Badu, 2006; C Kambale, 2006.
73 Interview: P Badu-wa-Badu, 2006.
74 Commission de Lutte contre la Corruption, la Fraude et la Contrebande ainsi
que la Contrefaçon de la Monnaie et des Marques
75 Interviews, S Bula-Bula, 2006; M Y Bongoy, 2006.
76 Comité de Pilotage de la Réforme des Entreprises Publiques
77 Comité Technique de Réforme de l’Administration Publique
78 Code de Conduite de l’Agent Public de l’Etat
79 Presidential Decree no. 075/2003 of 3 April 2003.
80 Interviews: S A Mwendambali, 2006 and 2007.
81 Ibid, 2006.
Recommendations 103

82 The acronym for Lutte Impitoyable contre la Corruption, la Fraude et

l’Impunité, which means ‘Merciless Fight Against Corruption, Fraud and
Impunity’. In Lingala, ‘likofi’ means fist.
83 Observatoire Anti-Corruption
84 Réseau Ressources Naturelles
85 Organisation Concertée des Ecologistes et Amis de la Nature
86 Centre pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme et Droits Humanitaires
87 Nouvelle Dynamique Syndicale
88 Réseau d’Organisations des Droits Humains et d’Education Civique
89 Haute Autorité des Médias
90 Comité International d’Accompagnement de la Transition
91 Interviews with staff of embassies and the UN in Kinshasa in June and July
2006.
92 Commission de Lutte contre la Corruption, la Fraude et la Contrebande ainsi
que la Contrefaçon de la Monnaie et des Marques. Created by Presidential
Decree no. 116/2002, dated 29 August 2002.
93 Régie de Distribution d’Eau
94 Société Nationale d’Electricité
95 Société Nationale d’Assurances
96 Office Congolais des Postes et Télécommunications
97 Office des Routes
98 Ministère du Portefeuille
99 Conseil Supérieur du Portefeuille
100 Conseil Permanent de la Comptabilité au Congo
101 Direction Générale des Impôts
102 Direction Générale des Recettes Administratives, Judiciaires, Domaniales et de
Participations
103 And interview: M Mabi, December 2006.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 The information used in this section is drawn from République Démocratique
104 Corruption and governance in the DRC during the transition period

du Congo, Assemblée Nationale, Commission Spéciale chargée de l’examen de

la validité des conventions à caractère économique et financier concludes
pendant les guerres de 1996-1997 et de 1998, Rapport des travaux, 1ère
partie, 2005, passim.
107 Interviews: I M S Mupira, June 2006 and C Lutundula, December 2006.
108 It was for the first time ever discussed in the DRC at a workshop organised by
CEPAS in June 2007 on the ongoing review of mining contracts. Christophe
Lutundula participated in this workshop.
109 Minière de Bakwanga
110 Office Congolais de l’Or de Kilo-Moto
111 Interviews: B Musafiri, December 2006 and L-I Ibonge, December 2006.
112 Interview: M Mabi, December 2006.
113 Commission de la Réforme des Marchés Publics
114 Groupe de Travail National
115 Forces Armées de la République du Congo.
116 Presidential Decree no. 05/160, 18 November 2005.
117 More information on the scheme is available on the official website of the
scheme at http://www.kimberleyprocess.com
118 Service d’Assistance et d’Encadrement du Small Scale Mining
119 Contrat de gouvernance
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