By Alain DESTEXHE*
What have successive presidents – Mobutu, Kabila father and son, Tshisekedi – brought to the Congolese people? Nothing, apart from the misery of the people and the depletion of the country’s natural resources.
In the past, under colonisation, roads and tracks were in much better condition. Monseigneur Faustin Ngabu, Bishop of Goma from 1974 to 2000, born in 1935, tells me that it was possible to cover the 550 km separating Bunia from Bukavu in just two days, thanks to a well-maintained track, with a road-mender assigned to each five-kilometre stretch. Today, that same journey takes more than twice as long, with vehicles constantly buffeted by potholes and crevasses.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Rwanda, the main roads are impeccable. In the DRC, as soon as you leave Goma, the average speed drops to 15-20 kph (video). Heading north towards Rutshuru, the tarmac road comes to an abrupt halt after a few kilometres, precisely at the spot where the former First Lady, Marie-Olive Lembe Kabila, had promised the construction of a ‘New City’. But there’s nothing there. Not a house, not a building, just a sign indicating a ghost project.
All that’s left is an old road built by an Italian company, which laid a 10 cm base course instead of the planned 40! A caricature of corruption and incompetence: not only did the poorly designed road deteriorate rapidly, but in order to renovate it or even transform it into a passable runway, the fragile base would first have to be torn up, a long, difficult and costly job. It would have been better not to build anything and simply maintain the original runway.
To the west, after Saké, 26 km from Goma, we make slow progress at 15 km/h towards the village of Ntoro, in the mountains. Along the road, a power line catches my eye: it doesn’t serve any of the villages we pass through. But at the end of the road, it supplies power to a large farm belonging to Joseph Kabila. That’s what public infrastructure is for in the DRC!
In Rwanda, the roads are lined with deep ditches to channel rainwater. In the DRC, there are no such ditches. The result: the slightest downpour turns the roads into muddy torrents, accelerating their deterioration (video) . In Goma, the few roads in good condition were financed not by the state, but by private contractors, thanks to a tax on fuel introduced with the agreement of the local authorities at the time.
Theft, predation, incompetence: these are the only competencies of the Congolese state, and this has been the case under every president to date. (End).
*Alain DESTEXHE is an Honorary Belgian Senator, Initiator and Secretary of the Belgian Senate Inquiry Commission on Rwanda (1997).