The Failing State in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A longer version of this article will be published in French as “Restructurer l’Etat congolais” in a forthcoming book edited by Dr Philomène Makolo.

On Christmas Day 2008, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a sadistic Ugandan rebel group, attacked the town of Faradje in the Eastern Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and killed dozens of men, women and children while looting stores and destroying property.¹ Even for an important urban centre like Faradje, the Congolese army and police offered no protection to the civilian population. The Congolese state was notorious by its absence.

On 20 March 2010, Human Rights Watch released a sixty-seven-page report documenting killings and other heinous crimes by the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Makombo area of the Eastern Province between 14 and 17 December 2009.² Based on a fact-finding mission carried out in February 2010, the report gives a total of 321 persons killed. A government spokesperson in Kinshasa denounced the Human Rights Watch report as a fabrication, insisting that there was no massacre since according to its own count, only twenty-five people were killed. So, for the Congolese state under Joseph Kabila, twenty-five civilians killed is no big deal, when serious governments like those of the United States and Israel will pursue and kill kidnappers of a single American or Israeli citizen. Thus, in addition to being a failed state, the Congo is being ruled by irresponsible leaders.

This irresponsibility is evident not only in the criminal negligence of top state officials to fulfil their national and international duties to protect innocent civilians, but also in their failure to establish and maintain administrative and security services capable of discharging effectively the responsibility to protect.³ And such services require well-trained, disciplined and regularly paid state employees. As a state, the DRC cannot meet this elementary condition for several reasons, one of which is its inability to mobilise sufficient revenues to meet its obligations. A land exceedingly rich in natural resources, the Congo ranks among the poorest countries on earth, with an annual GDP of approximately $300 per capita for its population of seventy million people. Nearly half of the current annual budget of $6 billion comes from external assistance.⁴ By comparison, the much smaller Congo-Brazzaville has a budget of over $4 billion,⁵ and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had an expenditure budget of $2.2 billion in 2009, a third of the DRC budget, for 28,916 students, 3,508 faculty members and 7,696 members of the support staff.⁶ It is estimated that annually, the Congolese customs service collects just 10 per cent of what it should gather in revenues. Other revenue collection agencies such as the tax service and revenue-generating state enterprises are well known for their rampant corruption and incompetence. Thus, even if the leadership were committed to providing essential services to the population, the means at its disposal are simply inadequate for doing so.

It follows that the Congolese state is wholly incapable of carrying out the three most elementary but fundamental functions of a modern state. These functions are (1) ensuring the security of the national territory, its inhabitants and their property (i.e., security and order maintenance); (2) providing economic, social and cultural services to the population as a whole (service delivery); and (3) mobilising the resources needed to fulfil all state functions (revenue collection). Restructuring the state inevitably means developing and reinforcing its capacity to fulfil these functions effectively and to the satisfaction of all the country’s inhabitants, namely, citizens, permanent residents and legal migrants, including legitimate refugees.

Failure as Permanent to the Congolese State

Surveying Congo’s history since the establishment of the modern state in 1885, the British journalist Neal Ascherson concludes that state failure is a permanent feature of the Congolese state in all its forms, from the Congo Free State of King Leopold II of Belgium in the late nineteenth century, to the DRC today:

The term “failed state” is often abused. It applies to the Congo, however … The causes of this failure go beyond the short-sighted nature of Belgian colonialism. They lie, ultimately, in the trauma inflicted on the peoples of the Congo basin by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, and his so-called “Congo Free State”. The brutalities and disruption brought about by that regime, in effect a private and personal colony whose single purpose was the extraction of wealth without regard to the human cost, were never overcome. The concept of politics has never risen above an image of plunder extorted by force, whether by a king, a European colonial system, a dictator or a regional warlord.⁷

Accordingly, the first and most important lesson of the Congo in its 126 years of existence as a modern state is that it is a failed state, and this, in all of its four major manifestations:

1. The Congo Free State (1885–1908): A personal property of King Leopold II who, according to Jean Stengers, owned the Congo just as John Rockefeller owned Standard Oil,⁸ i.e., as an enterprise that had to be made profitable by all means necessary. Economic exploitation under conditions akin to slavery during the “red rubber” campaign resulted in nearly ten million deaths and gave rise to the first international human-rights organisation of the twentieth century, the Congo Reform Association. The state was nothing but a brutal and criminal machine for whom the people were nothing but instruments of wealth accumulation for the king and his beloved Belgium.

2. The Belgian Congo (1908–60): “A colony that worked” and “whose natives had happy smiles on their faces,” according to colonial-era propaganda; it did work, primarily thanks to the whip. According to Roger Anstey, the colony was for all practical purposes “King Leopold’s legacy”,⁹ with the state itself universally defined as bula matari, or organised violence, by the Congolese people.¹⁰ While the state’s capacity for revenue collection, law and order and service delivery was relatively high by colonial standards, all of these