ABSTRACT
This case study shows that despite a rich endowment of natural resources, fertile land, and repeated oil booms, the Republic of the Congo has been unable to forge a national identity out of diverse and hostile tribes. Tribes engage in politics as a zero-sum game, where those in power exclude the rest, and those out of power plot to retake it. This political culture has led to endemic instability, corruption, economic decline, and intense intertribal animosity. For the first three decades after independence, Congolese followed Soviet and Chinese models for economic development that entailed the nationalization of industry, the neglect of agriculture and consumer goods, economic development through five-year plans, and political rule through a one-party state. This model transformed the country, a food exporter at independence, into a food importer; failed to maintain the transportation infrastructure left by France; and created a proliferation of money-losing state enterprises and an unsustainable expansion of the state bureaucracy. The turn to democracy in the 1990s brought not stability but civil war as the tradition of zero-sum politics lives on.
