ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits Congo’s post-colonial period with a twofold objective. The first is to provide a historically informed account of the country’s politico-administrative trajectory, from its colonial days to the end of the Mobutu regime in 1997, which allows to better understand the case studies that follow, especially the chapter on administrative reform. The second aim is to highlight a series of striking analogies between the current reform process and the periods that preceded it, particularly, but not exclusively, during the Mobutu regime. The objective is to show that salient aspects of the current patterns of reform not only are by no means unprecedented, but also that the historical succession and entanglement of power configurations within the country - Belgian rule, the first republic’s early days and the decolonisation crisis, and Mobutist dictatorship - have paved the way for a situation where the challenge of building effective state authority for the central government, and administrative capacity in particular, has become increasingly difficult. The country’s external relations - whether during the Mobutu years when the regime hinged on large-scale, Cold War-motivated support, or during the period of de facto international trusteeship beginning in 2001 - have meant that legitimacy has mostly been derived externally, with strong ramifications for reform efforts. However, as suggested by the previous chapter, this has left Congolese political actors with significant space for agency, which far from being reducible to mere compliance to external injunction, have largely charted their course in partial autonomy from outward influence. Broadly in agreement with much of the literature suggesting that the neat separation of the internal and external dimensions in African countries is illusory, as agency has often borne the mark of extraversion, this chapter uses the concept of co-production (drawn from the Africanist historian Frederick Cooper) to illustrate some characteristics of Zaire’s state reforms and (aid) politics which profoundly prefigure present-day trends. The most important of those has been the treatment of political issues as purely managerial matters during the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1975 debt crisis, the diagnosis of the IMF regarding Zaire’s economic problems identified ‘mismanagement’ as the problem, with Mobutu endorsing the verdict wholeheartedly, outlining organisational and administrative change as the solution without having to address broader political considerations. This type of solution is equally privileged today, with most current donor-funded state reform efforts being envisaged as technical fixes or managerial problems, not as high-stakes, contested, political, and conflictual issues. This chapter concludes by suggesting that, then as now, this situation in large part arises from the compromises which creditors and donors to the country become enmeshed in with political elites, each set of actors remaining involved in their respective pursuit and defence of interests, which have often unfolded at the expense of local populations.
