For those of you not living in Kinshasa, and not speaking Lingala, the title must sound weird… Strangely enough, it also sounded weird when I heard it last week. For a week, I was stuck at home with a bout of malaria, coupled with the flu and sinusitis – heaven, one could say – and I was resting in my room which is quite close to the street, in my average neighborhood in South-West Kinshasa.
Suddenly, one day, I heard someone scream the title of this post as he was strolling through my street, and he kept on doing it until I could no longer hear him, and assumed he had kept going. What does it mean? In fact it is “Cuivre, Nazali kosomba”, which means “Copper, I am buying”. The young man was in fact strolling the streets, offering people to buy whatever copper-made tool, art, cable, what have you, so he can go resell it at a higher price, on the grey market (it’s not totally a black market, but close).
Like in many countries, including in the US, France and other powers, copper has become quite the hot commodity, due to ever-rising demand, particularly from China. It has led to this type of bargain-roaming, and many other phenomenons. Kinshasa, for instance, is already poorly supplied in electricity, due to the catastrophic power grid, and antiquated distrinbution network. SNEL, the national power company can barely hold the system together, and is gangrened by corruption and greed. And in this context, we have seen the rise of cable thefts, sometimes in complicity with unscrupulous police officers, causing entire neighborhood to be left in the dark for days, months, even years on.
It is ironic really. Congo is one of the locations on earth with the largest and most concentrated copper deposits in the world. In fact, that vast mineral wealth has formed the basis of the much-famed Chinese contracts, by which the Congolese government is essentially bartering its copper for roads and other infrastructures. There is no shortage of copper in the DRC, it just needs to be extracted. Yet we are witnessing the same type of theft and spoliation as in countries where those electric cables are really the only place to find relatively large quantities of copper… why is it that people cannot see further than the tip of their nose?
In any case, I was amazed when I heard that young man screaming, because in a twisted way, that young man has quite unconsciously and inadvertently become an agent of globalization. This young man in Soyth West Kinshasa, trying to find the means to feed his family, has answered the call, the direct demand of a market half way across the globe, that he most likely will never see. It shows, if anything, that globalization has insiduously worked its way so deep inside the banalities of our daily life wherever we are, that it is an inevitable force that we must truly rise to the challenge to reckon with, and fast. This young man is a living example of Africa’s and the DRC’s relationship with the forces of globalization: we are subjected to these forces, flowing aimlessly wherever the big powers’ needs must be met, instead of being agents that wield these forces with a transformative purpose of our own.
I am not blaming the young man. He is doing what he has to do to survive, and his method is smart, under the circumstances. However, I dare say the problem lies with the national decision-makers, who sometimes lack the necessary weltanschauung, and the political will to make decisions that reflect a middle and long-term vision of economic agency, instead of economic dependency. They do not have the excuse the young man can be afforded. These are university graduates with doctorates, masters and special diplomas, who often simply cannot be bothered to come up with an economic program that rationalises the use of scandalously vast natural and human resources to increase prosperity, and start truly delivering on the social and other services the people is entitled to receive from the state, by law.
Now, when I bring up entitlements, many immediately label me an anti-business socialist. Nothing could be further from the truth. If a label is needed, I am a social market economist. I believe business has its role to play, but so does the state, and all should be somewhat accountable to the public, the people. The state has a higher threshold of accountability, and responsibility, as it is supposed to defend and represent the interests of the people it leads. Businesses are accountable to shareholders, but must operate within the confines of the law established by the state, in the name of the people. Only with a rational, win-win, public-private-people triungular partnership, can we, in my opinion, rise to the challenge of developping Africa in general, and the DRC in particular.
The problem now is that, as things stand each element of this potential partnership is acting against it. The private sector – especially foreign companoes – is quite irresponsibly seeking exhorbitant profits on the back of a people that is struggling to survive, bribing whoever is needed not to lose their privileges and their profits. The people is allowing itself to be corrupt by the business people and the elites in the ruling class. And the elite that form the state want to maintain the unheathy staus quo because it allows them to continue reaping the benefits from the continent’s wealth for their own personal gains. A vicious triangle…
In the mean time, the young man is still buying and selling his copper, unaware of his pivotal role in perpetuating the vicious triangle that maintains him in poverty and misery. Maye I ought to stop him the next I see him, and have a conversation with him… Would it make a difference? I am still wondering…
