With His Family’s Fortune at Stake, President Kabila Digs In
Joseph Kabila and his relatives have built a network of businesses that reaches into every corner of Congo’s economy. Is that why he won’t step down?
In his only public speech this year, Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was defiant about his refusal to hand over power when his final term ends on Dec. 19. “I cannot allow the republic to be taken hostage by a fringe of the political class,” he told parliament last month as members cheered.
His presidency had brought peace and economic growth to Congo, the 45-year-old said, outlining reforms he’d made in telecommunications, mining, energy and banking. What he didn’t say is how some of his own family members are among the biggest beneficiaries of those changes—including his sister Jaynet and brother Zoe, who both listened from the front row as elected members of parliament.
Together the Kabilas have built a network of businesses that reaches into every corner of Congo’s economy and has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the family, a Bloomberg News investigation has found. The sprawling network may help explain why the president is ignoring pleas by the U.S., the European Union and a majority of the Congolese people to hand over power next week, though his advisers dispute this.
Kabila at parliament for his only public speech of the year on Nov. 15, 2016, in Kinshasa.
Photographer: Junior D. Kannah/AFP via Getty Images
Kabila’s refusal to step down threatens to thrust his country back into the kind of chaos that cost millions of lives after his father took power nearly two decades ago. It could also destroy the tenuous stability that attracted international investment—mainly from mining giants like Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and Glencore Plc—and turned Congo into Africa’s biggest producer of copper, tin and cobalt.
In February, S&P Global Ratings lowered Congo’s investment outlook to negative amid rising political tensions. It affirmed that view in August. The last civil war destroyed the country’s copper industry, cutting production more than 96 percent by the time the conflict ended in 2003.
Since then, foreign investment has helped generate more than 100,000 jobs in mining and oil alone, tripled the size of the economy—and allowed the family’s empire to flourish. Over that period, Kabila and his siblings have assembled an international business network stretching across at least 70 companies, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of thousands of company documents and court filings as well as dozens of interviews with bankers, businessmen, miners, farmers and former government officials.
While Congolese law doesn’t prohibit politicians or their families from having business interests, the scope of that empire has only recently become visible, in publicly available corporate and government records that Congolese regulators have computerized and made searchable in just the past few years. Bloomberg News, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, traced the Kabilas’ interests by amassing an archive of hundreds of thousands of pages of corporate documents that shows his wife, two children and eight of his siblings control more than 120 permits to dig gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt and other minerals.
Two of the family’s businesses alone own diamond permits that stretch more than 450 miles across Congo’s southwestern border with Angola. Family members also have stakes in banks, farms, fuel distributors, airline operators, a road builder, hotels, a pharmaceutical supplier, travel agencies, boutiques and nightclubs. Another venture even tried to launch a rat into space on a rocket.
In Congo’s largely informal, cash-based economy where the family stakes are almost all in privately held companies, the exact value of the businesses isn’t known. The few figures available in publicly accessible documents show investments worth more than $30 million in just two companies. Estimated revenue for another company exceeds $350 million over four years—in a country where World Bank data show that nearly two-thirds of the 77 million people live on less than $1.90 per day.
While some of the businesses are owned directly, the family also has dozens of joint ventures and shell corporations through which it holds stakes to varying degrees in all manner of industries. That creates a system so pervasive that even seemingly innocuous payments—such as rent paid by the UN for a police station—end up finding their way to the Kabila family, an analysis of the network shows. It can be a ham-handed operation: Perhaps in its eagerness to tap the country’s resource wealth, the family has sometimes driven away outside investment that would have made some of its members even more money.
Government spokesman Lambert Mende said he couldn’t comment on issues concerning the president's family, which he considered a private matter. When asked how Bloomberg News could direct questions to Kabila, he said the president does not talk to Western media. Theodore Mugalu, who handles the family’s personal affairs, didn't respond to a series of phone calls and text messages requesting comment.
Kabila’s second term as president ends on Dec. 19, and the constitution bars him from running again. But the country’s electoral commission has delayed elections until at least April 2018, and a constitutional court that Kabila created last year has ruled he should stay on until a vote is held.
Publicly, Kabila says the delay has nothing to do with him and that an election will be called once voter-registration rolls are complete. Privately, he tells associates he’s staying put, says Francis Kalombo, one of his closest allies until he broke ranks last year. “He’s not going to do all that he’s doing, make all this effort, for one more year,” Kalombo said. “For him, it’s for life.”
Kabila’s chief diplomatic adviser, Barnabe Kikaya Bin Karubi, called the accusation false. “To say that he wants to stay in power because he wants to protect all these business deals, I think, is not proper,” Kikaya said in an interview in Paris. “He has said time and again what he wants to leave as a legacy to the Congo: a democratic process.”
Kikaya, who said he couldn’t comment on behalf of the president about his family’s affairs, nevertheless defended their right to conduct business. “The Congo is their country—they have to live, they have to have an income,” he said. “Whether their position as the first family makes things easy for them I think is normal. It’s normal, provided no laws are broken.”
For most Congolese, the economy isn’t booming anymore. The government has had to revise down its growth forecast three times this year due to weak commodity prices. It’s now at 4.3 percent from an initial goal of 9 percent in the 2016 budget.
In September, Kabila’s security forces shot, hacked and burned pro-democracy protesters in Kinshasa, the capital, killing more than 40, a UN investigation into the events found. They poured gasoline onto the headquarters of the main opposition party, set it alight and threw fleeing civilians into the flames, the UN said.
On Dec. 12, the U.S. sanctioned Congo’s interior minister and its national intelligence agency administrator, saying that the Congolese government was undermining democratic processes and putting the long-term stability and prosperity of the country at risk. On the same day, the European Union imposed sanctions on seven police and military officials for their role in September’s violence and for “allegedly trying to obstruct a peaceful and consensual solution to the crisis in the DRC.”
Further violence and unrest could spill over Congo’s nine borders, drawing in neighboring countries as it did in wars between 1996 and 2003. And it would squander the $40 billion that international donors, led by the U.S., have spent in Congo in the last 16 years, mostly on a UN mission, humanitarian and development assistance, and debt relief.
“We’re heading for a big, slow-motion crisis,” said Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of the International Crisis Group think tank, who knows Kabila from his eight years as the UN’s head of peacekeeping. “Why is he refusing to go? For the sake of power? To protect the family business? Probably a bit of both.”
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-15/with-his-family-fortune-at-stake-congo-president-kabila-digs-in