Faithful Turncoats Series

The country once called Zaire is gone. It’s hard to believe how fast it happened, isn’t it? The suffering has been terrible, but 7 months is an incredibly short time for a civil war to begin, run its course, and end, especially a country the size of Zaire. I mean, the Republic of Congo. It’s as big as all of Europe! And everybody - all of us international affairs junkies - were afraid of a massacre when the rebel troops entered Kinshasa; after all, look what happened in Monrovia during the Liberian civil war. But this was so astonishing, I almost want to say miraculous. We’ve certainly prayed hard enough for peace there. When Kabila’s soldiers entered the city the government troops, by and large, simply handed over their weapons. The TV cameras showed huge piles of surrendered rifles on the streets. It’s been about two weeks now, since Kabila took over the country, and it’s simply remarkable how smoothly it all went.

What happened? Why were people so willing to let the rebel forces just walk in and take over? They weren’t from any local tribe, they had no local backing, hadn’t even made any promises of anything except change.

Well, when people are desperate enough, almost any change will do. And Mobutu had looted the country for decades. In the 32 years since he took over, he reduced what had been one of the most prosperous countries in Africa to an economic basket case. It’s estimated that he got away with about $3 billion over the three decades. And not even the troops had any reason to be loyal. Most of them hadn’t been paid for months. They’d been living off of a combination of moonlighting and extortion; their only hope of survival was to transfer allegiance as quickly as possible to the new regime. And the bureaucrats were just as eager to change sides. The ones I heard being interviewed were hoping that they’d get jobs similar to their old ones as soon as the new government started taking shape. “They’ll need people with our skills,” they said, “it just makes sense for them to keep people in the jobs they’re good at.”

The interviewer noted that these were the same people who had helped Mobutu stay in power, who aided and abetted his plundering of the country. The viewers were left to their own conclusions. I’d say chances are at best fifty-fifty that either the police or the bureaucrats will behave any better under Kabila than they did under Mobutu. Probably less. And you may think I’m cynical, and you may be right. But I know how hard it is to change, even when you want to.

And I suspect that many of the people who are so eager to swear allegiance to their new rulers have no particular desire to change their life-style, they just want to be paid on time. But they probably expect to go on acting just the way they always did.

And that may be what happens. It may be that the new government will be just like the old one but with a new name and a new flag and a different set of slogans. We just don’t know enough about Kabila yet. He may tolerate corruption, overlook police brutality, practice nepotism, and buy villas in the south of France. But he may not. He may demand a higher standard of behavior. And he may enforce it. And the smart ones will watch, and take their cues, and shape up.

As the old saying has it, an honest politician is one who stays bought.

And if any of the expectations of those who were tossing their hats in the air with joy over Mobutu’s ouster are to come true, all of these changed allegiances will have to amount to more than just words. It’ll have to go deeper than that.

Allegiance is an old-fashioned kind of concept. People don’t talk about it much these days, it’s kind of gone out of style, along with words like duty and honour. It has to do, more than anything else, with whom you obey (that’s another word that’s out of fashion). And it’s the kind of thing that you generally don’t think about unless either you - or your circumstances - get shaken up.

There are a lot of different reasons why people might identify themselves as Christians. There was a time when church-going was pretty much automatic. Some people call themselves Christians just because they aren’t Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist, or because their parents took them to Sunday School when they were little. Some people use the word “Christian” as a synonym for “good person.” But it’s not as simple as that. It’s not even a matter of saying a prayer or two and showing up at church for an hour every week. It’s not about words, or about ceremonies. It’s a matter of allegiance. It’s a matter of obedience.