RE:RE:RE:DRC: the Moïse Katumbi problemRegarding your other question, I do believe Banro and DRC would be better of with Katumbi:
https://www.ft.com/content/60f59d60-60cb-11e7-91a7-502f7ee26895?mhq5j=e2 Moise Katumbi Add to myFT Is trucking tycoon Mose Katumbi the man to rescue Congo? His feud with the president has left him stuck in exile, but he still says he’s ‘the doctor to treat the sick elephant’ Lunch with the FT Read next Paris fashion sizzles at couture week Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) 9 Save YESTERDAY by: David Pilling © James Ferguson I wanted to meet Mose Katumbi at his palatial home in Lubumbashi where, first as a trucking magnate and then as governor, he lived like a king. According to those who have been there, hordes of supplicants would gather outside to pledge their lives to the multimillionaire businessman they insist turned the Congo’s mineral-rich Katanga province around. Inside, the decor is on an awe-inspiring scale: there are rows of elephant tusks, tall Chinese vases and reams of white leather. One guest reported that even the dogs — Dalmatians — were chosen to match the colours of the football team Katumbi owns, “All Powerful” Mazembe, who play in black and white. Instead of Lubumbashi, however, I have had to settle for the Dorchester in London’s Mayfair — an occasional hide-out since Katumbi fled to Europe in May 2016 after squabbling with his country’s president Joseph Kabila. It’s a long way from the Democratic Republic of Congo where, last time I visited, there was a gun battle outside my hotel when an armed gang robbed a supermarket and was met by the full, unbridled force of what passes for the law. The man opposite me, a cowboy-hat-wearing megastar back home, seems meek to the point of shyness in person. A handsome 52-year-old, with closely cropped hair and aquiline features, he is dressed like a Premier League football manager in an expensive blue jacket and black V-neck T-shirt. There is something of the fox in his demeanour, sweet but slightly cunning. But then you have to be cunning to survive in the realms of Congolese business and politics, where money and power are both the method and the objective. That was certainly the modus operandi of Mobutu Sese Seko, the arch kleptocrat, who, after seizing power in a 1965 coup, ruled his vast country for three decades with a poisonous blend of extravagance, repression and malign neglect. Since Mobutu’s overthrow 20 years ago, Congo has careered from one crisis to another. Only last month, former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan warned that the country’s political impasse could tip it over the edge. Allies turned enemies, Kabila and Katumbi have fallen out over succession plans. Kabila, president for the past 16 years following the assassination of his president-father, was supposed to step down last year but has stayed on by the simple ruse of avoiding elections. His advisers claimed that Congo was too broke to run them and that, besides, the electoral commission had not got around to counting the voters. Both were true. Katumbi is still fuming at Kabila’s refusal to step down. “The president doesn’t have the right to change our constitution, he’s going to kill the country,” he says, prodding a piece of bread into some spicy dip. He is convinced he is the president-in-waiting of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest nation. But this is of little consequence if he can’t set foot on his native soil. Katumbi’s life is a swirl of rumours. He claims there was an attempt to poison him last year when he was injected with an unknown substance. His opponents accuse him of hiring mercenaries to plot a coup. After he fled, he was convicted, in absentia, of selling a property that allegedly did not belong to him, charges he describes as “rubbish”. Still, if he returns, he worries that he’ll be “shot like a snake”. And, he asks, looking at me plaintively, “What is the Congo going to achieve then?” *** Katumbi is quite familiar with the menu and goes straight for the Dover sole. It turns out that he has been coming to the Dorchester for two decades. It’s a quaint tradition of Lunch with the FT that the shabby journalist treats the slick millionaire and I decide to join him in something expensive: the Highland Wagyu sirloin. The female sommelier recommends a glass of Foxglove 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon for me and a 2014 La Crema Chardonnay for him. We clink good-quality glasses. The question of how to govern Congo is hardly new. For more than 20 years, until 1908, it was run as the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. He used the Congolese as virtual slave labour to ransack the country’s fabulous wealth, in those days mainly ivory and rubber. Even after the Belgians turned it into a conventional colony, their goal remained maximum extraction and minimum development. When they left in 1960, there were fewer than 20 university graduates in the whole country. Independence has not been much better. The Congo, though one of the world’s biggest copper producers and home to at least half its cobalt, an ingredient essential for electric car batteries, has become a symbol of African misrule. The size of France, Spain, Germany, Norway, Britain, Greece and Iceland put together, the country was run — or rather, run into the ground — by the infamous Mobutu, even as he built himself a runway in his home village so that he could take shopping trips to Paris from his “Versailles in the Jungle”. Surprisingly, Katumbi thinks Mobutu’s reputation is overdone. “Mobutu was not a bad guy. He had a bad entourage. Look at how he built all the big buildings in Kinshasa. That’s all Mobutu. People forget that.” Perhaps he sees my sceptical face. He backs up. “Anyway, I can’t blame the entourage. We have to blame the president. He’s the number one.” A trolley is wheeled to the table and a liveried waiter sets about deboning the Dover sole. My steak appears, pink and sliced into thin strips. We’ve both ordered fluffy white mashed potato and spinach on the side. I try one slice of the Wagyu and am momentarily transported to Japan. Until it lurched into its most recent crisis, Congo had stabilised a bit. Yet the annual per capita income is still about $800. “The people are in bad shape today because of these bad politicians,” Katumbi says, taking a bite of sole, which looks buttery and wonderful. “They think the country is a cow that you milk but don’t feed.” As one of the country’s richest businessmen, Katumbi sees himself as the provider of the milk. He says he wants to run Congo like an efficient business. Far from denigrating the international mining companies, which critics see as co-exploiters of Congo’s people, Katumbi wants more of them. “Those mining companies pay tax in Congo, billions of dollars, and the government never talks about those billions. Where is this mining money going? That is the big question.” He never wanted to be president, he says — quite a statement for someone who appears to have hankered after the position for several years. “Now it’s my job. I can’t let Congo be miserable every day,” he says, taking a sip of wine and moving into his save-the-nation stump speech. “When Congo is happy, all of Africa is going to be happy and people will stop crossing the sea to Europe.” Fine words, but it’s less clear how Katumbi can apply the lessons from running a logistics business or even Congo’s most cash-flush province to leading an unruly, militia-riddled and impoverished nation of 80m people. *** His own story starts with his father, a Sephardic Jew from Rhodes. “My grandfather and my grandmother died in the concentration camp in Poland. My auntie, she’s 94 now, still has the number,” he says, holding out his arm to suggest a tattooed mark. In 1938, when the Nazis arrived in Rhodes to round up Jews, “My grandfather told my father, ‘You are a man. Run.’” He recommended Congo, as a faraway country where there was an established Jewish community. Katumbi’s father fled with his two sisters, pitching up in Congo aged 19. “My father landed with I think $10 in his pocket,” he says, making sure I imbibe the family lore with my darkly smooth red, which is going down a treat. His father, who married the daughter of a local chief, started trading fish, which he brought from the Luapula River, a section of the mighty Congo on the Zambian border. Katumbi, born in 1964, was one of 10 children. Which number were you, I ask? “I think fifth,” he replies, as if the order is yet to be finalised. He grew up speaking Bemba, Swahili and French. He speaks a national language, Lingala, less well, a fact that dents his credentials as a national saviour. As a kid, he swam in the local river with the other children who, unlike him, did not have cooks and servants at home. When Katumbi was seven, his father went to Israel for cancer treatment. He never came back. After he left, the business was run by Katumbi’s brother, Raphael, older by 20 years. The firm expanded, trucking minerals, leather and other goods, and becoming the monopoly supplier of miners’ rations to Gcamines, the state mining company. With increasing money behind him, Raphael also revived the fortunes of TP Mazembe, a football team founded by Benedictine monks. He was president of the club — whose crest depicts a crocodile with a ball clamped between its teeth — for more than 20 years, a position eventually inherited by Mose. Since the younger brother took over, they have won the African Champions League several times, becoming one of the most successful teams in the continent’s history, and providing Katumbi with a political launch pad. The Grill at the Dorchester 53 Park Lane, London W1K 1QA Dover sole £49 Highland Wagyu sirloin £40 Spinach x 2 £12 Potato puree x 2 £12 Decanter of water £7 Glass La Crema 2014 Chardonnay £20 Glass Foxglove 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon x 2 £30 Cheese £11 Sorbet £13 Mint tea £6 Filter coffee £6 Total (inc service)£231.75 Katumbi started learning the family business at an early age. He would accompany his father on long journeys by truck over Congo’s bone-jolting roads, picking up supplies of fish and beer. After a year as a parliamentary deputy, in 2007 he became governor of Katanga, the restive province that bankrolls the Congolese state and whose push for independence provoked the country’s first post-independence crisis. The essence of Katumbi’s tale of his Katanga governorship is that he fixed a province where, when he took over, corruption was rife and tax-collection and public spending rock bottom. “People were eating once every two days. I left them eating three times a day,” he says, rattling off a litany of data from the length of roads built to the number of school places created. “A businessman wants results and I wanted results.” Katumbi has leveraged his success as businessman, governor and football impresario to build nationwide support in a country so huge and fractured there has never been an opposition leader with truly national appeal. A rare opinion poll last October from the New York-based Congo Research Group showed that, if elections were to take place, 33 per cent would vote for Katumbi against just 7.8 per cent for Kabila. Katumbi’s supporters argue that his popularity makes him perhaps the only politician capable of bringing the constitutional crisis to resolution, though detractors say the fortune he amassed in business is a cause of suspicion not credibility. Besides, hadn’t he been a close ally of Kabila until recently, I ask. “Listen, he was a good president until December 19,” Katumbi says, referring to the date last year when Kabila was constitutionally obliged to step down. But Congo is in a terrible state, I say, pointing to the lack of infrastructure, grinding poverty, renewed violence and almost total absence of a functioning state. How can he defend Kabila’s record? We’re both working steadily through our main course. So delicious is the steak, I’m mentally rationing every slice, separating each bite with helpings of creamy potato and spinach. Katumbi seems to be savouring his food, too. Hasn’t Kabila outmanoeuvred him, I press. After all, the president is still playing video games in Kinshasa while Katumbi is marooned in exile. And the only other credible opposition leader, Etienne Tshisekedi, is in an even worse state: he died in February. A deal made by Catholic bishops to squeeze Kabila out of office has collapsed. Katumbi wants to return in triumph. But that would be to invite arrest or worse. You can’t go back, I persist. You said yourself you’ll be shot like a snake. “I’m arriving at that. I’m arriving at that,” he smiles, chewing his food. “I’m arriving at that.” And then without prompting, “I’ve never killed anyone.” A low bar for a presidential aspirant, I think, but a good start. “I’ve never stolen from anyone. I’ll go back a free man.” We pause to order dessert. I go for a selection of cheese with black coffee. He asks for sorbet and fresh mint tea. He picks lemon and passion fruit from a selection of six flavours, which is six more than Congo has had peaceful transitions of power. Why should this time be different? Elections will be held and he’ll go back to fight them, he responds. Will you fly back in your personal plane? “Yes. In the daytime.” What kind of plane is it? “It’s a Gulfstream IV. I’ve sold it.” So how will you fly back in it? “I will charter a plane,” he says, adding that he wouldn’t endanger fellow passengers by landing in a commercial jet. “If they want to shoot, they shoot me on my own.” Will Kabila finally get the message and step down, I ask? Or hang on for grim life? “I think he’s going to go. His chance of leaving a legacy is getting smaller and smaller,” he says, as though this has been the guiding principle of Congolese presidents. “He now has a small window to say bye-bye. If he thinks the people like him,” he says, alluding to popular rage against the increasingly elusive leader, “let him go and walk the streets of Kinshasa alone.” Congo should be the powerhouse of Africa. In energy alone, it could light up much of the continent if it dammed only part of the thunderous Congo River. “Congo is like a dead elephant, because there’s nothing going on. And an elephant with no life, what can it do? Rot,” says Katumbi, answering his own slightly surreal question. “That’s why I’m coming as a doctor. A doctor to treat the Congo, a doctor to treat the sick elephant.” For the moment, though, he is stuck in the Dorchester hotel, eating passion fruit sorbet and sipping fresh mint tea. David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor Illustration by James Ferguson