IMAGINE if, to collect your salary each month, you had to walk to the nearest town, perhaps tens of miles away, to congregate in a school or a football pitch or a church. There, you and your colleagues wait for a man to arrive from the capital, perhaps a thousand miles away, with a suitcase of cash. Most of the time, you do not receive as much money as you should. Sometimes the man does not arrive at all.
Until recently, that is how most government employees in the Democratic Republic of Congo were paid. But over the past three years the government has been urging civil servants to open bank accounts, to which their pay can be transferred directly. In the process, it is accelerating the spread of banking in an economy that, according to Michel Losembe, the bow-tied president of the Congolese Banking Association, is “not very far off barter”.
Few countries are as corrupt as Congo. A persistent national joke concerns a mythical “Article 15” of the constitution, which reads “Débrouillez-vous”—“You’re on your own”. Mobutu Sese Seko, a former strongman, used state funds to charter a Concorde to take him on shopping trips to Paris. By the time of his overthrow in 1997, graft was endemic. Government employees were not paid but rather expected to use their positions to make a living.
Civil war engulfed Congo in the 1990s and 2000s. As it...Continue reading
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