Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga

The theme of ingratitude recurs when Bourgi recalls Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko's plea in 1996 when his armed forces were folding before Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebels and their Ugandan and Rwandan backers for 1 000 men from the Service Action the special forces Foccart had created for France's foreign intelligence service to fly in and neutralise the threat...

' They were brandishing the green and red flags of the former Republic of Zaire ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko until he was ousted in 1997 by Laurent-Désiré Kabila who renamed the country Democratic Republic of Congo (AC Vol 65 No 7 Mobutu-style economic nationalism returns)...

Later the RDF provided most of the military might behind Laurent-Désiré Kabila's 1996-97 insurgency which ousted Zaïre's President Mobutu Sese Seko...

Foreign companies in Congo-Kinshasa are increasingly alarmed at what they see as a wave of economic nationalism that revives the politics of 'Zaïreanisation' under the three-decade kleptocratic rule of Mobutu Sese Seko...

Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege who runs a hospital in the South Kivu capital of Bukavu and is an outspoken critic of the President has also registered apparently hoping to assume the moral mantle of Tshisekedi's father Etienne who for decades opposed first Mobutu Sese Seko and then Kabila's dictatorships...

They see it as an excuse to remove a man who has built influence and power since the days of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (AC Vol 62 No 21 Cover-up in UN murders)...

It is the biggest political scandal in Congo-K since President Mobutu Sese Seko was ousted in 1997 by Kabila's father Laurent-Désiré Kabila...

President Mobutu Sese Seko – and the two Kabilas who followed him as president – saw the Kasaï provinces as a significant political threat...

23 years of mining Congo for profit Dan Gertler has been the subject of growing controversy since he first arrived in Congo-Kinshasa in 1997 just after Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebel forces ended the 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko (AC Vol 38 No 9 Business at war)...

If this allegation against Tshisekedi is true and if true too that the new President has already begun to steal public money that renders Tshisekedi's public stance against corruption an act of cynicism suggesting that the deep system in government of 'Article 15' or 'débrouillez-vous' (sort yourself out) proposed and championed by former President Mobutu Sese Seko and lovingly nurtured by the Kabilas remains alive and well...