1. MWASI'S ELECTRICITY WOES:
Mwasi's Electricity Woesenvoyé par aengw. - Plus de trucs et astuces en vidéo.
I caught this Mwasi (again, Lingala for woman) literally fighting to start her small particularly stubborn Japanese-made Elemax Fujisawa gasoline generator. With the rolling electricity blackouts throughout Kinshasa communes, mechanics and electricity are now among routine housewifely chores.
This particular Mwasi is an IDP from Kisangani where she’d worked as a professor of clothing design/sewing as well as the Director of the Mama Mobutu Center for 18 long years, before fleeing to Kinshasa via Kigali and Nairobi shortly after the massacres carried out there by Laurent Nkunda in June 2002. (Mama Mobutu Foundation was set up by Mobutu who named it after his deceased first wife, Marie-Antoinette. It had orphanages and vocational schools for underprivileged girls. It was attached to the Ministry of Social Affairs.)
While in Nairobi, where I was at the time of her arrival, Mwasi was told by other Congolese women she encountered to stay there and seek a refugee status. But Mwasi has an unquenchable love for her country and decided to return home by way of Kinshasa. (BTW, I know this matriarch so well because she also happens to be the mother of all my children, save Elikia, whose mom is American.) In contrast, our daughter chose to take advantage of the UNHCR relocation program in Nairobi and hails today from the boonies of the boondocks called the Ukraine!
Upon arriving in Kin, she bought a tiny house in the Commune of Selembao—again, the boonies within the boondocks of the Congolese capital.
Mwasi attempted to be reassigned at the headquarters of the Marie-Antoinette Foundation, an organization currently in limbo. To no avail… “Come back tomorrow,” that was the answer she got every time she’d up at the headquarters in the Commune of Limete, till she realized they wanted to tell her in so many words that she better think for career change. (The Foundation dropped the name of Mobutu from its official designation to avoid antagonizing the new regime. Apparently, this didn’t help them much as the organization has floundered.)
After being turned down, Mwasi launched a small clothing shop. But it turns out that she might have made a very bad investment by buying that house and opening up that clothing business. The kind of clothing she offers is made of expensive fabric that sells around $15 apiece whereas people can get well-made and hard-wearing second-hand clothes imported from the U.S. for $5 apiece! Additionally, the Commune of Selembao is among the hardest hit neighborhoods by blackouts. What’s more, when electricity gets to her house, the voltage is so low that her powerful electric sewing and embroidery machines can’t work.
To make things worse, for the past 3 weeks, the electricity that used to get to her house every 2 days has been cut off by a gang who have decided 1) to plunge a whole section of the neighborhood into the dark so as to maximize the voltage in their own section of the neighborhood (mode 1) and 2) to ransom those thus deprived of electricity (mode 2). These young men went from mode 1 to mode 2 when they realized the desperation of their neighbors.
Mwasi is now the de facto treasurer of the war chest of the neighborhood lords—she’s collecting $5 (the US dollar is now the default currency of the DRC, all the banks allowing their customers to open accounts in USD) or the equivalent in Congolese Franc per household “to buy a new 30-m cable” that would supposedly assure a better connection between the neighborhood cabin and the relay box, interred at the depth of less than 15 cm in the sand of the curb near Mwasi’s house! The money collected has to be given to these guys who’ve turned themselves into SNEL, the national electricity company.
I asked Mwasi why she wouldn’t just report this con on public service in broad daylight to SNEL offices and to the authorities—the neighborhood police precinct for instance.
She looked me up and down as if I were an alien from deep space or an impostor bent on playing for the gallery the part of the naïve and out-of-touch American (Kinois from the diaspora are adept at playing such games when they go back home) and told me: “If you don’t have eyes to see, you better grow a pair very soon. Where do you think we are, America? SNEL has declined its responsibilities in this neighborhood for quite some time now. SNEL doesn’t even bother to send us bills anymore. Young guys in neglected neighborhoods of Kin like ours are now the SNEL. You cross them, and welcome darkness!”
When Mzee Kabila deposed Mobutu, he ordered the creation of neighborhood “proximity” police “precincts” to combat urban insecurity. They are housed in containers painted in national colors (blue, yellow and red) and their role today is mostly confined to serving as parking areas for motorists of the vicinity (one vehicle fetches around $1 to $5 a night, depending on neighborhoods) and to resolving small-scale neighborhood conflicts or petty crimes. They’re understaffed, and lack communication equipment and adequate weapons.
But the lack of teeth of the local police isn’t why Mwasi turned down my suggestion of notifying the neighborhood police container.
She has far serious reasons for playing by the rule set by neighborhood lords: their families could be a nest of sorcerers who would come down hard on her household with all the evil spells they got in their malefic arsenal! I dare you to laugh when this Mwasi is making her point…
2) The Balubas launched “motos-taxis” in Kin:
(Photo: Alex Engwete)
One day, a friend (on the back of the motorcycle-taxi in the photo above) accompanied me to go see another childhood friend in the Kingabwa-TP neighborhood of the Commune of Limete. The outskirts of Kingabwa-TP were set up on the marshes of northern Kinshasa by the Congo River without much urban planning to speak of. Some of these Kingabwa neighborhoods, like where my friend’s house is located, have no suitable roads for vehicles. We had to either walk for about 3 km to get to my friend’s house from the taxis-bus terminus or hop on one of the ubiquitous “moto-taxis,” a means of transportation that didn’t exist 4 years ago when I was last in Kin.
This phenomenon of “motos-taxis” has been baffling me even since I got here. Of course, there were massive traffic jams caused by road constructions by the Chinese, but traffic jams have always been part of the urban landscape of Kin where avoidable huge gridlocks occur instantly due to drivers’ stubbornness and lack of cooperation. But why “motos-taxis” and why now in Kinshasa? Is Kin, which prides herself of being the country’s trend-setter, now emulating the provinces? This was very intriguing to me. And I got the answer to my interrogation that day…
I also forgot to mention that Kingabwa-TP ranks among the toughest neighborhoods of Kinshasa where you could get mugged for the sheer pleasure of muggers, robbed of your money, shoes and clothes or, worse, get killed. Last year, Christophe, another childhood friend, got killed right at the bus station of Kingabwa-TP as he sat in a taxi between two bandits who didn’t appreciate the fact that he was penniless. One of them seized his balls and crushed them, before tossing the dead man out of the taxi.
B.B. told me yet another tale of Kingawba-TP. A woman bandit would come up to you out of nowhere, hug you and scream something that would go like: “Oh, Richard, my love, why this long absence? Why this long silence? I call you and you don’t even bother to pick up the phone?” As if on cue, three or four muggers would show up, and one of them would pretend to catch you red-handed in the act of adultery with his beloved wife! Then the robbery would start, with passersby jeering you for wooing another man’s wife “just because you have money!”
That’s why I chose this friend (unbeknown to him) to accompany me (he works in the security sector and is a muscle man). And that’s why I also felt confident enough to get my camera out and snap the photo above from the backseat of a moving bike.
My biker-cabbie was Hilaire, a Ngbandi like Mobutu. At one point during the perilous ride on slippery sandy roads, I asked Hilaire about the phenomenon of “motos-taxis” that didn’t exist in Kin till very recently.
“It’s the Balubas that started the whole thing,” Hilaire said. “Last year, during the economic downturn, diamond prices fell sharply. The Balubas were biting their nails in disbelief and despair. They impoverished diamond traffickers flocked to Kin where it them: they could bring their bikes from Mbuji-Mayi and make money this way!”
Since then, many more people from other ethnic groups have followed suit, though Baluba entrepreneurs have achieved some kind of monopoly on this new untaxable activity of the informal sector—and pardon my redundancy! The “Ndingaris,” as all West-Africans are called in Kin, have also benefited from the unexpected windfall of the “motos-taxis”. Not so long ago, Hilaire tells me, the Ndingari used to sell motorcycles imported from Dubai for $450. Now the price of a motorcycle has shot up to $850!...
