Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga

Some recall the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's imposition of 'authenticité' on the people of the country he named Zaïre...

Weariest of all are Congo's 45 million people who have faced a more or less continuous conflict since the Banyamulenge rebellion against the late President Mobutu Sese Seko started in Kivu-Sud Province in October 1996...

Since taking power in May 1997 he has replicated most of Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorial and manipulative political techniques and detained the country's most popular political leaders...

Two years later the Kigali-Kampala alliance went to war again firstly to clear those guilty of genocide and their associates from the United Nations-run refugee camps in eastern-Zaïre and then to oust in alliance with Angola President Mobutu Sese Seko's tottering regime...

What made Hassan different from Africa's other absolutists (such as his pupils and friends former Zaïre's Mobutu Sese Seko and Togo's Gnassingbé Eyadéma) was his enduring ability to manage change and make himself useful to countries more powerful than his own...

In the north-west Jean-Pierre Bemba's Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) claimed on 5 July to have captured Gbadolité the former headquarters of the late President Mobutu Sese Seko...

In Mbuji-Mayi the capital of Western Kasaï and of small-scale diamond mining the new Congolese franc notes are not accepted: people still use the old Zaïre notes from Mobutu Sese Seko’s time (AC Vol 39 No 23)...

Also in the scrum to lobby for Bongo was Jean-Marie Coulbary a Senegalese confidant of the late Mobutu Sese Seko...

The next sign of unwillingness to negotiate came on 10 March when the Minister of Justice Mwenze Nkongolo confirmed in his office just five days earlier called for progress in prosecuting former high officials of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime whom he accused of economic and political crimes...

Miners were recruited from Zaïre under an agreement with the late President Mobutu Sese Seko...

In October 1996 after repeated requests to the UN to disband the camps Rwandan and Ugandan troops stormed across the border to do the job themselves – just as Zaïre’s own rebellion against the rule of the dying Mobutu Sese Seko was gathering steam...