ACCORDING to his propagandists, he was the Guide, the Father of the Nation, the Chief, the Helmsman, even the Messiah. But to his people. Mobutu Sese Seko was a crushing despot who exterminated opponents, impoverished the masses and turned Zaire into his personal fiefdom.
This weekend, with rebels advancing on the capital Kinshasa, it looks as if Mobutu has finally played his last hand. Advancing age, prostate cancer and the collapse of his army make a comeback unlikely. Exile awaits him in a palatial villa on the French Riviera, a more comfortable destiny than befell many an African exile.
Mobutu turned a country the size of Western Europe into his personal moneymaking machine. The revenues from vast mineral reserves were siphoned into his personal bank accounts. He was the "king of the kickbacks", scamming huge "cuts" from eager Western firms vying for million pound building contracts.
Academics came up with a new word, kleptocrat, to describe his intrigues. Mobutu didn't invent corruption in Zaire Belgium's King Leopold II used profits from the export of the country's extensive natural resources to build his personal fortune. These were profits extracted under conditions of forced labour that included killing workers and chopping off hands if quotas were not met.
Joseph Conrad, writing at the turn of the century, described the behaviour of the Belgians as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience". But Mobutu, "the Big Man", perfected the art of graft, African style, turning Zaire into a predatory country that fed on its own people.
"Corruption has become the system; it is a system by which the powerful exploit the less powerful, who in turn exploit the powerless," concluded two US academics who have studied Mobutu's Zaire.
Over three decades Mobutu was everywhere. His picture hung in every government office, and many homes. Millions of Zaireans wear clothing made of material that bears his image. He carries a sculpted cane that, according to officially spread rumours, is so heavy that 20 normal men cannot pick it up.
For years the President's dead mother was the subject of a government-inspired Madonna cult. In all presidential press releases, all references to "Him" are capitalised.
He renamed the country. He even renamed himself; the simple Joseph Desire Mobutu was transformed into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku wa za Banga.
According to the official government translation this means: "The all powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake. " But the locals have their own version: "The cock who jumps all the chicks in the farmyard".
Mobutu's fortune is commonly estimated at $5 billion. It includes 11 palaces in Zaire and assorted villas in Europe. In one year he dispatched a government owned DC8 airliner to Venezuela 32 times to pick up 5,000 long haired sheep for his ranch at his ancestral village of Gbadolite.
Gbadolite became a small city with the best water, electrical, telephone and hospital service in Zaire. Versailles in the jungle has luxury guest houses a 100 room hotel, a palace, along with plantations for oil palm, coffee and coconut, groves for orange and grapefruit, and ranches for cattle and those longhaired sheep. At one stage there were daily Boeing 737 connections to Kinshasa from the airport, which can accommodate long haul jets from Europe.
Meanwhile, since independence in 1965, more than 85 per cent of the road network inherited from the Belgians has turned to bush. The river is the only east west highway left.
Amnesty International says Mobutu has starved and tortured thousands, others he has "rusticated" by exiling them to country villages. And to others he awarded massive pay rises. One way or an other, all groups kept their mouths shut.
MOBUTU proved himself a genius at stifling dissent. He constantly moving supporters in and out of top jobs. In the 1970s one foreign minister fell out of favour with "The Guide" and was sentenced to death. Instead, he was subjected to torture, including the application of electrical shocks to his testicles.
A year later Nguza Karl-I-Bond was freed - and Mobutu made him prime minister. Two years on he fled into exile and wrote a book exposing Mobutu's money stealing techniques. Amazingly, Mobutu invited him home, and he went. In 1986 the former dissident was appointed Zaire's ambassador in Washington and later served again as foreign minister.
Mobutu was born in October 1930. He grew up poor. His father, a domestic cook, died when be was eight. His mother, a hotel maid, saw little of him after the age of 10, when he went to mission school.
After being expelled for robbing the school library, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and seven years in the colonial army. There he rose quickly to the rank of sergeant major, the highest rank then available to Zaireans. At 25, he left the army and became a journalist in Kinshasa, where he net worked with Europeans and young nationalists.
In 1959, during a trip to Belgium, he was befriended by the CIA, who saw in the former soldier a resolute defender against the Reds they saw creeping out from under the bed in central Africa. The Congo's first five years were marked by confusion, coups and murder. Ireland sent troops to serve with the UN, and some of these still remember Mobutu as a small, bespectacled figure on army parade stands.
Mobutu returned to the army to become chief of staff and used his military and social networks to good effect. But it was the CIA that helped him to overthrow and murder his chief rival for power, Patrice Lumumba, thereby installing Mobutu as the ruler for life in Africa's second largest country.
The president repaid his US friends by giving the CIA unparalleled access to his country during his 32 year reign. Covert operations against communist guerillas in neighbouring Angola were marshalled from Kinshasa. In return, the US pumped in massive aid to the country, most of which ended up in the Guide's Swiss bank accounts.
This was on top of his cut from Zaire's vast reserves of copper, cobalt, diamonds, tin and zinc. As Mobutu successfully played Cold War politics, the US helped to put down two earlier rebellions and President Reagan called him a "voice of good sense and good will".
Meanwhile, Zaireans got poorer and poorer. Inflation reached 6,000 per cent. Unemployment was 80 per cent. Wages are one tenth of pre independence levels. While the people went hungry, the regime concentrated on big infra structural projects with high kick back potential. Many of the steel mills and hydroelectric projects don't work today, but Mobutu's successors will still be lumbered with an external debt exceeding $13 billion.
The Guide survived so long by greasing the right palms for the minimum time necessary, then shuffling the deck once more. When money was short, he just printed more. In the 1980s, when the World Bank started complaining about corruption, the worst excesses were curbed, but only for long enough to extract another billion dollars from the bank and the IMF.
When a million Hutu refugees streamed across the border with Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, Mobutu spotted another moneymaking opportunity. The international organisations streamed in, throwing copious amounts of money at the problem, some of which ended up in the Big Man's large pockets. His soldiers just looted the refugees of all their possessions.
This last scam was to lead to Mobutu's downfall. His attempt to foment ethnic tensions in eastern Zaire by driving out some of the ethnic Rwandan tribes living there backfired. Laurent Kabila's rebels drove the refugees back to Rwanda and then turned their guns on the Big Man in Kinshasa.
With covert support from Rwanda, Uganda and the US they have pushed forward relentlessly across the vast country. Mobutu fled his capital only days before they are due to arrive there.
