The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa by Donald Rothchild & Naomi Chazan

Author:Donald Rothchild & Naomi Chazan [Rothchild, Donald & Chazan, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, African Studies, African, Social Science, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781000304947
Google: -kyfDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52321299
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Participation of State Personnel

By the late 1960s, as we have seen, state personnel were fulfilling their needs for the perquisites of office over and above their salaries by smuggling diamonds on a large scale. By the mid-1970s they were further consolidating their class position by increasing their wealth and means for patronage through an enormous expansion of their involvement in other second economy activities. The principal illegal activities to which a position in the state or the army or employment in a large capitalist enterprise provides access are bribery, corruption and embezzlement; smuggling and fraudulent export; and speculation and middleman activity.

Bribery, corruption and embezzlement on an enormous scale are widespread in Zaire and have been described in detail elsewhere.37 A survey of government personnel in Lubumbashi in 1982 reveals the principal ways in which officials regularly supplement their inadequate salaries: corruption, embez-zlement, pay-offs, forgeries of official signatures and seals, sales of false documents of certification, illegal taxation, use of spouses for commerce and other unauthorized practices, overcharging on document fees, usury, second jobs, and cultivation and sale of foodstuffs.38 David Gould documents several more ways: false bills and profit-margin cheating on the allowed rate of profit by business; import, export and excise stamp fraud; distribution of merchandise quotas; postal and judicial fraud; and extortion at military barricades.39 Embezzlement includes direct payroll theft, often by padding payrolls with fictitious names. In addition, position in the state apparatus is used to acquire commodities such as cobalt, gold, diamonds, ivory and coffee for smuggling and fraudulent export. I have given details of the enormous scale of these activities and of the wealth amassed in them elsewhere.40

Newspapers and government reports, as well as hearsay, supply abundant evidence of the expansion of speculation and middleman activity by state personnel from the mid-1970s onward. As one annual report complains:

It is necessary to point out the appearance in commerce of a class of intermediaries, extremely powerful and rapacious, who dangerously restrict the distribution circuits. There are magistrates, directors of the JMPR, managers of the wholesale houses, state functionaries but especially political and administrative officials (sub-regional and zone commissioners). These intermediaries use their power to seize for themselves all the merchandise to the detriment of the real merchants who must content themselves with the crumbs. . . . The complicity between these intermediaries and the managers of the wholesale houses means that the latter become, in the long run, untouchable and uncontrollable. Merchandise is thus sold at triple, quadruple or more than its original price.41

The report deplores the dwindling power of the economic affairs office in the face of the collaboration of higher authorities in these activities.

Government personnel, military officers and others with official position, however, generally try to avoid participating in such activities in their public official capacity. They frequently use intermediaries, have a spouse or relative act as a front for their operations, or use certain words and gestures that in popular usage refer to the second economy, in order to avoid open involvement in defrauding the state.

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