The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. Tom Burgis
year when his phone rang. ‘Hello, may I speak with Katumba?’ said the voice on the line.
‘Yes, this is he.’
‘This is Kabila.’
Katumba had a friend with the same name and asked him what he wanted.
‘No,’ said the voice. ‘This is Laurent-Désiré Kabila.’15
The president, a fellow Katangan, told Katumba he wanted to meet him. A few weeks later Katumba stood before the corpulent guerrilla at the presidential palace. Following some brisk questioning about the young man’s background, the president said, ‘I want to name you governor of Katanga.’ According to his memoir, a stunned Katumba protested that he was utterly unqualified for what was one of the most influential positions in Congolese politics. But he could hardly refuse. The appointment was made public that evening. ‘Katanga is as big as France,’ Mawapanga, the finance minister, told his protégé. ‘If you can manage that, the sky’s the limit.’ He might have added that Katumba was being handed the keys to one of the world’s greatest vaults of minerals.
Kabila’s rebels-turned-rulers needed to generate money from Congo’s dilapidated mining industry for the twin purposes of resisting an invasion by their erstwhile Rwandan backers and making sure that they used what might prove a brief stint in power to bolster their personal finances. Oscar Mudiay, a senior civil servant in Kabila’s government, told me that the president received a minimum of $4 million each week delivered in suitcases by state-owned and private mining companies.16 Kabila’s government soon signed a flurry of mining and oil deals, with scant regard for due process. The regional coalition that had swept him to power had split into pro-Kabila and pro-Rwanda alliances, and Kabila needed to keep his foreign allies, principally Zimbabwe and Angola, sweet. One beneficiary of the deal-making was Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company controlled by the Futungo, with which the Congolese state formed a partnership.17 As governor of Katanga province, Katumba was perfectly placed to build his influence over the mining industry. ‘He was more intelligent than the others and got close to Gécamines,’ Oscar Mudiay recalled.
As he built a base for himself in Congo’s mining heartland, Katumba became a member of Kabila’s inner circle. He befriended the president’s son while they travelled together on sensitive diplomatic missions. Monosyllabic and withdrawn, Joseph Kabila had been thrown into the military when his father became the figurehead of the rebellion against Mobutu. He was prematurely promoted to general and, in name at least, appointed head of the army. In December 2000 Rwandan troops and anti-Kabila forces routed the Congolese army and its foreign allies at Pweto, Katumba’s hometown in Katanga. The Rwandans seized a valuable cache of arms, but there was another prize within their reach: Joseph Kabila was on the battlefield. As the Congolese army melted into frantic retreat and the high command took to its heels, Katumba received a call from the president: ‘Kiddo, find Joseph, my son.’18
Katumba raced to reach Joseph by phone and discovered he was alive and still free. Such were the straits of the government campaign that Katumba, according to his memoir, personally had to find fuel and take it to the airport for a plane to evacuate the president’s son.19 This was the moment that formed an unbreakable bond between Katumba and the younger Kabila.
Four weeks later one of Laurent Kabila’s bodyguards, an easterner who had been among the cohort of child soldiers in Kabila’s rebel army, approached the president and shot him three times at close range, for reasons that have been the subject of competing conspiracy theories ever since. In disarray, his senior officials decided to create a dynasty on the spot and summoned Joseph to Kinshasa to inherit the presidency. Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, the former finance minister who had brought Katumba back to Congo, was involved in the tense efforts to hold the government together after the assassination. ‘Joseph was a general – he did not know politics,’ Mawapanga told me. ‘So he called Katumba to come back and be his right-hand man and show him how to navigate the political waters.’
In four years Katumba had gone from a junior post in a Johannesburg bank to the side of Congo’s new president. He was appointed minister of the presidency and state portfolio, in charge of state-owned companies. In 2002 UN investigators appointed to study the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources named him as one of the key figures in an ‘elite network’ of Congolese and Zimbabwean officials, foreign businessmen and organized criminals who were orchestrating the plunder of Congolese minerals under cover of war.20 ‘This network has transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state mining sector to private companies under its control in the past three years with no compensation or benefit for the state treasury of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ the UN team wrote.
When the UN investigators recommended Katumba be placed under UN sanctions, he was shuffled out of his official post in Kabila’s government – and moved into the shadow state. He became the leading exponent of a system that Africa Confidential, the most comprehensive publication in English on the continent’s affairs, encapsulated: ‘Exercising power, from the late President Mobutu Sese Seko to the Kabila dynasty, has relied on access to secret untraceable funds to reward supporters, buy elections and run vast patronage networks. This parallel state coexists with formal structures and their nominal commitment to transparency and the rule of law.’21
I have heard people compare Katumba to Rasputin, Karl Rove and the grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire. Diplomats rarely met him. In photographs his eyes look penetrating, his face set in a permanent semifrown of calculation. One foreigner who found himself in the same room as Katumba described an impressive man, shrewd and gentlemanly, with a fondness for his own jokes. ‘He never spoke much,’ said Oscar Mudiay, the official who served under Laurent Kabila. ‘Just a glance.’
Katumba was like an elder brother to the young president. ‘Joseph Kabila put his total faith in Katumba,’ Olivier Kamitatu, an opposition politician who served for five years as planning minister in Kabila’s government, told me.22 ‘He was hugely intelligent. He knew how to run the political networks and the business networks. The state today is the property of certain individuals. Katumba’s work was to create a parallel state.’
On 15 October 2004, the residents of the Katangan mining town of Kilwa discovered what it meant to fall foul of Katumba’s looting machine. The previous day Alain Kazadi Makalayi, a twenty-year-old fisherman with delusions of grandeur, had arrived in Kilwa at the head of half a dozen ramshackle separatists and proclaimed the independence of Katanga.23 His call to arms attracted fewer than a hundred young followers. Realizing that a rebellion that could not even organize a radio broadcast was unlikely to last long and that the national army could not be far off, most of Kilwa’s inhabitants ran away.
The separatists posed a negligible threat, but they had dared to challenge the interests of the shadow state. Dikulushi, the copper mine that lay 50 kilometres outside the town, was linked to Katumba.
Anvil Mining, a small Australian outfit, had won the rights to mine the area in 1998 and began producing copper in 2002. According to a subsequent inquiry by the Congolese Parliament, the company was granted a twenty-year exemption from paying any taxes whatsoever.24 Katumba was a founding board member of Anvil’s local subsidiary, and his name appeared on the minutes of three board meetings between 2001 and 2004.25 Bill Turner, Anvil’s chief executive, denied that Katumba held any shares in the company; he said Katumba sat on the board as the government’s representative. But Turner admitted to a reporter from Australia’s ABC television that, as well as a few thousand dollars in director’s fees, the company paid some $50,000 a year to rent a compound Katumba owned in Lubumbashi, Katanga’s capital, for its headquarters.
After the young separatist convened a public meeting in Kilwa’s marketplace to proclaim his rebellion and declare that the days of Joseph Kabila and Katumba ‘pocketing money from the mines’ were over, the president ordered the regional military commander to retake the town within forty-eight hours.26 Troops had orders to ‘shoot anything that moved’, according to a UN inquiry into what followed.27
The soldiers arrived on Anvil Mining’s aircraft and made use of the company’s vehicles. They encountered