The New York Times reports
KINSHASA JOURNAL
For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow
Protesters faced off with the police in Kinshasa after the deeply flawed presidential election in November. But the intense mass demonstrations many expected proved difficult to sustain, in part because of the daily struggle to survive.
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Bénédicte, Josiane and Manassé, 3, 6, and 9.
Of course, the small ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any,” said their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month. There will have been a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more.
“At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”
The Berboks are practicing a Kinshasa family ritual almost as common here as corrugated metal roofs and dirt streets: the “power cut,” as residents in this capital of some 10 million have ironically christened it. On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days, all the children eat, and the adults do not. Or vice versa.
Terrible though this is it will get worse far worse soon.
The term “power cut” — in French, délestage — is meant to evoke another unloved routine of city life: the rolling blackouts that hit first one neighborhood, then another.
Délestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe these state-decreed power cutoffs, but when applied to rationing food it illustrates a stark survival calculus, one the head of a household must painfully impose on the rest. And unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness mandated from on high.
That must be heartbreaking. Parents having to decide who gets food and who goes without.
“If today we eat, tomorrow we’ll drink tea,” said Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month; the numbers, Mr. Nsala pointed out, simply do not add up. Are there days when his children do not eat? “Of course!” Mr. Nsala answered, puzzled at the question. “It can be two days a week,” he said.
We worry about kids going to school without breakfast and so we should but we should not be blind to reality that much of the third world lives with.
Though residents here frequently gather on crowded street corners to argue politics, their daily struggle may help explain why the capital did not experience sustained mass demonstrations after disputed election results were announced last month. Sporadic protests and street clashes certainly erupted, but the margin of survival here is simply too slim for most people to demonstrate for very long.
“People in Kinshasa are so poor, they are living hand to mouth,” said Théodore Trefon, a researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. “They simply don’t have the means to mobilize for a long time.”
Beyond that, the government leaves little room for expressions of popular discontent. Human Rights Watch said that Congolese soldiers had killed at least 24 people and detained dozens more after the flawed elections that returned President Joseph Kabila to office.
Kabila feed your people. Or are you yet just another African Crocodile with nothing to offer but more corruption."
" Whatever the city’s misgivings about the vote, daily life itself is enough of a challenge.
“On the weekend, you’ve got to do everything you can to have food because you are at home with the children,” said Mr. Nsala, the administrator. “But there are days, for sure, when we don’t eat. I’ll say, ‘There isn’t enough to eat, so you, maman and the kids, you take it.’ ”
Mr. Nsala, soft-spoken and precise in his diction, stared at the floor of his modest cinder-block, metal-roofed living room. Fuzzy television news played in the background. His wife was selling vegetables out front, to supplement the meager family income. Don’t ask him about meat."
“Maybe, if we make a sacrifice,” he said, pointing out that a pound of beef costs $5.
At the Berbok household — where Ghislaine’s husband, a teacher, earns $42 a month, adding to her salary as a police officer — there has been no fish in a year.
“Délestage. That means: ‘Today we eat. Tomorrow we don’t.’ The Congolese, in the spirit of irony, have adopted this term,” said Mr. Nsala quietly. He added that the family had eaten the day before: “So, today, there is nothing.”
" The food délestage is not new in Congo, a country rich in minerals and verdant landscapes yet also one of the hungriest on earth, according to experts. It is last on the 2011 Global Hunger Index, a measure of malnutrition and child nutrition compiled by theInternational Food Policy Research Institute, and has gotten worse. It was the only country where the food situation dropped from “alarming” to “extremely alarming,” the institute reported this year. Half the country is considered undernourished."
We are watching a crisis develop and I don't think anyone has got any answers. Worse still the world is looking the other way. The Organisation International de la Francophonie meets in Kinshasa this October I hope food security is on the agenda.
Congo is in the most severe category along with Eritrea and Chad.
Ten years ago, even poor Congolese could expect to eat one substantial meal a day — perhaps cassava, a starchy root, with some palm oil, and a little of the imported frozen fish that is a staple here. But in the last three years, even that certainty has dropped away, said Dr. Eric Tollens, an expert on nutrition in Congo at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he is an emeritus professor at the Center for Agricultural and Food Economics.
Ten years ago, even poor Congolese could expect to eat one substantial meal a day — perhaps cassava, a starchy root, with some palm oil, and a little of the imported frozen fish that is a staple here. But in the last three years, even that certainty has dropped away, said Dr. Eric Tollens, an expert on nutrition in Congo at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he is an emeritus professor at the Center for Agricultural and Food Economics.
Dr. Tollens blamed the “total neglect of agriculture by the government,” which is fixated on the lucrative extraction of valuable minerals like copper and cobalt. Less than 1 percent of the Congolese national budget, he said, goes to agriculture. Foreign donors finance “all agricultural projects,” he said, and “massive amounts of food” are imported in this rich land, so food is expensive.
“Agricultural productivity is simply gone,” he said in an interview, adding that there was no reason for a lush, fertile country like Congo to be importing 20,000 tons of beans a year.
“It’s worse than Niger or Somalia,” he said, citing two sub-Saharan nations perennially teetering on the verge of famine. “Come on, come on. With so many resources, what’s happening?”
Half the population eats only once a day, Dr. Tollens wrote in an essay several years ago, while a quarter eats only once every two days."
That still leaves a quarter unaccounted for. I am guessing a small proportion of that quarter eat very well indeed President Kabila might know more about that.
“Before, we ate three times a day; now, we eat by délestage,” said Cele Bunata-Kumba, a tennis coach who lives in the Matongele neighborhood of Kinshasa with his wife and 12 children.
“Today, it’s the children who eat,” he said. “We, the adults, we can sacrifice ourselves. We, the adults, we can get by,” he said, grimacing. “Yes, yes, of course, all day. With nothing to eat. No bread. Sure, that happens,” he added."
In the immediate term, the street-smart Kinois — as Kinshasa’s residents are known — famous for hustling and adept at the art of survival in a harsh environment, must cope. They must feed their children, the top priority, a number of families said.
In the household run by Elisa Luzingu and her sister-in-law Marie Bumba — Ms. Luzingu’s husband is out of work — the children range in age from 7 to 17. Délestage means no meals, three days a week. “My children are studying, so, it is very difficult,” Ms. Luzingu said.
New Zealand statistics show a clear relationship between hunger and performance at school. This is the true meaning of a poverty trap.
On the days without food, Ms. Bumba said, the children “will be very tired and hungry.”
On a recent gray Sunday, at least, “everybody eats,” Ms. Bumba said, standing outdoors in the bare courtyard next to a simmering pot of matembele: sweet potato, palm oil, greens and a little fish. There were smiles all around. The food was almost ready.
“The Kinois,” said Mr. Bunata-Kumba, the tennis coach. “For him, eating is day to day.”
1) To be sure, there were irregularities in the 2011 presidential and legislative elections. But those didn't have any impact on the overall outcome of the presidential election.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it was sociologically and statistically impossible for Kabila to lose his presidential bid as Congolese vote by ethnic group membership, provincial ties, and linguistic affinities.
All the eastern Swahili-speaking provinces voted for Kabila (Katanga, North Kivu and South Kivu, Maniema, and Orientale provinces), including the southwestern province of Bandundu, whose leaders had made prior power-sharing arrangements with the Kabila bloc.
Now, as it turns out, those provinces are the most populous regions of the country.
2) People who claim that Kinshasa oppositionists were at the receiving end of police brutality don't know what they're talking about. I live in Kinshasa and I witnessed during the electoral campaign and after the election results were published the kind of deadly violence opposition mobs could unleash on their political enemies and cops. There were cops and civilians that were "necklaced" by oppositionists.
3) The claim that "he margin of survival here is simply too slim for most people to demonstrate for very long" is preposterous. People didn't demonstrate too long because those demonstrations were without cause--not that they were too weakened by famine! And BTW, those claiming that Kinois are weakling whiners don't know Kinshasa at all. Have they ever heard of the Kulunas, those machete-wielding gangs that raid city squares in broad daylights to seize mobile phones, monies, and jewelry from pedestrians? Recently they chopped off the arm of an overzealous cop--at midday!
4) The "food délestage" in families might be the most enduring urban myth I've ever encountered. And I've spent time in urban centers like Nairobi, Yaoundé, Boston, and Washington (I won't even count the 2 months I spent in Suva, Fiji) that have their share of urban myths too.
I live in one of the most squalid slums of Kinshasa and I've never once seen one single poor family cutting off food to their kids of every other day. And not eating food for a year in a city with a big river running thru it is, well, a lie.
BTW, in calculating the protein intake, do these experts also take into account Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) such as the dried caterpillars on which I dined this evening with rice? Yummy!
5) It's interesting that the anecdotes about tough living in Kinshasa are brought out by civil servants and cops. Those are the most corrupt groups in the Congo. They bribe their way to feed their families and live large. And they racket denizens on a daily basis. A large number of those whiners even own cars. The amount of money a highway patrol officer makes each working day is staggering.
Here's another anecdote: "Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the
Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month."
So why don't this guy and other civil servants in his position resign en masse? Most of the state fees citizens pay for services go into the pockets of these thieves. That's why Dieudonné Nsala hasn't resigned or hasn't been kicked out eons ago by his landlord.
Lastly, a number of years ago (2003 or 2004), the IMF conducted a comprehensive study countrywide. The most significant finding of the study was that in all the 11 provinces, the city-province of Kinshasa was by far the one better off--with only 47% of households living below the poverty.
The rate is still high in comparaison to the rate of the African subregion, but it's not nearly as bad as the 90+% rate in Equateur Province.
One strange finding of the study: households led by men were more likely to be hit by poverty than those led by single moms!
1) CORRECTION:I meant, "not easting FISH for a year..."
ReplyDelete2) There's one variable explaining why the DRC can't meaningfully invest for example in agriculture: the IMF--not to mention the blood minerals wars waged against the Congo.
Under the Mobutu regime, the IMF and the World Bank lent without conditionalities to the Congo. To this day, the DRC is still paying interest services to parts of those debts bought out by rogue investors(though the bulk of the debt was cancelled about a year and a half ago).
Moreover, the World Bank also forced the DRC to liberalize the mining sector, which further saw the influx of international rogue investors who cheated the country of its mining assets and of its tax revenues as those concerns have their companies and bank accounts registered in offshore tax havens. This is the modern-day Wild West, mate!
Just imagine: the budget of this sprawling country is meaningless: $7 billion! How could you possibly invest in education, public health or agriculture with those peanuts?
It's easy to bash Congo by sweeping under the rug the meddling by western powers into its internal affair this country has suffered from day one of its independence: the assassination of its first democratically-elected premier, Patrice Lumumba; the propping up of Mobutu; and the blood minerals wars still being waged against Congo!
Thanks Alex. I can only go on what is reported and I expected the New York Times to be fairly reliable. I still have concerns about the inevitable rise in food prices. The Global Hunger Index an " extremely alarming " rating is not something to be ignored.
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