Chapter Eleven
After multiple draughts, however, even the tonic provided by my two kinds of love no longer satisfied. One reason was that I grew tired of listening to complaints. From Isa: “Festy, dear!” (Isa was a deep-dyed vulgarian.) “When are you going to buy me my own car? I’m tired of being driven around in those awful ‘official’ vehicles. They look like hearses, and they are red flags for the beggars.”
And from the fathers of my young paramours: “Excellency, we are overjoyed by the honor you have bestowed upon our daughter. But, Excellency, she has now reached an age when we must begin to think of a marriage for her.” At that point, of course, the bite would arrive. One particularly importunate father had the nerve to suggest that I use my authority to help him wrest a disputed plot of land from a hated neighbor. Did these people think that a Head of State had nothing better to do than to waste his time with their petty grievances?
Other things, too, were happening in my life, most of them, bad. In 1995, the aforementioned plot of Andrew Ennyange took place, which I blamed for my father’s death, and which rendered his son a 58-year-old orphan (my mom having passed in 1977). How I wish I could have got my hands on this M. Ennyange! I would have taught the traitor a few things about “crunching” (bones, not numbers). But all that Mike Horvat could discover was that the scoundrel had fled to (where else?) Nairobi, where he found sanctuary with that businessman who organized and financed so many of the insurrections that have plagued our region.
For thirteen more years, this man, an Indian-African Jew named Eliyahu Josephai, remained a painful thorn in my side. In 2008, when I heard the news of his passing, my reaction was, “Would that he had died sooner!” This referred to the fact that, among the insurrections of which he had been banker and mastermind was the attempt on my life.42 Ironically, perhaps, the cause of M. Josephai’s death was said to have been a cardiac infarction, which was what had killed my father, as well.
Then, too, there were my recurring nightmares. As an amateur psychologist, I was particularly interested in the symbolism behind them. Take the one in which I was suffocated in a mine collapse.
After witnessing Mike Horvat’s successful extraction of information from a minor CPLN operative, I commented on the technique he had used. “I admire the way you finally loosened that traitor’s tongue, Mike.” As usual, he shrugged off my praise; even with his boss, Horvat was an uncommunicative fellow. I persisted. “How did you know exactly when to remove the hood? A moment or two longer, and he would surely have asphyxiated.”
“Experience, Excellency. I have been using this technique for years. At first, I did lose one or two, but I learned that, when the prisoner’s lips turn blue, I must pause. Besides, if one or two …” Again, he shrugged.
I completed his unspoken thought: “… happened to die, there were always others.” This provoked a small smile. Was my pleasure in observing Mike in action a kind of homeopathic remedy for my violent nightmares? (I also enjoyed the torture-by-clubbing sessions.)
Some of my more rational reasons for retaining the services of this invaluable man after Fons Batakoudou’s death, in 1985, I have already adumbrated: the constant internal threats, and the examples around me of insecure regimes and failed states.
Nor, as time passed, were those irritants alleviated! It did not escape my notice that, by the 1990’s, Africa was plagued by numerous breakaway groups. These included one still left over from Nigeria’s un-civil war of the 1960’s, the so-called Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). (I believe the group is still active as I write these words, in 2021.)
Also during the ’90’s, some African insurrectionists began forming alliances of convenience with radical Islamists. These included the mungiki, in the Nairobi shack settlement of Kibera, whose leader converted to The Faith, in 2000. Given the fact that the convert’s own grandfather had been a Mau-Mau, the grandson’s apostasy was particularly flagrant!
A second example: after the collapse of Zaire, amidst the subsequent ethnic violence that destabilized the eastern parts of that country, a mariage de raison [marriage of convenience] was forged between the Islamic State (IS) and the DRC’s so-called “Allied Democratic Forces” (ADF). In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the chaos in the DRC was exacerbated.
But alliances were not the only way violent Islamists sought to make inroads throughout Africa. In 1998, terrorist bombings by Islamic Jihad shook Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi. Soon after the USSR collapsed (in 1991), American diplomacy in Africa shifted from manipulating cold-war proxies and competing with the Russians for mineral contracts, to complaints about violations of human rights, as well as to cooperation in fighting terrorism. Pragmatism makes étranges compagnons de lit [strange bedfellows].
As always, of course, copper was in the vanguard of my worries. However paradoxical this may seem, the rise in world prices, which would linger until 2017, and the extraction of newly discovered coltan deposits, brought their own headaches. There were the inevitable demands of the now-combined miners’ union, le tccu, or travailleurs du cuivre et coltan unis [the United Copper and Coltan Miners’ Union]. Then, too, I personally had to direct Ngongo’s negotiations for favorable coltan contracts with the superpowers (the USSR/Russia, the U.S., and, of late, China). As if all of that were not enough, I also had to cope with competition from not only our African friends and neighbors, but from behemoth producers of coltan such as Australia, Brazil and Canada.43
Because the issue would not go away, I keep mentioning my decision not to nationalize the mines. Throughout my reign, “nationalization” remained the number-one buzzword among critics. Among my many reasons for emulating Fons Batakoudou, in this regard, were the old ones (Ngongo’s treaties and other “French connections”), as well as some new ones, such as fear of interrupting the revenue stream essential to building hospitals, schools (more of them), and so on. Of course, I was cognizant of the fact that more schools meant more unemployed graduates and school-leavers —half-educated fools to swell the ranks of the CPLN. I note here that, as usual, by clamoring for both more schools and lower unemployment, the CPLN ont parle’ des deux côtés de ta bouche [were speaking out of both sides of their mouth].
Those were not the dissidents’ only criticisms. They whined incessantly about the environmental damage caused by mining: land degradation, deforestation, water pollution, and air pollution (from the particles of sulphur dioxide released during the smelting phase).
But what did those ignoramuses know about copper? Could they even name the stages by which the raw ore is transformed into the useful metal? Had they ever so much as heard of the ISASMELT process, developed in Australia, and currently used in several African countries, for both economic and environmental reasons?
The relatively low cost of ISASMELT, and its ability to turn sulphur dioxide from a noxious pollutant into a valuable resource, made it an attractive option for Ngongo to consider. But did the CPLN ranks ever include even a single metallurgist or economist who understood all this? In 2018, my own experts studied smelting options exhaustively.
I can recall several interesting discussions that year with my Minister of Mines, the metallurgist I mentioned as having graduated from the University of Nigeria, at Nsukka. This clever fellow, by name, Peter Obi, I hired in 1987, shortly after my accession to the Presidency. Since our conversations were of a suffocatingly dull technical nature, I will offer only a small sample:
FN: Tell me again, Peter, why we should commit to the ISASMELT technology, rather than to any of our other options.
(I believe that I have already alluded to ISASMELT in a previous chapter. I apologize if my earlier discussion of the process makes some of the details about to be quoted, redundant.)
PO: Would you prefer to hear, Excellency, the shortcomings of the rival options, or the virtues of ISASMELT?
FN: Both, please! Short summaries will suffice.
PO: The other options —the best ones— would be an electric furnace; a flash furnace, operating direct-to-blister; the Mitsubishi smelting process; the Teniente converter; the Noranda reactor; and the Ausmelt furnace. As I told you when we last discussed these options, electric furnaces remain unproven at the proposed concentrate feed rates, and the low sulphur dioxide concentration in the waste gas in electric furnaces would make its capture prohibitively expensive. Flash furnaces and the Mitsubishi process should also be excluded, because …
FN: Enough, thanks, Peter! And the ISASMELT is best because…
PO: …because it can treat 850,000 tons per year…
FN: Yes, correct, Peter! Thanks to your excellent tutelage, I am not completely ignorant…
PO: … 850,000 t/y of copper concentrate, including a purpose-designed electric matte settling furnace to separate the ISASMELT matte and slag. To refute complaints about hypothetical environmental damage, ISASMELT is the best option for converting sulphur dioxide to (marketable) sulphuric acid. And…
FN: Thank you very much. And the final argument, the clincher, if I may state it for you, is how well ISASMELT has worked at Zambia’s Mopani mines. No need to say more! And now, let us return to your cost estimates…44
Do you see why I hired this Igbo from Nigeria? In environmental disputes with my ignorant critics, however, I would always eschew these technical details, which they could not have begun to understand. Instead, I borrowed a blunt riposte from capitalists in the U.S. When people there complained about the noisome fumes emitted by industries such as paper manufacture, the American bosses and their acolytes would quip, “Smells like money to me!” (There was a second, less delicate quip I could also have borrowed, involving the use of trees for toilet paper. Am I the only observer to have noticed the inveterate vulgarity of so-called “American culture”?)
It goes without saying that many of the troubles of other African nations continued to spill over into Ngongo during the 1990’s and 2000’s. As if we did not have enough of our own! Even some of Zimbabwe’s political refugees, sponsored by the CPLN, found their way to our tiny nation. As the new millennium began, Ngongo was said to be an exporter of minerals and an importer of trouble.
Your patience, Reader, will now be rewarded, as I finally arrive at the much-foreshadowed assassination plot. In the year, 2007, whether coincident with Ngongo’s mounting troubles, or not, the CPLN struck. The details of their plot I learned, soon after it had failed, from the invaluable Mihajlo Horvat,. The most important are as follows:
Their key instrument was one Pierre Tshombe, a young man (the son of a Mindouli miner) who had been employed for two decades as a translator for the ministere des Affaires etrangeres. This Tshombe (whose namesake Fons and I had encountered at several regional conferences, during the mid-1960’s, before Moise Tshombe's exile and death), was a traitor, working not only for us, but against us, as a CPLN translator.
Mike Horvat discovered that one of this Tshombe’s earlier assignments had involved contact with Cuban military personnel seconded by Castro to Angola to assist in their independence struggle.45 (Undoubtedly, in Angola, there was a “smoking cigar.”) You will also recall that our ore was shipped via that country.
My nemesis, Oscar Odhon’g, was among the masterminds who conceived the idea of killing me with a remote-controlled bomb. Whether inspired by older insurrections —the Mau-Mau, Kwilu, etc.— or by the ANC’s triumph in South Africa, leading to majority rule (1994)— the Cadre resolved to remove me from the scene. Perhaps, it was for symbolic reasons that the date was set for July 14th, or perhaps that just happened to be when their plot matured. Behind this plot, Mike guessed, were both the Cuban technical assistance just mentioned, and foreign finance, in the persons of that Kenyan Jew and his American associate.
On July 13th, when Tshombe was apprehended, Mike’s “methods” unfortunately failed to break him, before he managed, some forty-eight hours later, through some colossal blunder, to escape. As the hotelier, Alphonse Saint-Louis told Mike afterwards, one of the few guests at his pension on the nights of the 15th and 16th was an elderly American. Americans rarely stayed there. On the 16th, Mike also discovered, the escaped, and now disguised, Tshombe was observed making contact with the American in a city market. He —Tshombe— eluded subsequent efforts to recapture him, and was never seen, or heard from, again.
The way in which the CPLN plot was foiled was much more to Mike’s credit. The plot involved the placing of a trash receptacle, during the early morning of July 13th, outside the Musee’ d’Ethnographie. The placement was successfully effected by a youth who was never identified, other than by his first name, “Albert.” Like Tshombe, he was never apprehended. On the evening of that day, Tshombe was to have placed the bomb in the receptacle. The next morning, when the Independence Day march-past reached the Musee,’ the bomb was to have been remotely detonated, and I was to have kept my appointment with my Maker.
What went wrong —for the plotters— was their timing. (I seem to recall that, in medieval Europe, there was a heresy which maintained that, although God controlled the universe, the Devil controlled the timing.) As luck would have it, Tshombe left his office too soon to plant the bomb, which he was supposed to have done after the crowds of early evening strollers had dispersed. With the idea of waiting an hour, or so, he detoured to a park bench.
Fortuitously, this park was only a few blocks from the pension owned and operated by his uncle, M. Saint-Louis, who also happened to be an informant for La Force. Also fortunate was that one of the pension’s employees was my old age-mate, Joseph Ngbaga. Out for an evening stroll, Ngbaga spotted young Tshombe on the bench in the park. This set off alarm bells.
As Ngbaga reported, “I asked myself what he was doing in this neighborhood. He had never previously visited mon patron [my boss], so I had assumed they were estranged. And why was he looking so nervous, and fussing with that briefcase?”
The rest of the story can be told briefly. Ngbaga related what he had seen to Saint-Louis, who passed the information along to Mike Horvat, whose men were already on high alert for the Independence Day festivities. Mike dispatched the trusted brute, Grand Pierre, with orders to capture, alive, the not-so-grand-Pierre. This part of the mission to thwart the CPLN plotters was as successful as its aftermath was not.
The upshot was that the parade and the speeches that followed on the 14th, at the Parc de l’Independence, went off without a hitch (or a bang). As for the CPLN brain trust, like Pierre and Albert, none of them was ever apprehended. Although Odhon’g and the others ceased, thereafter, to be focal points for ngongienne dissidence, their fingerprints have been detected, over the past fifteen years, on many anti-government initiatives.
(In recent times, assassinations by motorcyclists have become increasingly popular in Africa. I wonder if the bumblers of 2007 would have succeeded in killing me if, instead of their bomb, they had planned a drive-by shooting.)
As the years have passed, and all of these pressures have mounted, my pleasures have paled, flickered, and then gone out. I think I have mentioned my crise de la quarantaine [mid-life crisis]. As I managed to survive into my fifties, then my sixties and seventies, and now, my eighties, this crise has become chronique, or, you might even say, mon mode par défaut [my default mode].
Note 42: For more about Eliyahu Josephai, see Pierre Tshombe… chapters 5-8, 14, et passim.
Note 43: FN’s summary of political and social events of the 1990’s is, once again, substantially accurate. After his father’s death, in 2022, Paul-Auguste told me that FN had spent a large portion of each day’s working hours (twenty, or so) poring over newspapers. He subscribed to the leading papers of Kenya, South Africa, and several European countries, and even to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, switching to online editions as these became available. The English-language publications would have been translated into French for him by polyglots from his ministries. (Was his would-be assassin, young Tshombe, possibly among them?)
For the growth of coltan exploitation, see Daughton, on the booklist, infra.
Note 44: According to Julius Nkwema, his father’s real reason for never nationalizing the copper industry was that doing so would have decreased the opportunities for bribes and rake-offs. Starting as far back as the late 1980’s, FN began to portion out control over state enterprises to shifting networks of loyal associates. As his reign wore on, the economy increasingly became an adjunct of his political machine.
As Julius also said, “His talk about switching to an ISASMELT copper smelter was just that —talk. The plan was undermined by the logistical problems of bribery: who would get which contracts, and what would FN’s own cut be? ISASMELT was never installed.”
Note 45: For additional details of the assassination plot, see Pierre Tshombe… passim. Pierre’s knowledge of explosives came not from a meeting in Angola, but in the DRC. This was one case in which Mike Horvat’s “intelligence” was faulty. See Pierre Tshombe…, Chapter Twelve.
To be continued...
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