Kinshasa

Kinshasa is the capital of the world’s most tragic loss of potential. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is massive, young and is blessed with unrivalled natural wealth. It should be a thriving African mega-state, not the poorest and grimmest place on earth.

The double disaster

The Congo is a place of extreme poverty--77% of Congolese live on less than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day, more than any other country in the world. On the streets on Kinshasa even that can seem like a rosy statistic: forget $1.90, in Kinshasa there are plenty of people that live on nothing at all.

Terrible in any country, in the Congo this is a double disaster. The Congo is a place of huge wealth. Early explorers talked of sugar cane, oil-palm and tobacco of “very excellent quality”, of vines producing rubber “nearly everywhere” and the abundance of coal, copper and gold around Katanga. The Congo also diamonds, tin and other rare metals; it has the world’s second largest rainforest. It is not just natural wealth: Kinshasa shares its time zone with London or Paris depending on the season, and the Congolese speak a major European language, the population is young and growing. Every one of these things should spur an economy. This country is an extreme not just because it is the poorest in the world, but because it should be one of the richest. In economic terms, this city is the capital of failure.