Sign of Pitiful Public Sector : In Zaire, Walkie-Talkies Proliferate as Phones Fail

KINSHASA, Zaire —  The sound of radio static crackled through the air. In every corner of the hotel lobby, men were leaning over to mumble into their gray handsets. Some took their walkie-talkies outside, squinting into the bright sun as they sought better reception. At the hotel’s French patisserie, the units shared space with china teacups on tiny marble tables, like portions of gateau .

It might have been a convention of security agents. But the sight of black antennas bristling from people’s pockets and gray handsets hung on their belts is not unusual here. In Kinshasa, this is how one makes a phone call.

The ubiquitous walkie-talkie is perhaps the most obvious expression of two parallel features of Zairian life: the pitiful condition of the public sector and the thriving entrepreneurial instincts of the private.

Zaire’s public telephones barely work. It is all but impossible to call from one neighborhood of Kinshasa, the capital city, to another, and often fruitless to try reaching someone a few blocks away.

Dialing into the country’s vast interior is hopeless. International calls are available only to those who pay a special price for a dedicated private line, like hotels and large businesses--and then the cost of a call to Europe or the United States is more than $10 a minute.

“We don’t even bother to try telephoning anywhere,” says one Western diplomat in Kinshasa. “If it’s important, we send a telegram.”

Like its highways, Zaire’s telephone network has not been renovated since the Belgian colonists left it in place upon their panicky departure in 1960, when an army mutiny followed on the heels of independence. Lines into the interior have long since corroded or, in places, been stolen.

The walkie-talkies, sold and maintained by a number of private companies here, are the indispensable substitute.

“The walkie-talkie is a tribute to the Zairians’ private resourcefulness,” said one Western banker.

“I have three,” said Tambue Mbuyi, a Health Ministry worker who explained that he has to remain in touch with his office, his home and a team of mobile cars. “There are no telephone booths here, and whether you are in the city or 50 kilometers out, you need the apparatus.”

5,000 to 7,000 Units

One salesman estimated that there are 5,000 to 7,000 hand-held units in the city, a figure that almost certainly is too low.

“I’m sure if there was no problem with the telephones, you’d see our sales decrease totally,” said the salesman, Marc Kadoch, director of regional telecommunications for the local Motorola distributor.

In Zaire, examples abound of private concerns taking over what were once public services as the government’s ability and inclination to maintain things deteriorates. Chronically starved for the foreign exchange needed to import replacement supplies and pay foreign engineers, the government has largely given up on restoring the country’s aged infrastructure. Even where money is appropriated, it often disappears through graft and official theft.

“In this country one doesn’t have any respect for the public sector’s property,” said one Western banker in Kinshasa. “It’s there to be drained away or stolen.”

Bribes Get Things Done

At the same time, even basic services are provided only to those who choose to pay bribes--whether to highly placed officials or to ground-level workers.

“We look at it as a different sort of tax,” said one foreign businessman here. “You just pay for the services you actually want, and then at the point of sale.”

That means that services that citizens even of neighboring African countries would take for granted are here provided by businesses on as narrow a scale as possible.

Because the city’s public transport system has less than a tenth of the vehicles necessary to serve the commuting population, many businesses in Kinshasa now run private buses for their employees. In the interior, some businesses pave and maintain roads, but only those directly necessary for the shipment of their goods.

Training Provided

Companies hiring college graduates give them the training needed to do their jobs.

“We train people fresh out of the University of Kinshasa,” said Michel de Spot, the Belgian manager of a Zairian-owned computer systems distributor. “At the university, they study computer programming, but only from books. They’ve never touched a computer, because the university doesn’t have any.”

As the country’s deterioration has progressed, the scale of some private projects has grown. Perhaps the most ambitious such undertaking today is the installation of an entirely new telephone network in the country’s southeastern mining district by Gecamines, the quasi-public mining company. Providing as much as three-quarters of Zaire’s foreign exchange, Gecamines is by far the most important business enterprise in Zaire and accordingly, the only state corporation run on anything approaching Western standards.

Gecamines’ microwave-based system will accommodate 4,000 telephones, including private ones, in and around Lubumbashi, Zaire’s second-largest city, at a cost of close to $7 million.

Willy-Nilly Privatization

Observers here are divided over whether the willy-nilly privatization of essential services is a boon or spells the doom of what little state activity still exists in the enormous, varied countryside.

“I think we’re going to see a disappearance of the state’s capacity to intervene in public health, education, and many other fields,” said one Western diplomat. “As this happens, the private sector takes up the slack to the extent it has to. And eventually, they’ll reach a point where they again say this is the government’s job.”

But others argue that by abandoning any investment in its own future, Zaire may be depriving itself of the means to economic progress. For creating a genuine foundation for growth requires spending money on services, whether education or roads, that pay dividends only over time. These are precisely the broad expenditures that private concerns will not make.

Since top politicians and businessmen will always be provided for, they will have less and less inclination to devote their attention to the needs of the rest of Zaire’s more than 30 million people. The gulf between the country’s privileged and poor will continue to widen.

‘The Rest Are Ignored’

“It’s already true that most policies in this country are directed at the handful of people who ‘matter,’ ” remarks one prominent Kinshasa lawyer. “The rest are simply ignored.”

At this point, the government is making no attempt to stand in the way of the trend. Although there is talk of a large-scale rehabilitation project for the telephone system, Kadoch simply grins at any suggestion that the state might compete with his business.

“To restore this system,” he said, “you’d have to fire everyone in it and get new people. Then six months later, you’d have to fire them, too.”

Even what official regulation exists of the radio-telephone business is haphazard. Although users are theoretically required to obtain a license to use an assigned frequency and then permitted to transmit only between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., so much illegal use is going on that Kadoch’s customers are constantly fighting pirate transmissions.

No Secure Conversation

“You can’t have a secure conversation with these anymore,” he said of the walkie-talkies.

Hence, the next generation of equipment: the cellular telephone, which also overcomes other obvious inadequacies of the walkie-talkies, including their limited geographic range.

“I’ve sold 300 in the space of months,” said Rwayitare Miko, president of Computer & Industrial Engineering in Kinshasa, the sole distributor of the new equipment, “and I could easily have sold 900 if I could have obtained the units.”

Miko sells the phones here for the equivalent of $5,600 each; in the United States the same unit would cost $3,000.