Democratic Republic of the Congo
A. The Work
This was really the first time I ventured to apply to a position I knew required more refined managerial skills: I knew that I would have to push myself extra-hard to measure up to a position that required human, organizational and team-building skills beyond just the technical expertise. Did I make mistakes? If the statement “experience is the series of errors we are fond of remembering”, is anything to go by, then DRC was a bag of memories for me. Some I will share. Some I will not. After 3 years in Geneva, I applied for, and was posted to Kinshasa as Deputy to the Representative, from 2006 to 2008. My Representative was a Mr Eusebe Honsoukou, who, in the prevailing circumstances in DRC, was wise enough to spend his assignment in an apartment of a secured hotel. The rest of us lived in town, with our daily worries about security, water and unserviced expensive houses.
While life for us was difficult, one cannot begin to describe the daily calvary of a Congolese national in their houses, with collapsed public services. Still, a happy singing people. Even our neighborhood priest danced in the altar in those days, in fact, the priest in my area used to do the ndombolo number around the altar with his acolytes. Anyway, I am starting to digress. I went to Kinshasa to replace Aida Haile Mariam, an Ethiopian colleague and a beautiful mother with a more beautiful heart always concerned with the welfare of her staff. I learned from her.
Now: if all you know of the DRC is the map, you are fully deceived. I came to realize that the true size of Africa may be misrepresented by maps that are part of an economic, ideological and political project, inherited from European explorers, brave slave traders (braving the seas and the forests), not produced by us. It is through my travel, in countries like the DRC, Mozambique, Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire, Angola, Chad, Nigeria, Niger that I understood, courtesy of UNHCR solid logistics, how really big our countries are. For instance, flying from Lubumbashi to Goma, in the same country, takes 4 hours 45 minutes. With the exception of five or six countries globally, that much time in the air will get you crossing as many as four countries. DRC is a vast country and it took me 2 weeks to visit all offices in the field, just flying. I also travelled by road between Bukavu and Uvira through what they call the escarpment road and the Ruzizi Plain. And from Lubumbashi through Zambia to Pweto and Moba, crossing the huge concession of King Leopold of Belgium. Adventures! I visited offices in Mbandaka, Gemena, Bunia, Beni, Kisangani, Goma, Bukavu, Uvira, Baraka, Lubumbashi, Kalemie, Pweto, Moba.
It gave me the impression that such a vast spread would be difficult to manage, and it was. The visit allowed me to know the field teams, the essence of our operations, the conditions of work of colleagues and how to provide the support expected from the Representation. And, in that particular national environment, how to ensure that risks were properly managed (security, assets, political risks to operations, etc). DRC brought me down from a professorial position of issuing instructions from Geneva to, once more, receiving instructions and see how they applied in such a complex, amorphous, solutions-starved operation. The characteristics of the operation were a challenge in themselves:
There was intermittent repatriation to Angola through Matadi, the other side of the same theatre that I had seen in Angola, with repatriation of Congolese nationals. These two countries were locked in a long-running economic warfare that impacted their border populations, creating new, equally intermittent humanitarian crises of mutual mass expulsions.
We were also engaged in the return of Congolese refugees from Tanzania into Moba, Kalemie, and Baraka, through Lake Tanganyika.
The long-running security and political crises in CAR, which I later came to learn were also caused by political power plays out of DRC, resulted in refugee outflows, some of which we received in Mbandaka and Gemena areas, integrated into villages. Others sought asylum in Chad, and would continue to do so until I served in Chad.
By far the largest humanitarian operation was the IDP situations at the borders with Rwanda and Uganda, as a result of many armed movements roaming in Eastern DRC, born of the 1994 Great Lakes crisis. We had offices in Bunia, Beni, Kisangani, Goma. Indeed, at one point, the Representative sent me to Goma to upgrade the office to better respond to IDPs, and I stayed there four months until the position there was upgraded. The UN Mission decided to make Goma a second important humanitarian hub. If you hear about Bunagana border post, I know it for having spent two nights at the priest’s residence at the time (2007). Pweto and Manono in Katanga Province (remember Rwandan troops going as far down south of DRC as Pweto) also had many IDPs.
Then there was the historical group of refugees from Burundi and Rwanda, both urban and rural, which slowly got subsumed in the whole Banyamulenge military and political imbroglio.
Urban refugees: there were urban refugees in Goma, Bukavu, Uvira, Lubumbashi and Kinshasa. Working with the different NGOs, it became apparent to me that the organization was ready to admit that refugees have a right to live in urban centres. However the manuals were theoretical and based on the doctrine of rights (academic in that sense), offering little by way of handles to help us grapple more efficiently with refugee demands in such settings, particularly where urban populations already were mostly destitute as well. So, we embarked on an initiative of health mutualization, the first, with a second experiment in Kenya and a third in Chad. The reality is that the organization still needed to offer practical responses to urban contexts, and may even have to be more so now with the continuous urban population growth.
B. The working environment:
This topic alone would be a full chapter in itself if one had to make justice to it. Let me however limit myself to a couple of brushes. I arrived in DRC in the year of elections and as soon as I finished my first field tour, elections took place. the election results were immediately contested through another urban warfare, consigning us to staying locked at home (for me the second time, after Angola).
Arriving in DRC in 2006 and for the following 2 years, the most important political actor in the country was not even the government: it was the United Nations Mission in DRC (MONUC, since renamed MONUSCO). This was the second time DRC had received a large UN mission. It included a Humanitarian Coordination function, headed by the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Lise Grande. This is where I first encountered, as head of operations, serious issues of coordination when dealing with IDPs, together with (and sometimes conflicting with) other UN organizations, given the different cultural ways of doing business. Instead of learning about our different cultures and how to adapt to each other, we were in serious adversarial competition for resources. UNHCR had always been on the losing side, with humanitarian coordinators favouring organizations where fund-raising was already their grounded culture of decentralized processes. We learned (or maybe we as an organization never learned really) that while UNHCR was focused in the deep field, our other colleagues spent time understanding how to convincingly present projects for financing, how to make alliances. I encountered the same issues of UNHCR benefitting the least of the humanitarian pooled funds a decade later in Chad and more personally in Nigeria. In 2006, Pooled Funding was just being introduced as a new humanitarian way of responding to emergencies.
Coordination was also a key discussion in 2007 between UNHCR DRC and an American mission (B/PRM), which presented to me for the third time in my career (Angola, Zambia) a structured questionnaire about the protection and coordination foundations of UNHCR operations in the country. In fact the unsmiling fellows grilled me all the way from Kinshasa to Goma. Still, it did help us to better focus on understanding the huge forced human displacements (refugees and IDPs), how these were evolving, and how much the humanitarian approach could impact on solutions. I was coming to the realization, and that is a personal conclusion, that humanitarian responses cannot be efficient if the political processes are not. My time in Nigeria only reinforced my conviction, particularly as the authorities never owned the humanitarian operations, merely (sometimes just barely) tolerating them.
In the case of DRC, humanitarian operations, while providing life-saving assistance in food, shelter and health assistance, were not efficient in providing solutions. So much so that even as I write, the UN mission is still there, entering in its 24th year now. For instance, when I visited remote Kisangani, and looked at the map again, I asked myself: how (I knew why) would Rwandan forces have reached all the way down here in Kisangani (and all the way to Pweto)? The role of both players in DRC (the UN Mission and Rwanda) is a chapter in history that will be written. Anyway, the humanitarian role looked more like an enterprise contracted to make bearable the impact of the evil mess others were creating, and less about solutions (at least from the UNHCR solutions mandate perspective). It may not have escaped keen political observers that both the SRSG and his deputy were American at the most critical period of the UN Mission.
That period in Congo was particularly intense politically, with a strong UN Mission, a strong SRSG, three strong Humanitarian Hubs (Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Goma). The Mission effectively displaced the authority of the state, represented at that time by one President deputized by a bizarre structure of four vice-presidents. MONUC ran during those years, and very efficiently too, all the airports in DRC with a strong logistics, and several aircraft. The elections of 2006 were supported by an air logistics fully organized by the UN Mission. Here please allow me to digress again into an incident.
A serious UN flight incident that touched me personally in 2008 for two reasons: first, I was supposed to have been on that flight, but I had asked my supervisor permission to postpone my field mission because of food poisoning during the preceding weekend. And secondly because, had I been on that fateful flight, a father of three children would have died merely seven months after the mother had died too! In effect, on a blue Monday, a UN flight struck a mountain as it was seeking to land in Bukavu and all people on board perished, including 7 UN officers. That incident has lived with me ever: seeing and praying in front of seven coffins, I shed tears, no one understood that I could have been in one of them. I knew none of the dead colleagues.My next stop? I had applied for a position of Representative in Liberia, been appointed, and a letter requesting my accreditation had been sent to Monrovia one week after the appointment. The accreditation was received one week later. I was preparing to go take up my new assignment, when the Director of the Bureau for Africa called from Geneva and asked me to consider letting go of the Representation position, to go and support a bigger operation in Kenya as Deputy Representative. And that in due time, if I accommodated this request, I would be considered favourably for career advancement in the future. So, I postponed my being Representative for another 3 years to be Deputy Representative in Kenya, Nairobi. I never regretted the delay, because it did give me more time to learn more and mature as a manager of people, of an office and of relations. This was perhaps the biggest lesson after my assignment in the DRC:
C. Lessons for colleagues in active service
You may not wish to rush to becoming a Representative. Most probably you are not even destined to be one. It is not a government career where you have a right to climb into Directorship. Representative is complex, it is about:
diplomatic tact,
human resources understanding and tact,
protection commitment,
solutions vision,
operational efficiency and innovation.
Now I understand why some representatives are not good managers, neither of operations, even less of Protection, and perhaps even disastrous when it comes to managing people. The sense of entitlement that the UN culture unwittingly breeds in us is seriously misplaced and makes us weak characters, especially seen from outside of the UN as I do now.
The best character attributes of a Deputy Representative, as a middle manager are: honesty, loyalty towards the boss, towards the team; loyalty including speaking the truth all round: up, down and horizontally, with a sense of timing of course. Being manager is about integrity, team cohesion and delivery efficiency. Emotional intelligence should start here at the latest, if it still has not.
Coordination grew in the United Nations as a function in its own right. It raised major issues and created a theatre of rivalries between agencies. Coordination had become a business where UNHCR did not perform well. Inevitably, as we will discuss later, coordination has reached a stage of justifying itself as follows: Coordination saves lives. Why this motto made me even more cynical? Avoid the cynicism and learn instead.
Banyamulenge (in my language it would read wanyamulenge, those (pl.) who live around the Mulenge mountains). This was a chapter in the mostly urban refugees in Bukavu, Goma, Uvira mentioned above, and many mofre in rural areas of Eastern DRC which UNHCR had not studied carefully the origins of (at that time at least). They continue to represent two long-term struggles:
A struggle of belonging and an unresolved risk of statelessness between Rwanda and DRC; there are experts on the subject in both countries, and both exclude each other (they offer no solution);
An expression of the real demographic pressure in Burundi and Rwanda, over which all of us have gone silent and which poses a challenge to the region, if not to-day, tomorrow. The demographic growth needs the formulation of an intelligent, futuristic, non-territorial but inclusive solution, without which this pressure is a problem waiting to irredeemably explode into violence in another few decades. No country can resolve this alone. It should be courageously taken on board by regional organizations and not wait for another humanitarian crisis. For which we will have no money and no control.
Refer:
Jose, 08 June 2023
I remember this time in your brilliant career as if it was yesterday. Thank you for your many investments in Africa and in Africans.