The National Bank, with a staff of 3,300, had a garage and a carpentry workshop, but not a single computer. Now the ministries are clean and freshly painted. The lifts are gradually starting to work again and staff arrive on time. Foreigners arriving at the capital's airport think they have landed in the wrong place. The hordes of conmen and porters who used to grab documents and luggage have gone, kept away by the soldiers.
Formalities are speedy, politeness is the norm.
The streets are still full of enormous holes like bomb craters, but the verges have been weeded and carefully planted with vegetables and there are flowerbeds at the crossroads. Leaders in every field are making it clear that they want to restore order and eventually rebuild the state, which, by the end of Mobutu's rule, had become no more than an asset to be plundered. The health minister, Dr Jean-Baptiste Sondji, is launching a polio vaccination campaign. Though the disease has been stamped out in most countries, a thousand children contracted it last year in the diamond capital, Mbuji Mai. The minister plans to close down the ligablos , the little parallel health centres where self-styled doctors used to operate on kitchen tables.