Amid growing economic disarray and infrastructural breakdown, standards of living have plummeted, moral and ethical standards have withered, and violence has risen.
Political authority is almost hopelessly fragmented and discredited.
To the astonishment of many observers, Zaire continues to exist. Despite the implosion of key social, political, and economic structures since the beginning of the 1990s, Zairians have developed a set of informal arrangements that enables them to survive and prevents the societal explosion one would have expected. Belgian colonial rule created a society, but not a strong centralized state, out of a network of mobile and autonomous households. In the postcolonial period, attempts to establish the total unification of Zairian society through the cult of the Supreme Chief and acceptance of a party-state ran up against ethnic and mostly regional loyalties. In regions such as Shaba, Kasai, Kivu, and Kongo, these loyalties are still strong.