The longtime dictator's stern face adorns the inflated bank notes that pass through the hands of ubiquitous money-changers.
Unpaid cops subsist on fines for imaginary traffic violations.
Children wade in sewage. Elevators are opened with a firm bang on the doors. When Laurent Kabila's rebels overthrew Africa's longest-ruling autocrat last May and renamed Zaire the Democratic Republic of Congo, expectations were high. But Kabila, after becoming president, has hardly become a statesman. The former guerrilla has alienated much of the world by thwarting a United Nations investigation of massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees during his sweep across Congo.