Imagine the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Congo was being run by the private sector. What would be the fate of a CEO who spent $1.4billion every year for several years but returns the kind of results we see?

What would happen to a board that kept voting for this expenditure despite dismal results being announced every year? What would happen to personnel deployed in the field who not proved incompetent, but began doing the very things they were deployed to prevent?

Of course, in the private sector, where rationality governs decision making, such a state of affairs would not be allowed to continue for more than a year or two, at most three.

The CEO would have been severely reprimanded when the peacekeepers deployed at such colossal cost turned to abusing women and girls they were supposed to protect.

He would have been fired the second or third time his armed men folded their arms and looked the other way on hearing rebel shots.

A rational board would have re-examined the operation into which it injects over a billion dollars a year, and either stopped pouring money into Congo, or hired a more credible group to spend the $1 billion on.

It would have several options, including giving the money to regional countries that have already proven their capability by taming Somalia.

Such a board would perhaps even have brokered a merger of the different fighting groups and sponsored their amalgamation and fusion into a modern army for Congo.

For the rebels are citizens with a duty to restore democracy in a country where sham elections result in ineffective government. They have a legitimate reason to take up arms to resist the rape of their country, which has been going on since the days of King Leopold.

A rational board would view with suspicion reports of some not-so-competent “experts,” especially where such experts have glossed over human-rights violations perpetrated by the government army on a grand scale, and those of the so-called peacekeepers. 

The board would even suspect that some countries did not like the idea of local forces emerging who could stem the shameless exploitation of Congolese wealth that has been going on for so long.

The board would open old files from the assassination of nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba 50 years ago, the support accorded to the demented kleptocrat Joseph Mobutu.

They would do some comparative study of more recent countries where order was disrupted by powerful outsiders like in Iraq and Libya, only to be replaced by lawlessness and squalid living conditions in once prosperous societies.

Such a rational board would declare that continuing with lies and hypocrisy cannot solve the problem of Congo.

It would advise all countries, multinational corporations and international organisations to only involve themselves in affairs of the Congo by supporting genuine democratisation.

But alas, the UN is not a private sector organisation, it is an inter-governmental body affected by the aggregate irrationality of governments.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]