Getting around the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo can be a real headache. Moving Kinshasa's 17 million inhabitants requires tenacity and resilience. The hundreds of thousands of private taxi buses are barely enough, as the public transport company is near bankruptcy and urban train services have been virtually non-operational for the past 10 years.
So, motorcycles come in handy as a real recourse for the population, who are concentrated in a 2,000 square kilometre area, in a 10,000 square-kilometre city.
Kinshasa is notorious for its traffic jams, and motorcycles are an easy alternative, due to their ability to manoeuvre their way around the gridlock.
There are an estimated 300,000 ‘wewas’, as motorcyclists are called in Kinshasa, and they are a major economic force. One generates $20-$30 a day. Some make more.
The rise of the wewas in Kinshasa is traced to the collapse of the diamond mining company, Miba, in Kasai Oriental. Since that collapse, the Grand Kasai area, made up of five provinces in the centre of the DRC, has been going through an economic crisis, which has led to a massive displacement of families and young people to towns that offer promise.
In 1998, during the so-called Second Congo War, Miba's entire financial strength was devoted to the "war effort". The company was restructured, and the diamond industry, once the driving force behind the entire economy of the five provinces of Greater Kasai, was wiped out.
Young people, who had worked in the artisanal diamond sector, found themselves without work, without subsidies, and without any kind of vocational training. So, they arrived in Kinshasa and other major cities in the DRC in masses. In Kinshasa, where riding a motorcycle was once deemed a lowly job, these perceptions have completely changed.
It started with the young men from Kasai, but now Kinshasans are diehard motorcycle riders.
The motorcycles became a solution to the endemic unemployment.
Cédric, a young motorcycle rider in his thirties, told TheEastAfrican that at times like December in Kinshasa, as people move in and out for Christmas, some motorcyclists could generate up to $50 a day. Yet, despite all this, most of the motorcyclists still consider themselves jobless, seeing motorcycling as a less prestigious activity.
Willy Kalengay, a journalist, explains that from an economic point of view, "what we call work has nothing to do with pride”.
“It's about any activity that generates income," he says.
According to a survey carried out in Kinshasa, 67 percent of the Capital’s population capital have used motorcycles at least once to get around quickly. According to the survey, some 800,000 people in the Congolese megalopolis depend economically on the income generated by the work of motorcyclists.
According to World Bank statistics, the DRC is one of the five poorest nations in the world. In 2024, 73.5 percent of the Congolese population lived on less than $2.15 a day. One in six people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are in the DRC.
In Kinshasa, young motorcycle riders have shown resilience, even as they hope for better from life. Despite their joie de vivre, Kinshasa's young motorcyclists still complain about being "hassled" by the traffic police, who, they say, hold them to ransom, constantly arresting them and harassing them.
"Every time we're stopped, the police demand large sums of money. It doesn't matter what fine we've been given," says Marcel Tumba, a motorcyclist.
Motorcyclists and the police are in a love-hate relationship, with the police trying to impose strict rules on the riders reputed to disobey the Highway Code or any authority. The national police has banned wewas from entering the commune of Gombe, the business, institutional and diplomatic centre of Kinshasa, but this order has never been obeyed. They usually ride around without helmets, weaving in and out of traffic and creating chaos. Often, they cause fatal accidents.
Most wewas are politically well versed. Many of them come from the Grand Kasaï, the region from which President Félix Tshisekedi hails, and are unwavering supporters of the head of state. Given their numbers in Kinshasa, and their political activity, the wewas are therefore a political force in a city where political passions can soar high. They were particularly active recently, at the end of January, in the protests against the war in eastern DRC, where the M23 rebels have been capturing swaths of territory. During the Kinshasa protests, the embassies of the US, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, France, Belgium and others were attacked and some looted.
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