Claiming workers' rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the case of the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines

Introduction

Under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, a wave of privatisations has taken place among public and semi-public companies in Africa since the 1990s. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the opportunity to implement this type of reform first appeared, after many years of conflict, in the early 2000s. In their strategy for supporting the reconstruction of the DRC's economy, the international financial institutions (IFIs) put together a plan for restructuring public companies, beginning with the Générale des carrières et des mines (Gécamines). Founded in 1906, Gécamines – the former Union minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) – had for a century been the most important mining enterprise in DRC-Zaïre, and the main source of income and currency for the state. But, for a variety of reasons, the business went into a steep decline during the 1990s (Rubbers 2006). To address the situation, the World Bank advocated the sale of company assets to foreign private investors and staff reductions to improve its competitiveness.²

Opération Départ Volontaire (ODV) (Operation Voluntary Departures) was implemented against this background. With the financial and logistical support of the World Bank, the scheme offered voluntary redundancy to 10,000 Gécamines employees, some 45% of the total workforce, in return for a lump-sum severance payment which fell below the legal minimum. The ODV was exceptional in two respects, first because of the number of workers involved, and second because it was an unprecedented move for the World Bank. The Bank does not normally finance projects in their entirety, or intervene directly in redundancy programmes – and this was in all likelihood one at odds with Congolese employment law. However, the ODV has also been used as a test case for similar projects. Since Gécamines, the same operational approach has been used to cut staff numbers in five other Congolese public enterprises carrying budget deficits. And it is not impossible that it will in future be applied elsewhere in Africa.

Based on ethnographic research,³ this paper discusses the movement which arose out of the redundancy programme to denounce its terms and demand more adequate compensation for the workers involved. What resources are available to such a collective action operating in a social milieu long characterised by paternalism? What are the best means of conducting a struggle of this type in a precarious economic and political environment? In answering these questions, this paper will first discuss the action taken by the Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines (Collective of Former Gécamines Employees). It will then attempt to distinguish the moral economy underlying the demands made by the Collectif, and to specify the conditions under which its representatives negotiated with the authorities in Kinshasa. In conclusion, it will discuss the significance of this social protest in the context of Congolese politics.

The history of the claim

After severing relations with the Mobutu regime in the early 1990s, the World Bank re-engaged with the DRC in 2001 when Joseph Kabila came to power.⁴ The Bank's renewed engagement with this heavily indebted country was marked by a sense of urgency. It was justified by the need to support first the peace process and then, after the establishment of the transitional government in April 2003, the reconstruction of the national economy (De Villers 2009a, pp. 43–53). The liberalisation of the mining sector – its decline blamed on ‘poor governance’ on the part of political elites – was central to the strategy devised by World Bank economists (Mazalto 2009). This strategy was designed to attract foreign private investors to the sector by promulgating new legal codes, parcelling out mining lands, and selling concessions on attractive terms. Particular interest was shown in the enormous reserves of copper and cobalt in the sub-soil of Katanga, situated for the most part in the concession held by the state-owned Gécamines. In 2002, the company was producing only 19,000 tonnes of copper and 1800 tonnes of cobalt, compared to 476,000 tonnes of copper and 14,000 tonnes of cobalt in 1986. It also had liabilities of US$1.3 billion, including at least US$100,000 owed to its 23,730 workers, each due on average 21 months in wage arrears.

The principal objective of the reform programme was to strip Gécamines of part of its deposits, allowing these to be leased to private investors or exploited through joint ventures. However, the implementation of this scheme by Congolese officials was the subject of criticism from various international organisations (Fatal Transactions 2006, Global Witness 2006). Far from the tests of transparency and competition promised by the World Bank, it resulted in a bout of asset stripping which imperilled any hope of recovery. The reform programme also envisaged the restructuring of Gécamines to give the company a chance to start again from a new base. Opération Départ Volontaire, aiming to cut 10,000 members of staff, was conceived against this background.

Even without taking into account the benefits in kind payable to the workers, the cost of this staff reduction exercise was estimated by the World Bank at US$120 million, far in excess of the budget earmarked within the framework of the Economic Recovery Credit allocated to the DRC. The Bank then offered a budget of US$25 million specifically to fund the ODV, an offer rejected by the trade unions representing Gécamines' workers. Having obtained another US$18.5 million from the World Bank in additional aid, the DRC government called in an international consultant, Jacques Catry, to negotiate with the unions. Agreement was reached in March 2003: voluntary redundancy would be available to all employees with more than 25 years service on 31 December 2002. In return for accepting the termination of their contract of employment ‘by mutual agreement’, all those who took redundancy would receive ‘in full settlement’ a lump sum lower than the legal minimum.

The redundancy programme ran from March 2003 to February 2004. It was a resounding success with employees, the majority of whom had not been paid since October 2001 and who were by then owed on average 36 months in wage arrears; many who failed to meet the conditions nevertheless volunteered for the scheme. A total of 10,655 employees were made redundant: workers received between US$2,000 and US$4,000, managers between US$8,000 and US$15,000, and directors between US$20,000 and US$70,000. Implementation of the programme was entrusted to a government agency, the Unité de Coordination de la réinsertion au Katanga (URK). The URK began by launching an information campaign to explain to those volunteering for redundancy how the ODV would work, and to provide details of the different retraining opportunities available to them. Between August 2003 and February 2004, it arranged the termination of workers' contracts and made payments into a private bank for each employee. Finally, it set up a programme to support ‘economic reintegration’ of the retrenched workers, providing training and handing out financial assistance to selected collective projects.

At the end of the ODV, the World Bank, Gécamines and the URK all gave the programme a positive assessment: the budget had been spent, the timetable respected, and the ex-Gécamines staff had received their money. The majority of former employees had found new employment in agriculture; others had obtained work in the transport, retail and service sectors. With their technical background, a few had been able to find new jobs in privately owned mining enterprises, although generally at a wage below that on offer during the good times at Gécamines. The URK even produced newspaper articles and television reports demonstrating the ODV's success. To show that the scheme was trustworthy, these featured appearances by former employees expressing their happiness with the outcome, before highlighting some model retraining projects, in general those set up by managers and directors. The message was a simple one: it was entirely possible for ex-Gécamines staff to free themselves from a wage dependency sustained by a century of paternalism. They could now be self-reliant, and perhaps even start up small businesses. At the same time, however, a huge protest movement was developing, to denounce the terms of the ODV.

The Collectif des ex-agents de la Gécamines was in fact created as soon as the ODV came to an end in March 2004, its purpose being to demand payment in full of all wage arrears and other benefits in kind. The men behind it were two former directors of Gécamines in Lubumbashi – a lawyer and a sociologist – who held an informal meeting in Kinshasa with the Congolese vice-president in charge of social and cultural affairs, Arthur Z'ahidi Ngoma, before making contact with colleagues in the various towns where Gécamines operated. The Collectif quickly developed an organisational structure, with a coordinating committee in Lubumbashi, one committee for each of the three geographically defined groups within Gécamines, and branch officers for each district. Each group committee met once a week to keep former employees within each district informed about the decisions taken and results achieved. These meetings were open to all who wished to attend. At Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, these meetings have even been held in an open-air stadium, allowing local residents to fill the terraces. Thanks to its open organisational structure, the Collectif can boast that it represents all 10,000 former employees.

Being an informal organisation, the Collectif sought the help of two trade unions, Nouvelle dynamique syndicale (NDS) and Force syndicale des mineurs (FOSYMINE), to act as its official representatives. Together, the unions and the Collectif organised demonstrations in Katanga, lobbied the authorities in Kinshasa and requested support from various European organisations. After meeting officials from the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (MONUC) and the Comité international d'accompagnement de la transition (CIAT), the leaders of the Collectif and representatives of the two trade unions were received by the principal private secretary to the Congolese president, who passed their case on to Vice-President Z'ahidi Ngoma. A long process of dialogue and consultation followed, chaired by the vice-president and the minister of labour. In August 2005, the Inspecteur Général du Travail appointed to investigate the dispute delivered his verdict in favour of the Collectif: the government would have to pay all monies due to the former Gécamines employees, an estimated US$200 million plus interest accrued at 10%. All that remained was for Vice-President Z'ahidi Ngoma to come up with a viable way of financing the deal, allowing the bankrupt government to free up the budget required, and to persuade Gécamines to calculate the final reckoning due to each ex-employee.

This first victory was followed by a long wait, which ended with no concrete result. According to one representative of the Collectif, Vice-President Z'ahidi Ngoma had finally ordered Gécamines to pay its ex-staff a few days before the transitional regime ended in November 2006, but the company denied all responsibility for the ODV. The whole negotiation process therefore had to start again. However, approaches made to the incoming government (2006 to present) quickly bore fruit, with the new regime taking up the case scarcely three months after its arrival in office. The new government acknowledged the illegality of the ODV and decided to appoint a commission to calculate the exact amount payable to the ex-Gécamines staff: the sum previously suggested by the Inspecteur Général du Travail (US$200 million) had been based solely on an approximate figure provided by the Collectif.

Despite protests, letters to the authorities and petitions to the president, this commission never met. A year and half later, the minister of labour replaced it with a broader national body, the Cadre permanent du dialogue social (CPDS), which was established to give recommendations regarding all the social conflicts inherited from the Mobutu regime.⁵ The seventh recommendation of the CPDS re-emphasised the legitimacy of the struggle waged by the Collectif, and the necessity of finding the money needed to pay what was owed, but without fixing an exact amount. The determination of the new government to find a solution to the Gécamines affair was welcomed as a second victory, but it was also perceived a way of playing for time. The government intended to resolve this case along with those of teachers' salaries, the final reckoning due to ex-employees of the nationalised banks, and a civil service pension deal. Money would therefore have to be found to meet all these demands, one after the other.

A solution to this financial problem was put forward by representatives of two non-governmental organisations, Sherpa-Belgique and Comité pour l'annulation de la dette du tiers monde (CADTM-Belgique), during a visit in October 2008.⁶ They suggested that the leaders of the Collectif should put their case before the Inspection Panel of the World Bank. In their view, there were grounds for a challenge: in implementing the ODV, the Bank had flouted its own rules and procedures, which stipulate that it that must always respect the laws of any country in which it intervenes. The leaders of the Collectif initially rejected this path, and the technical assistance offered by the two Belgian associations. Having spent the preceding four years following a strategy of political conciliation, they were afraid that the Congolese authorities would lose interest in their case if they approached the World Bank instead.

Despite the disapproval of the Collectif, a member of its Central (Likasi) Group Committee went ahead in an individual capacity and contacted the two Belgian associations. They helped him to establish another organisation, the Association de défense des droits économiques et sociaux, and to put together a ‘Request for Inspection’ to the World Bank. The Request was submitted at the beginning of 2009, first on an individual basis, and then by the Association. Fearful of losing all credibility, the president of the Central Group Committee then quickly followed this example. While the members of the coordinating committee and the trade union representatives associated with them continued their lobbying work in Kinshasa, the Central Group Committee became the principal interlocutor with the World Bank. In response to the Requests made, the Inspection Panel of the World Bank undertook a mission to Likasi in May 2009. Its report recognised the admissibility of the Requests and recommended that a socio-economic survey be commissioned.⁷ A survey of 547 ex-Gécamines staff was undertaken in October 2009, which concluded that the living standards of these ex-workers had improved since implementation of the ODV.⁸

The Panel returned in January 2010, making further visits to the prime minister's office in Kinshasa and to the appellants in Katanga. The report of this mission, published in April, confirmed that the directors of the World Bank had established a framework for negotiations to find a solution to the conflict: it proposed that Gécamines should recognise its debts towards its former employees, and once again open up its schools and hospitals to them; in return, those former employees should also give up some of their demands.⁹ However, given the ‘complexity’ of the case, no further action is envisaged before 2011.

A paternalistic moral economy

This section of the article examines the arguments utilised by the Collectif in its denunciation of the way in which the ODV operated. It disputed the voluntary nature of the programme, attributing its take-up to the poverty endured by the workers since 1998. At a time when Gécamines staff had received no wages for several months, they could not give up their jobs and take up other activities on the side without the risk of losing everything. Some had to sell their household goods and furniture, while others took out loans. Having taken their children out of school, many households had nothing else to eat but bukari (maize flour) and vegetables – and no longer once a day, but every other day. Some workers, unable to buy drugs and medicines, saw their children die of preventable illnesses during this period. Given these conditions, it is hardly surprising that all employees were quick to accept the lump sum offered by the ODV. In a memorandum sent by the Collectif to DRC President Joseph Kabila, it summarised the situation as follows: ‘For us, it was take it or die, beggars can't be choosers.’¹⁰ The decision to take ‘voluntary’ severance was determined by a whole range of material and familial constraints. It was not, as ODV procedures stipulated, the result of a choice freely taken and carefully considered. The memorandum continued: ‘Is it possible to talk about voluntary severance when an employee is faced with a “life or death” dilemma, a superior power forcing him into a certain course of action, an overwhelming incentive, a state of extreme need?’

For the Collectif, the ODV was implemented under conditions which amounted to a conspiracy. According to this, those who took voluntary redundancy were the victims of a ‘swindle’ cooked up by particular leaders in Kinshasa and directors of Gécamines, who first ‘starved’ the workers to force them into accepting a derisory pay-off and then embezzled the remaining money set aside for the ODV programme. A note sent by the Collectif to the Governor of Katanga suggested that the ODV was ‘in reality nothing more than a conspiracy planned and implemented by certain sons of this country with the aim of filling their pockets at the expense of their fellow citizens’.¹¹ The origins of this theory lie in the confusion surrounding the exact size of the ODV budget, but it was also fuelled by suspicions of corruption hanging over both the union executive at Gécamines, which agreed to the ODV in 2003, and the URK, the government agency responsible for the programme of economic reintegration. Substance was added by the sudden death of World Bank consultant Catry after the ODV had ended. One leader of the Collectif interprets Catry's death as an assassination designed to conceal the colossal misappropriation of funds by the authorities in Kinshasa, with the ex-Gécamines workers bearing the brunt. Finally, one member of the coordinating committee claims to have been visited in 2005 by armed men ‘with orders to kill’, as a result of which he sent his family to safety in South Africa.

The Collectif now refuses to use the words ‘voluntary severance’ to describe something which in legal terms was a ‘mass redundancy’. These legal terms are important to the Collectif because its principal argument is that the ODV has made a mockery of Congolese law. Indeed, the Collectif draws on several bodies of rules, not simply to provide authority for its claims,¹² but also to denounce ODV procedures, in particular the calculation of the severance payment. Correspondence addressed by the Collectif to the authorities in Kinshasa and to World Bank representatives makes frequent reference to articles within agreements signed between Gécamines and the trade unions or within the Congolese labour code. In so doing, the Collectif is attempting to remind the government and the World Bank of their declared mission, that of bringing the ‘rule of law’ to the DRC. This is a magical incantation regularly adopted by the Collectif in its letters and petitions, as for example in this letter to President Kabila in 2008:

Whatever the opinion of World Bank experts, the demands made by the Collectif cannot simply be reduced to their monetary dimension. The readiness of all ex-Gecamines staff to support the demands needs also to be understood in terms of moral economy as propounded by Thompson (1971) and Scott (1976). These demands exist within a discourse that denounces the breakdown of the reciprocal relationship which formerly united the public enterprise and its workers. In their letters and speeches, the leaders of the Collectif invoke the acknowledgement of the services rendered by its members to the state. Throughout their working lives, they contributed to the economic development and international prestige of their country. Their ‘reward’ was to be dismissed in violation of their rights, and deprived of the paternalistic support (school, hospital, and so on) previously provided by their employer. They believe that their offering to the nation ought to inspire respect; instead it has been forgotten and disdained by the supervisory authorities. This is exemplified in a speech given by the President of the Central (Likasi) Group Committee to Likasi's Mayor:

The abdication of the public authorities of their responsibilities has had another, indirect, effect: it makes it difficult for ex-Gécamines men to fulfil their role as husbands and fathers. Women no longer find them desirable husbands, capable of feeding their families and offering all the comforts of the ‘modern’ home. Papa André, whose first wife left him in 1993, described his experience of contemporary views on marriage:

In its interventions, the Collectif lays claim to its members' right to subsistence, to exercise one's duties as a father, and to live a ‘good life’ by invoking ideas of human dignity and the sanctity of human life. It suggests that the redundancy programme made a mockery of the absolute moral principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, reducing ex-Gécamines employees to the status of things, of animals, or of slaves: ‘You've treated us worse than dogs,’ a representative of the Collectif called out to a World Bank official during a focus group held in September 2009. These comparisons reappear not only in the letters and speeches of the Collectif, but also during my discussions with residents in Panda. Papa Pontien:

Faced with the accusations made by the Collectif, the board of the World Bank defends the legality of the ODV, while emphasising the necessity for further root-and-branch reform of Congolese social legislation, still overly tinged with paternalism.¹⁶ The Bank also wishes to reposition the redundancy programme within a broader historical and moral framework, that of economic development and rebuilding peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the Bank, responsibility for the current situation of the ex-Gécamines employees lies above all with the company's previous management failings, its paternalistic policies, and the advanced age of those who took redundancy. Within this context, it deems its reintegration programme, as defined in its own narrow terms, a success: most people have managed to find a new occupation which permits them to survive. The most the Bank is prepared to concede is that the project of turning workers into businesspeople was illusory. Nevertheless, the ODV has fulfilled its primary objective, that of reducing staff numbers at Gécamines. The fate of former employees of the company thus appears as nothing more than collateral damage, unfortunate but essential, within a larger project of economic regeneration.

Mobilisation and representation

The demands made by the Collectif render explicit a regime of largely implicit expectations drawn from past relational experience (Siméant 2010). As such, they are the subject of consensus among ex-Gécamines staff, demonstrated in interviews and discussions with residents in Panda. The only criticisms of its campaign came from former employees happy with their earnings in their new occupation who made fun of the passivity of ‘those who wait without doing anything’. Such comments reflect the values – increasingly normalised in the towns of Haut-Katanga – of fending for oneself (Petit and Mulumbwa 2005). They do not however question the overall legitimacy of the campaign waged by the Collectif: the moral economy of paternalism remains relevant to the demands they make of their former employer.¹⁷

This consensus presupposes the pre-existence of an imagined community (Anderson 1996 [1983], pp. 19–20). The protest would have been unable to unite all ex-employees, and achieve such a scale over a long period, without the already established social and identity framework provided by membership of the Gécamines staff. Although many structural factors divide this community (hierarchical, institutional, geographic, and so on), it is also underwritten by social networks which, taken together, embrace all employees. These were the networks mobilised to form the Collectif in February 2004. An effort of this kind would have been difficult, not to say impossible, without the shared identification with a single social group, that of Gécamines employees affected by the ODV.

The formation of this Gécamines worker community derived largely from the paternalistic policies practised by the employer, first the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) and later Gécamines, from the late 1920s onwards. UMHK developed a vast network of infrastructure and institutions designed to control all aspects of the life of employees and their immediate family: marriage, housing, food distribution, schooling, family medical care, leisure opportunities and so on (Mottoulle 1946, Fetter 1973). The company also systematically encouraged its workers to mix with colleagues of different ‘tribal’ origins, thus earning it the nickname Changa changa (ku-changa means ‘bring together’). The construction of this biopolitical edifice – designed to control the workforce, increase its productivity and ensure that it reproduced itself from generation to generation – was accompanied by a paternalistic rhetoric which characterised workers as the ‘children of the Union Minière’ (Dibwe dia Mwembu 2001, pp. 45–118). This sense of family was transmitted through schools and churches, but also through the radio and the company newspaper Mwana Shaba.

Employees felt they belonged to a fixed social group that was protected and privileged within the working population of Haut-Katanga (Mwabila 1979). Many factors helped to forge this sense of belonging: community life in the different spaces offered by the company (work, circle, camp, and others); support for the symbols defining the ‘family of the Union Minière’ (uniforms, songs, ‘copper-eaters’ day', and so on); and the hierarchical and geographical mobility of workers within the same institutional network (class, works, groups, and others). From the 1980s, however, this ‘labour aristocracy’ experienced a serious deterioration in its living conditions, with rising inflation, irregularly paid wages and the abolition of several types of benefit in kind (Dibwe dia Mwembu 2001, pp. 157–195). Indeed, by 2003, the standard of living of Gécamines employees was found to have fallen below that of the urban population of Haut-Katanga as a whole.¹⁸ But this descent did not destroy the collective identity of workers, who continued to refer to what was the Gécamines family. Their recent experience has instead recast that family as a community with a shared fate, a redefinition of the membership group that was essential to the creation of the Collectif.

The historicity of the worker community at Gécamines should not be allowed to obscure the significance of the continuous mobilisation work undertaken by the Collectif and its leaders during the six years of their protest. They first had to establish their unity by overcoming social and regional divisions amongst the former employees. Although the Collectif is run by former managers, the social distance between manager and worker is constantly downplayed during meetings and assemblies by reference to a single ‘us’, that is, all those who accepted voluntary severance. ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Papa’ have replaced forms of address previously used at Gécamines, such as Chef or Ingénieur. The sometimes critical advice of former workers and labourers is listened to with deference. The extent of the privileges once enjoyed by managers, and the larger lump sums they received through the ODV, is consistently underplayed to emphasise the tragedy of the shared fate of all ex-Gécamines staff. Meanwhile, the regional split between Katangese people and Kasaïans is the subject of a deliberate public silence, in stark contrast with the bitterness it engenders during private conversations. Indeed, the terms Katangais and Kasaïen, which became very sensitive during the expulsion of Kasaïans in 1992/93,¹⁹ were never used in public meetings of the Collectif attended during the research.

The mobilisation work of the Collectif also involves the repetition at each meeting of a litany of suffering endured, rights scorned, and actions taken with the authorities. The Collectif has to maintain interest among its members by provoking their sense of injustice and involving them in its actions. Repeating the same lines week after week eventually makes members weary: ‘It's always the same old thing!’, one manager whispered to me as we left a meeting of the Central (Likasi) Group. To prevent discouragement, the Collectif resorts to a more or less subtle manipulation of information, leading members to believe that victory is imminent. After the vice-president's favourable reaction in 2005, after the seventh recommendation of the CPDS in 2008, and after the visit of the panel of World Bank experts in 2009, the leaders expressed the hope, without providing any guarantees, that the workers would be paid in the near future. Similarly, the leaders of the Collectif seek to maintain morale by claiming the receipt of material and/or moral support from abroad.²⁰

In agitating for their rights, the former employees can no longer exert pressure by striking, as they could when they worked at Gécamines. They have therefore been forced to turn to a new ‘repertoire of representation’: rallies, protests, group petitions, and lobbying the authorities (Tilly and Tarrow 2008). What would previously have been considered a social protest, internal to the machinery of state, thus acquired a truly political character. However, the collective action undertaken by ex-Gécamines staff continues to be based explicitly on a strategy of conciliation, with both the state and the World Bank. In a country run since the colonial period by a succession of authoritarian regimes, this strategy forms part of a long tradition of negotiating with the powers that be. This is not to ignore the many strikes and acts of worker resistance evident under different regimes (Higginson 1989). However, it remains true that most of the demands made were dealt with in an institutional framework, and not as a result of open confrontation in the public space.²¹

This public protest has been conducted since 2004 within a political space controlled by competing factions and dominated by the international authorities. Even the Joseph Kabila government, itself the product of a process of elite co-optation, has not wholly eradicated former divisions. The government also continues to instrumentalise its dependency on foreign powers (Bayart 1989, 1999, De Villers 2009b). Confronted with what Callaghy et al. (2001) call a ‘transboundary political formation’, the Collectif has found it difficult to establish clear lines of accountability for the ODV. At the outset, it pinned responsibility on Gécamines, but the company was referred them back to the state. The Collectif then went directly to the foreign donors, MONUC and CIAT. Directed back again to the national authorities, it expressed its grievances to the president, the vice-president, various ministers, and the provincial authorities in Katanga. Today, the leaders of the Collectif are conducting their campaign on two fronts, negotiating directly with the authorities in Kinshasa on one hand, and with representatives of the World Bank on the other. In attributing responsibility for the ODV, their discourse increasingly encompasses the whole of the ‘transboundary political formation’.

Independent of the need to establish accountability, the Collectif faces the complicated task of identifying interlocutors within this political environment who are capable of pursuing its demands. It has despatched letters and petitions to all the bodies mentioned above, in the hope that at least one of them will heed its voice. At the same time, its leaders have been careful to remain outside factional struggles to avoid linking themselves to a patron with an uncertain political future. Thus, they avoided becoming publicly linked to any single party during the 2006 elections, even while officially supporting Kabila's candidature.

Conclusion

The Collectif makes explicit a paternalistic moral economy which draws on the colonial heritage of Katanga but which uses a new language – the language of the law. What is the impact of this collective action within the political context of the Democratic Republic of Congo? The conditions might be considered ripe for the emergence of a social movement. Even if the Collectif is playing the conciliation card with the current regime, it is still taking care to guard its political autonomy. Although one cannot speak of ‘class consciousness’ in this context,²² the former employees of other public enterprises undoubtedly share the same values as the Collectif and are likely to develop campaigns based on the same corpus of law. More generally, the Collectif draws on the sympathy of retirees abandoned to their fate, of unpaid officials and poorly paid workers – that whole mass of ‘the discarded’, who willingly characterise themselves as such in comparison to the ‘grands’ (bakubwa). In contrast to observations made by Larmer (2005) with regard to Zambia, the defence of paternalism mounted by the Collectif has not, however, led to explicit criticism of neoliberal reforms implemented by the international financial institutions. There is also no form of dialogue between the former employees of different public enterprises; each group has its own set of demands, as they seek to obtain what is due to them. It was in fact their interlocutors, the Congolese government and the World Bank, which sought to deal with their claims together. The common space that this provides has not yet led to the development of a common political agenda; it is therefore too soon to talk of a social movement.

Nevertheless, the collective action undertaken by the ex-Gécamines staff certainly forms part of a more general process of political change. According to the interpretation suggested by Young (2004), the ‘democratic transition’ of the 1990s ushered in a new era for Africa, representing a partial break with its colonial inheritance. This new era was characterised by an emergent space for political expression where a critique of power could be articulated using the language of the law. It appears that the public protest movement represented by the Collectif was made possible by the political liberalisation of the 1990s. Although this did not result in a process of democratisation, it nevertheless allowed people to openly criticise those in power, both on the street and in the press (Lafargue 1996, pp. 16–17, Quantin 1997, p. 14). With the end of the regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the Collectif moved cautiously into this discursive space to claim its rights. In a semi-authoritarian polity, those in power at different levels of the state had to consider the demands made by the Collectif, and in so doing give them a degree of publicity and legitimacy. Some politicians appealed to the leaders of the Collectif to stand for their party in the elections; others adopted its demands in the hope of benefiting from the support of its members. Although opportunistic, it is this populist strategy which has allowed the fight of the ex-Gécamines staff to be linked with that of other public employees and so brought the broader problem of workers' rights into the public space (Larmer and Fraser 2007).

The most important characteristic of the action taken by the Collectif is that it has based its underlying argument on a group of national and international laws. This recourse to the law did not constitute a legal strategy, operating through tribunals. Instead it formed part of a political strategy, designed to remind actors within the political formation of the imperative nature of the rule of law (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). To adopt the terms of Bayart (1992, pp. 89–90), the Collectif constructed a language to fight the state on its own terrain. But the Collectif also mobilises this language in its relations with international donors, to force them to exert pressure on the government, or on themselves to respect national laws. How far may such a law-based discourse be capable of encouraging the formation of a protest movement in the DRC? Bodies which articulate this discourse, such as the Collectif, do not yet demonstrate the solidarity needed to unite in a social movement capable of representing a threat to authority. The language of the law is also sufficiently flexible, multi-faceted and ambiguous to be subverted by government officials in their interaction with those who make use of it in the field (Rubbers 2007b). However, the imagined state associated with that language attacks the very foundations of the Democratic Republic of Congo as a state. It therefore exerts a diffuse influence on the way donors, political actors, and ‘civil society’ organisations assess the legitimate boundaries of state action.

Note on contributor

Benjamin Rubbers teaches at the University of Liege and at the Free University of Brussels. He has a doctorate in Anthropology, and has been conducting research in Katanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for 10 years.