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Tim Butcher QUOTES

Tim Butcher QUOTES

21 " Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

22 " In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian colonial rule, the Congo was the world’s epicentre for mercenary activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times, for the government, against the government, against the United Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively, white) had more venal motives – a passion for violence and loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

23 " And he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

24 " It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

25 " Belgian colonial law barred Congolese from reaching senior positions in the army, civil service, judiciary or other organs of state, and by the time the colonialists left, the country had barely a handful of graduates. Control of the Congo fell into the hands not of a cadre of trained, experienced, educated leaders, but of young turks who suddenly found themselves vying for positions of enormous influence. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

26 " Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

27 " We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

28 " I visited white-supremacist websites, designed by American racists, in which the Congo was held up as proof of the black man’s inferiority. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

29 " the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

30 " I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than sovereignty "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

31 " Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

32 " the Congo government had enough money from mining to promise the mercenaries extravagant pay packages, but they often ended up paying themselves. It became routine on operations when entering a Congolese town for the mercenary forces to hurry to the local bank, blow open the safe with dynamite and take whatever was inside. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

33 " What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi’s cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa’s problems. Until the Congo’s economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

34 " If you think you can solve Africa’s problems with money, then you are a bloody fool. You solve Africa’s problems by creating a system of justice that actually works and by making the leaders accountable for their actions. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

35 " The collapse of the state in this large swathe of Africa meant that its people either relied on the charity of outsiders or took to violence. I must have looked bit dejected because Louise tried to lighten my mood. 'From my point of view as a church worker,it's great.'she said.When I go on leave back to the UK and I go into a church on Sunday,I am the youngest person there by a long way. But here in the Congo,I am always the oldest. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

36 " I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low-budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

37 " But his only advice to me, the novice, was: ‘Just two things to remember in Africa – which tribe and how many dead. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

38 " I was born here in the Congo. When my parents took me as a child back to Greece, it was more primitive than here. I used to look forward to coming back to the Congo because it was more advanced than Greece. Can you imagine that? "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

39 " The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

40 " Mining might convey an image of industry or technology, but I found this was not the case in the Congo. In the so-called ‘mines’, a brutally primitive process was in place involving what was effectively slave labour clawing minerals from the earth so that they could be shipped to eager cash buyers in the developed world. President Kabila headed what was effectively a cobalt and diamond cartel, while two rival factions (one backed by neighbouring Uganda, the other by Rwanda) divided up the rest of the country’s resources. Crudely, Uganda got gold and timber, and Rwanda got tin and coltan – a mineral used in mobile telephones. "

― Tim Butcher , Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart