| | Mobutu's undignified exit from Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) brings to a close one of the few remaining terminal spoils regimes in Africa. It creates - unlike Somalia - an opportunity for a different, more democratic and decentralised political system, though it is precisely the long process of decline, corruption and internal violence that makes terminal spoils systems so vulnerable that also makes the building of viable popular regimes in their place so difficult. So also do external constraints, pressures and forces: we may have seen the last of Mobutu, the man installed in part by the CIA, but we have not seen the last of American influence upon events. |
