Building a Credible Central Bank in an Emerging Democracy

Abstract

The vaults of the Central Bank of the Congo have featured in some colourful news stories that have appeared in local and international newspapers in recent years. First, there is the claim that on the night of 16 May 1997, one of Mobutu’s sons made what has been euphemistically described as the ‘illicit withdrawal’ of $100 million in $100 bills, and an indeterminate amount of gold bullion. If this actually happened (I personally doubt that it did), it was surely quite a job to load this into the tractor-trailer trucks that were said to have carted the money away. A second story reported that the jewels and gold of the colonial era were rescued by one of the previous Central Bank governors which required workers to pump nearly 500,000 gallons of rain water out of the flooded main central bank vault in Kinshasa.