 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The World Bank knows that the money is being misused. So it's quite surprising that they continue to give money to the DRC. And what does that actually say? I mean, the history of the World Bank and IMF, as I just listed in the past few years, has been that they provide funds to African leaders who seem to be on the side of Washington, even with the human rights abuses and corruption and any other issues that they may have, they continue to provide them with funds. On July 5th, Malangu Kabedimabui became the first female governor of the Central Bank of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This appointment was made by DRC's President Felix Shisaketi. The appointment of a female head of the Central Bank for the first time is being hailed widely. However, many are concerned about the kind of policy decisions Kabedimabui will take given her record of working with the IMF for many years. Beyond its symbolic significance, what does Mabui's appointment mean in terms of the larger role played by financial institutions such as the IMF and the DRC? So within the country, there has been celebration around this, mainly from a superficial level, because a woman has been elected in a very important office, the Central Bank of the country. There is a need to have women representation in DRC. The women in the Congo are the majority of the population and should be the one in many parts of the lives of the Congolese people within government and the society itself. Their voice should be heard and should be lived in the country. Particularly for Malangu Kabedimabui, the thing that is worrying me is her background. She's a former technocrat with the World Bank, with the IMF particularly. Having an insider from the IMF leading an institution such as the Central Bank, one will be worried about which policies she may be pushing to post-stabilize the economy. We have experiences looking at Latin American countries, particularly Venezuela, where you had a former Bretton Wood individual who led the coup in Venezuela that was unsuccessful against Hugo Chavez. We knew that they were going to push for neoliberal policies that will negatively affect Venezuela. So now looking into the Congo, that's how I'm looking at this. What will this new Central Bank director do? Even though she's the first female to have the position, Congo is still a new colonial state controlled by Western nations, controlled particularly by the United States in the pursuit of controlling strategic minerals in the DRC. So that is my worry about the appointment to actually understand what is it that she would be doing as a Central Bank director who's just been appointed. The Bretton Wood institutions in the DRC have a fascinating and devastating record. Remember in the early 1980s, I'll say 1981, the IMF themselves actually audited the finance they were giving the president at the time, the president at the time was Mobutu. In their own audit, they discovered that the money that was being given to the country was being embezzled. Surprisingly, the year after, they continued to provide more and more funds to Mobutu. We can see with the structural adjustment program where they forced the Congolese states back then, Zaire, to pretty much privatize many of its sector to move money away from education, public education, and focus more on mining and so on, how he had a devastating impact in the country. By the end of the 1980s, we saw a deterioration, a complete deterioration of the Zairean economy back then, and many African countries suffer from that. The same thing we continue to see in Congo, right in the 2000s, during the war, we had Laurent Kabila, who took power, then later Joseph Kabila, after the death of Laurent Kabila in 2001. We continue to see that the World Bank funds projects in DRC while they see questions of corruption. There is another element that's also fascinating about these two institutions, World Bank and IMF. Many people do not know that in the early 2000s that the World Bank and IMF, they wrote the forestry laws of the Congo, they wrote the mining laws of the Congo, pretty much determining how mining will be done. Some of the laws pretty much gave control of the land to mining companies from the surface all the way to the magma for the exploitation. We had people such as a member of Poland called Utundula who fought it. There were many others who mobilized to challenge some of the policies. We're still fighting to transform all of those things, but it's still ongoing. Now to modern day, we are now in the past two to three years, we've seen the World Bank literally giving away money that they know there's going to be misuse. When Felix Chisakedi became the president of the Congo, I was declared the winner of the 2018 election, which was quite contested because of all the irregularities in it. We saw how in March of that year he visited Washington. He had meetings with mining companies, but he had another meeting that was fascinating. His first visit to Washington DC, he actually met with Christine Lagarde while being accompanied by the U.S. Ambassador Mike Hammer in these meetings. And in coming out of these meetings, we saw how the World Bank stopped giving billions of dollars to the DRC. They gave money for education. They gave money for infrastructure projects and others with some stipulation. Year after, they've had audits on the funds being used, and the audit of the World Bank themselves and the IMF World Bank audit show that the money that was destined for education was misused, that there were many schools that were fictitious, teachers that did not exist. This money was geared toward the presidential program of providing free education to the Congolese, free elementary school to youth in the DRC. But it's clear that now that the money was embezzled. Even worse, the Minister of Education was caught a few months ago across the river, the Congo River in Brazzaville, fleeing the country with $3 million cash on him. He was actually arrested in Brazzaville and then sent back to the DRC, where he still faces trial for embezzlement of money. So we at least know $3 million was about to flee the country. So the World Bank knows that the money is being misused. So it's quite surprising that they continue to give money to the DRC. And what does that actually say? The history of the World Bank and IMF as I just listed in the past few years has been that they provide funds to African leaders who seem to be on the side of Washington, even with the human rights abuses and corruption and any other issues that they may have, they continue to provide them with funds. In the case of DRC, the most blatant corruption case that's happening in the country right now is that this past month of June 2021, members of parliament in DRC have received a gift, a gift of a SUV. We have 500 members of parliament and the state has bought 500 SUVs to give to the members of parliament. So the Congolese population right now is at range. People are demanding accountability. Why are they being given this SUV? They're seeing that as a way of moral corruption to the members of parliament because there are laws to be passed and process to be implemented around the 2023 elections, the electoral commission laws and many other laws that need to be passed. So the population is saying that the state is trying to corrupt the members of parliament to be in favor of the current president. But this information is not just known to me, it's also known to the World Bank and IMF. So we see that as a way, the way they are providing the money to the DRC to strengthen the regime of Elixir Chisaketi, which is marred with so many corruption cases and of course to maintain meaning power beyond 2023 as many political leaders are doing. So in the end, having a first female central bank director, why he may be presented as a positive thing, we must be scrutinizing what are the policies that she will implement as right now the World Bank wants to give the Congo $1.5 billion on top of the billions of dollars that given in the past three years. Where will this money go? How will we pay? And let's be frank, does Congo need a loan from the World Bank? The country is seen as a wealthy country. Factually, people say that the wealth of the Congo is around $24 trillion, which is the Europe and the US GDP combined. How come a country so rich with so much mineral wealth, gold, diamond, zinc, copper, oil, still has to get money from the World Bank? Economists will say that Congo is cast trap. I will argue that Congo is becoming a colony of the United States, where policies that's happening in the DRC is being directed from Washington, from London, where Brenton Buenos and Tushas such as the World Bank and IMF support oppressive regime, support a corrupt regime to stay beyond the term or re-election and so on, while the Congolese people are continuing to fight to have a free Congo. And the Congolese youth, the Congolese people, understand that we've been through this before, that we are continuing to fight so that the leaders of tomorrow, even though at the present time we are not there yet, that the leaders of tomorrow are now running to Washington or London or Paris to ask for loans, that we actually use our land and resources, exploit them for the benefit of the masses in the Congo.