DR Congo: The case for taking the administration seriously
Stylianos Moshonas, Tom De Herdt and Kristof Titeca explore the challenges facing the DR Congo civil service.
The Congolese administration in its current state has long been pointed to as a major impediment to Congo’s ambition to achieve developmental outcomes: threadbare on the service delivery front, inefficient, excessive in urban settings, and corrupt – indeed indicative of the state’s predatory nature. In a sense, the civil service has come a long way: the outbreak of war in the 1990s came atop decades of economic crisis, structural adjustment, and state decline, and meant that in 2001 – when donors re-engaged with the country after ten years of absence – administrative capacity was very emaciated. Since then, though, a wide array of (mostly donor-promoted) structural reforms have been unrolled in the DRC.
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