For two decades, Congolese leaders have promised and failed to implement a national identification program. To understand why the deals with biometric companies never came to fruition, Bloomberg, Lighthouse Reports, and Actualite.cd spent more than a year studying the deals, interviewing more than a dozen people familiar with the negotiations, and reviewing thousands of pages of unpublished documents. After the revelations about the Idemia/Afritech consortium, this second part of the investigation focuses on the Kabila years
In Lubumbashi, everyone knows the Hypnose shopping center. For its public debut on June 2, 2018, the developers organized a big party. The Alex Reed of honor? Congolese President at the time, Joseph Kabila. Standing next to his wife, Olive Lembe di Sita, it was he who inaugurated the building and cut a ribbon printed in the national colors of Congo with a pair of golden scissors. At the time, no one revealed the links between Hypnose and the national identity card project.
Yet this futuristic building, which reportedly cost $25 million to build, helps us understand why the project failed.
The details of the decade-old deal, which have never been revealed, illustrate how money that was originally intended to benefit millions of Congolese citizens was used, through shell companies and secret negotiations, to serve a small circle of wealthy individuals with close ties to former President Kabila.
It all began in October 2014. At that time, Belgian entrepreneur Albert Karaziwan wrote a letter to Joseph Kabila to introduce his company. Karaziwan, who owns three castles and manages a real estate portfolio, is the founder of Semlex, a family business specializing in biometric technology. Since 1992, Semlex has provided national identity cards and passports to a dozen African countries. Karaziwan offered both to the DRC.
Joseph Kabila is interested. Discussions between Karaziwan and the president’s representatives have been going on for more than a year, through written exchanges and in-person meetings in Paris, Brussels, and Dubai. Semlex’s plan? Charge the Congolese elite $185 for a passport—an enormous sum in a country where, according to the World Bank, three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Some of the profits would then be used to print identity cards, which citizens would receive for free.
Karaziwan presented this plan to Joseph Kabila in a letter dated November 18, 2014. “Semlex proposes to offer free of charge the national identity card which costs 5 dollars. This cost will be absorbed by a compensation system through the other documents entrusted to us.”
The project was then negotiated between Semlex and various government agencies, including the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Interior, and the National Office for Population Identification (ONIP). During the first half of 2015, the passport and ID card projects moved forward in parallel. Semlex prepared two separate contracts in which it proposed to finance, build, and operate the infrastructure needed to produce both types of documents. In May, the company drafted a contract for a national ID card system that it projected would cost $430 million. The following month, it signed a contract with the government to produce Congolese passports, which it expected would cost $222 million over five years. In both cases, Semlex agreed to cover the initial costs, hoping to recoup payments through revenue from passport sales.
But that is not what happened. Despite receiving a notice of no objection from the Directorate General for Public Procurement Control (DGCMP), the identity card project remains definitively on the shelf.
Congo’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, began selling passports in late 2015, Congolese media reported. According to two sources familiar with the negotiations, the funds generated by its sales – originally intended to subsidize the production of identity cards – were instead redirected to the Kabila family through a disguised payment mechanism. Of the $185 spent on each passport, $60, or nearly a third of the total cost, went to a newly formed company in the United Arab Emirates called LRPS, one of the people said, confirming a Reuters report. Financial documents seen by this investigation name Makie Makolo Wangoi, a close associate of former President Kabila, as the sole director and shareholder of LRPS. Makie Makolo Wangoi did not respond to requests for comment when contacted.
One source familiar with the negotiations said the passport contract was used “as collateral” to secure a $25 million loan from a private Congolese bank to finance the Hypnose shopping complex. “$25 million went to Lubumbashi,” the person said, describing Karaziwan and Kabila as “partners” in the Hypnose project. The second source, who is involved in the current ID negotiations and is familiar with the details of the previous negotiations, confirmed that the passport contract, obtained in 2015 by Semlex, was used to secure a loan and that the construction of Hypnose was linked to the passport and ID card projects. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also added that former President Kabila had asked Karaziwan to act as his proxy and create a company to manage the Hypnose construction project.
A few months later, a gleaming glass building rose on what had been a 22,000-square-metre wasteland in central Lubumbashi. In Congo, the debate over the identity card had ceased.
Semlex, Albert Karaziwan, ONIP and Joseph Kabila did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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2024-08-10 12:17:31
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