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Zaire THE SECOND REPUBLIC, 1965-90: THE REBIRTH OF BULA
MATARI
In retrospective justification of his 1965 seizure of
power,
Mobutu later summed up the record of the First Republic as
one of
"chaos, disorder, negligence, and incompetence." Rejection
of the
legacy of the First Republic went far beyond rhetoric. In
the first
two years of its existence, the new regime turned to the
urgent
tasks of political reconstruction and consolidation.
Creating a new
basis of legitimacy for the state, in the form of a single
party,
came next in Mobutu's order of priority. A third
imperative was to
expand the reach of the state in the social and political
realms,
a process that began in 1970 and culminated in the
adoption of a
new constitution in 1974. By 1976, however, this effort
had begun
to generate its own inner contradictions, thus paving the
way for
the resurrection of a bula matari ("he who breaks
rocks")
system of repression and brutality.
Data as of December 1993
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