By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 30, 2006; A16
KINSHASA, Congo, July 29 -- There is something familiar in the stern dark eyes of one of the men who wants to be Congo's next president. Put him in a pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses and a leopard-skin hat, and he would look a lot like the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
The candidacy of his son, Nzanga Mobutu, 36, in Sunday's presidential election is among the persistent echoes of an earlier era in this troubled country, a time when its borders were secure, its prestige high and its name not Congo, but Zaire.
On the eve of the first multiparty balloting here since 1960, nostalgia was running high for a man who, though corrupt and brutal, kept united a country that has experienced little but mayhem since he was driven from power in 1997.
Though his son, who has spent most of his life outside the country, is not regarded as among the front-runners in the election, many Congolese say they crave a return to the elder Mobutu's proud, nationalist style. At campaign rallies, Nzanga Mobutu said, men sometimes wear replicas of his father's trademark leopard-skin hat.
"Under President Mobutu, people lived in peace," Nzanga Mobutu said during an interview at a family mansion overlooking the Congo River. "People lived in security."
On Thursday, the crowd roared its approval when, at a rally for another opposition candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba, a man waved a green Zairian flag, complete with the onetime national symbol of a fist clutching a flaming torch. Another man held a wooden sign bearing Bemba's image with the elder Mobutu's above it.
"He made unity in the country," Guillaume Badibanga, 30, who had the wooden sign, said of Mobutu. "Bemba is trying to do the same thing."
The election is for a president, national parliament and provincial parliaments. President Joseph Kabila, 35, is regarded by many analysts as the front-runner but is unpopular in Kinshasa, the capital, and some other areas. Should none of the 32 candidates win a clear majority Sunday, the two top vote-getters will have to stand in a second round, likely in October or November.
The government of Kabila, whose father, Laurent Kabila, drove the elder Mobutu from this central African country and renamed it Congo, has successfully scrubbed the capital of remembrances of a man regarded by many as the father of their nation.
The city has no monuments, statues or billboards bearing Mobutu's image. There is no museum or library in his honor. Even his body is in exile, buried in a cemetery in Morocco, the country to which Mobutu fled in his final months before dying of cancer.
His spectacular fall was cheered by many Congolese who had grown weary of his corrupt, repressive and, near the end, weak leadership. Yet now many voters and analysts say that Mobutu -- if he could somehow be restored both to life and to the vigor of his early years in the 1960s and '70s -- would win in a landslide.
"Absolutely," said Alexis Mutanda, editor of the Kinshasa-based newspaper La Tempete des Tropiques, waving his hands for emphasis. "If Mr. Mobutu were here today on the ballot against Mr. Kabila, I'm sure that he would win."
Mobutu, a former army officer who took power in a 1965 coup, was one of Africa's archetypal Big Men, putting his image on currency, on pictures in public buildings and on billboards across the country. The evening news began with images of him descending, god-like, through the clouds. And he changed his name to an eight-word phrase meaning "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."
He looted, by various estimates, billions of dollars in government revenue from a country whose population remained mostly poor, helping give rise to the term "kleptocracy." He so feared coups that he built few roads that might assist advancing armies, leaving a country the size of the eastern United States with only 300 miles of mostly battered pavement. And he sharply limited political debate, allowing for most of his reign only a single party -- his own Mouvement Populaire de la Revolution.
"During the Mobutu regime, we didn't have freedom of speech," said Katunda Mubalu, 48, who peddles rare memorabilia of the late president -- some currency, military medals and a book featuring Mobutu on the cover -- at a Kinshasa market. "He didn't want the country to be developed."
Yet what came after, voters say, was worse in almost every way.
After Mobutu's fall, the country endured years of devastating wars under both Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001, and Joseph Kabila, who signed a peace deal the following year. But during the strife, foreign governments and investors divvied up much of Congo's vast mineral wealth. Deaths from the years of instability were estimated at 4 million, with most coming from easily preventable diseases and famine.
The United Nations has a 17,500-member force in Congo, the largest peacekeeping operation in the world. In advance of the vote, U.N. tanks drove through Kinshasa while Congo's own military was confined to barracks.
Nzanga Mobutu's party flag borrows the color scheme and torch-in-fist symbol of Mobutu's Zaire, but the son has a problem. Though Nzanga Mobutu was briefly an aide and spokesman for his father, his years in Europe, where he attended school, and in Morocco, where he had been in exile, have undermined his credentials as a politician in Congo, analysts say. Other candidates, including Bemba, a former Mobutu adviser, and Pierre Pay Pay, a Mobutu-era governor and cabinet minister, have more successfully laid claim to his political legacy.
Yet none is nearly as popular, Nzanga Mobutu and analysts said, as Mobutu himself.
Nzanga Mobutu said his father, if he were alive, would adapt to the ways of multiparty democracy. "He would understand that the world is different," Nzanga said, "and he would have done things differently."