I try not to start these kinds of threads because it just makes us all look bad, but this is beyond embarrassing.

Ya Andre Kimbuta, le faux "gouverner de la ville". Douze ans de foutaise and monthly trips to Europe, plus robbing us blind with his tax at aeroport N'djili... There are a few nice parts, but they mostly reserved for the wealthy and tourists

Things started going bad in the late 70-80's when the "Kin-Kiese" craze motived people from the country side to look for opprtunity in the big city (Mobutu's incompetence and in small part to song lyrics), and thus Kinshasa has been incredibly over-popluated for too long.

The population of  Kinshasa is now 9.5 million, almost twice the size of the entire Congo-Brazza 5.2 million. If I remember correctly, the city was originally built to handle 1 million or less. No space, no reliable electricity, no functioning city-wide sanitation system, dirty water, and a very high child mortality rate

@Matebu

This site is very much similar all across the continent with maybe the exception of the North African countries and to some degree South Africa and Rwanda. You will notice that for a place like South Africa were the whites have never really left, things atleast work. Now this has nothing to do with say that whites are better than us blacks but its just our mentality. Take someone from Kin to Europe they will behave differently in terms of how they dispose of their waste, but immediately the same person lands in Africa he starts throwing trash through car windows. Like really!

The other problems we have is like you rightly put it is the greed of our leaders. Two weeks ago i was in Switzerland, Geneva and one of my embassy friend told me a story of how everyone knows when Paul Biya the Cameroon president is in Geneva. He says, the first thing you see is the large number of latest Mercedes benz vehicles packed at Hotel Intercontinental. Then he goes on to book three floors of the hotel to himself and his cronies. And holds cabinet meetings in a foreign country, even spends most of his time in Geneva than he does in Cameroon. And this 85 year old man just "won" reelection back home. Now can you imagine the poverty and just the breakdown in systems in such a country!

@Matebu if that's true, then Kinshasa really has been regressing longer than I thought.

In Africa we are led by leaders who have no planning ahead.Except for Rwanda dare i say Kagame for all his faults Kigali is sparkling clean.You go to Zimbabwe our capital Harare is an embarrassment.Mugabe spent most of his time travelling he never had a walk in the town.His successor is useless also shields corrupt people.