Joseph Mobutu was the Congo’s authoritarian president from 1965 to 1997. After the Congo’s independence from Belgian rule, Mobutu continued Belgium’s extractive practices and amassed a private fortune of several billion dollars while the majority of his people lived in abject poverty. Acemoglu and Robinson view Mobutu’s regime as a classic example of how extractive institutions enrich the elite while neglecting and impoverishing the masses.
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Joseph Mobutu Character Timeline in Why Nations Fail
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Chapter 3: The Making of Prosperity and Poverty
...institutions? Not necessarily, they argue. For instance, after the Congo’s independence in 1960, President Joseph Mobutu created extractive economic institutions to enrich himself because he knew he would surely lose power...
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...absolutist system with more extractive economic institutions. And after the Congo became independent in 1960, Mobutu repeated this pattern. While Mobutu extracted as much wealth as he could from the country,...
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