In Congo’s second city of Lubumbashi, a blue glass-and-steel shopping mall towers over the dust-blown skyline, dwarfing the surrounding colonial-era architecture. In 2018, then President Joseph Kabila was guest of honor at the development’s opening ceremony, using a pair of golden scissors to cut a ribbon printed in Congo’s national colors of yellow, red and blue.
Six years later, the $25 million Hypnose complex stands as a monument to the corruption that has long dogged the vast central African nation. It illustrates how money intended to develop a national ID system was leveraged to serve a small number of elite with close ties to former President Kabila, according to a joint investigation by Bloomberg News and Lighthouse Reports.
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