(Bloomberg) -- 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.
Congo, one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, has no national ID systems, not even for driver’s licenses. The absence of a civil registry makes day-to-day life — already marked by hunger, unemployment and the threat of political violence — significantly harder. People struggle to access basic services and secure official documents, cash checks, open bank accounts and receive money from abroad. According to the World Bank, the situation has made Congolese people “foreigners in their own land.” Nobody is sure how big the country's population is, who can vote, or who is eligible to pay tax.
“It’s impossible to govern a country if you don’t know its population,” explained Ithiel Bathumike, a researcher on biometric IDs and elections for Ebuteli, a Kinshasa-based research center supported by New York University. “How can you levy property tax if you don’t know who owns the land?”
Now, as a $1.2 billion ID contract with Idemia, a French biometrics provider owned by American private equity firm Advent International, works its way through Congolese bureaucracy, external partners and government watchdogs are warning that the project’s exorbitant price tag and unorthodox financing structure could give way to misallocated funds, once again depriving citizens of the systems needed to access basic services. Should the contract go through, it would be one of the most expensive of its type in African history.
Civil servants at the National Office for Population Identification, the agency in charge of the new ID plan, offered a stark assessment of the deal in a 2023 memorandum, the executive summary of which was reviewed by Bloomberg and Lighthouse. The confidential document, reported here for the first time, highlighted “worrying elements” including “flagrant overpricing” and the risk that the contract would end up as an “enormous scam.”
The agency, known as ONIP, and its former director did not respond to multiple emails asking for comment. Advent declined to comment.
Dual Contracts
For about two decades, Congolese leaders have been promising and failing to develop a national ID program. To understand why deals with third-party biometric companies have never panned out, Bloomberg and investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports spent more than a year looking into these arrangements, as well as interviewing more than a dozen people familiar with the negotiations and examining thousands of pages of unpublished documents.
In October 2014, Belgian entrepreneur Albert Karaziwan wrote a letter to Kabila introducing his company. Karaziwan, who owns three castles and manages a portfolio of real estate holdings, is the founder of Semlex, a family-owned firm specializing in biometric technology. Since 1992, Semlex has provided national ID cards and official travel documents to a dozen African countries. Karaziwan was offering both to Congo.
Kabila was interested. Discussions between Karaziwan and the president’s representatives took place for more than a year, through written exchanges and in-person meetings in Paris, Brussels and Dubai that have not been previously reported. Semlex’s plan was to charge Congolese $185 for a passport — an enormous sum in a country where, according to the World Bank, three quarters of the population live on less than $2 per day. Part of those profits would then be used to print national ID cards, which citizens would be given for free.
Karaziwan outlined this plan to Kabila in a letter dated November 18, 2014. “Semlex is proposing to offer the national identity card, which costs $5.00, free of charge. This cost will be absorbed by a system of compensation through the other documents entrusted to our care.”
The project was negotiated between Semlex and various state agencies, including Congo’s Ministry of Finance, Ministry of the Interior and ONIP. Over the first half of 2015, plans to develop the passport and ID systems proceeded in parallel. Semlex prepared two separate contracts in which it offered to fund, build and operate the infrastructure necessary to produce both kinds of documents.
In May, the company drafted a contract for a national ID card system that it projected would cost $430 million, the details of which were listed in the country’s 2015 annual tendering report but have not been reported until now. The next month, it signed a contract with the government to produce Congo’s passports, which it expected would cost $222 million over five years. In both cases, Semlex agreed to cover the upfront costs with the expectation that it would recoup the payments through revenue from passport sales.
But that is not how things turned out. Despite receiving formal approval, the ID project was left in limbo.
The Congolese Ministry of Foreign Affairs began selling passports in late 2015. The funds generated – originally intended to subsidize the production of ID cards – were instead redirected to the Kabila family through a disguised payment mechanism, according to two people familiar with the process. Of the $185 spent on each passport, $60, or almost a third of the total cost, went to a newly established United Arab Emirates-based company called LRPS, one of the people said. The sole director and shareholder of LRPS is Makie Makolo Wangoi — a close relative of former president Kabila — company filings show. Wangoi didn’t respond to emails and text messages asking for comment.
One of the people said that the passport deal was used as collateral by an unknown entity to secure a $25 million loan from a private bank in Congo to finance the Hypnose shopping complex. Twenty-five million went to Lubumbashi, the person said, describing Karaziwan and Kabila as partners in Hypnose.
The second person, who is involved in the current Congolese government’s efforts to procure an ID system and familiar with the details of the earlier negotiations, confirmed that the passport deal was used to secure a loan and that Hypnose was connected to the passport and ID projects. The person also added that Kabila had asked Karaziwan to act as his proxy and set up a company to manage the Hypnose construction project.
In November 2015, incorporation documents show that Karaziwan personally established a Kinshasa-based real estate company called La Congolaise de Développement Immobilier, as previously reported by anti-corruption watchdog the Sentry and the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa. This new company went on to play a leading role in building and managing the Hypnose complex.
A few months later, a gleaming glass edifice was rising out of what had been a 22,000 square meter lot in downtown Lubumbashi. And public discussion about a national ID card had all but stopped.
Today, even as the building houses dozens of retail stores, there’s little else to show for a national ID program projected to cost nearly half a billion dollars.
Semlex and Albert Karaziwan did not respond to multiple emails and text messages requesting comment about the ID and passport contracts. Spokespeople for Kabila confirmed that the former president had received Bloomberg’s questions, and promised to “give a definitive answer.” There was no further response.
Looking Ahead
When President Felix Tshisekedi took office in January 2019 following a disputed election, he quickly began to pursue his own plans for a national ID system. Hundred of pages of exclusive corporate documents obtained by Bloomberg and Lighthouse Reports offer unprecedented insight into how he went about doing so.
Confidential documents that have not previously been made public show that, starting in 2020, close to 60 companies approached the Congolese government with offers to provide such a system, an undertaking that ONIP estimated should cost around $360 million.
By the time a consortium including biometrics provider Idemia and local partner Afritech had emerged as the preferred vendor, the proposed cost had spiralled to $1.2 billion, more than three times ONIP’s original estimate, and an amount that would make it among the most expensive digital identity contracts in African history.
According to a confidential 160-page memo written in June 2023 and bearing Idemia’s and Afritech’s logos, that figure — nearly 60% of which would come from the government, with the rest from participating companies — included the cost of 8,000 biometric registration kits, the opening of several hundred enrollment centers, and the initial production of 10,000 ID cards for the Kinshasa elite. A brochure attached to the memo suggested the system could be used to create surveillance watchlists, a features that Idemia denies having promoted.
Once the contract was signed, the proposal said, Congo’s entire population — believed to be around 100 million — could be registered within a 17-month period.
The blockbuster deal was publicly presented for the first time at a press conference in December 2023, where Idemia’s Africa head and a top ONIP civil servant praised the system’s capabilities. Behind the scenes, however, it had already prompted concern in and outside the country. The World Bank, which had been approached by the Ministry of Finance about covering some of the costs of the national ID system, had informed Tshisekedi’s office in October that it would not contribute to the project because of the lack of a competitive tendering process. ONIP employees released an internal memorandum highlighting the potential for fraud.
Questions have only multiplied since then. ONIP produced its first batch of ID cards last December, distributing them to politically connected individuals in Kinshasa. Production was slated to expand, according to the agency, until the Congolese Inspectorate General of Finance (IGF), a government watchdog, opened an investigation into the contract in spring.
In a report released in June, the agency stated that the Idemia-Afritech partnership did not have enough capital to execute the project and planned to charge the government an excessive amount of money from it over time. The IGF also raised concerns that the proposed infrastructure costs were excessive and that the government’s main funding mechanism — allowing the consortium to take out a commercial loan backed by the Congolese central bank, which it would then lend back to the government to cover the government’s share of the costs — was “illegal or impossible.”
Idemia, when reached for comment, said that it “is not a party to any contract” with the Congolese government. Instead, it said that it does have a contract with Afritech to build Congo’s civil registry and print citizens’ ID cards. Samba Bathily, the chief executive officer of Afritech, said a company lawyer would respond to questions and then did not reply to follow-up emails. ONIP did not respond to repeated emailed requests for comment, and a spokesperson for President Felix Tshishekedi spokesperson asserted, “the ID contract was not handled by the presidency,” then declined to comment further.
Meanwhile, ordinary Congolese continue to struggle with the absence of an ID system. Completing basic tasks is a constant challenge. On a bright morning last November, more than 50 people were assembled in the courtyard of a community center near the presidential palace. They had been waiting since dawn in the hope of getting one of the laminated voting cards that pass for an ID in Congo. As the lettering on these cards fades quickly, people will sometimes scorch them with lighters to make the text more visible. Because of the tense situation in the country, sensitivities around government contracts and fears of repercussions, Bloomberg granted people anonymity in order to speak freely.
Among those in line was Chancel, a 40-year-old Kinshasa local who joined the queue before first light. “My card started to fade away in September,” he explained. “Now, all the banks refuse it.” Beside him, Mario, 28, had an interview for a position as a pool attendant at the US embassy. Without the ID, he wouldn’t even be allowed to enter the high-security compound, let alone get hired.
For now, ID cards are accessible only to a small clique of Congo’s elite. Last June, President Tshisekedi was photographed at a ceremony in central Kinshasa showing off the first prototype Idemia ID and touting a coming mass enrolment drive. It never came. “We issued only a few hundred cards so far, definitely fewer than a thousand,” said an ONIP civil servant who wishes to remain anonymous. Among the lucky few are high-court judges and government officials. People like Chancel and Mario are still waiting.
--With assistance from Michael J Kavanagh.
(Updates to embed Next Africa podcast link.)
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