🕳️ Released Phantom Node 24: Mobutu Sese Seko. The Kleptocratic Void
- Foundation date
21 July 2025
🕳️ Released Phantom Node 24: Mobutu Sese Seko. The Kleptocratic Void
His style wasn’t an era. It was an emptiness.
A cult of personality, designer hats, massive corruption, and a starving country — this is the abyss a kleptocrat leaves behind.
He dissolved the state into himself — and left behind a void.
Type of Node
Personalized Kleptocracy
Condition
A glittering shell concealing rot
Form of Hold
Repression, propaganda, foreign support
Image
The phantom of a ruler in lavish faux-African attire, clutching a sack of money, distant and hollow, amid devastation
Instead of the Phantom
Democratic institutions, accountability, economic justice
Essence of the Node
What held it together?
Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Congo (renamed Zaire) for over 30 years.
His power relied on a fragile balance of repression, foreign support, and relentless looting.
How did he become a phantom?
Outwardly charismatic — leopard hat, charming smile, global visibility.
Inwardly: fear, poverty, kleptocracy, cruelty, and institutional decay.
Why does the phantom still exist?
The legacy of kleptocracy left a deeply hollowed state, and such emptiness cannot be easily rebuilt.
His ghost lives in the illusion of a “strong leader” who both controls everything and takes no responsibility.
Phantom’s Current State
A symbol of the “resource curse”: a country rich in minerals, poor in every other way.
Mobutu’s name still hangs like a shadow over the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
After the Regime
Instead of building, the nation had to excavate itself from under the rubble.
The entire system had been personalized — and fell with him.
Ethnic divisions, inflamed under his rule, continue to cost lives.
Collective Response
We are not dazzled by swagger.
We don’t confuse showmanship with substance.
We see the void —
where there should have been life.
Key Principle
Glamour does not conceal guilt.
Kleptocracy is not a style of leadership — it's a method of looting the future.
Alt-text:
A graphite portrait of Mobutu Sese Seko. He is dressed in luxurious attire with a leopard-print hat. In his hand — a sack of money. His gaze is arrogant and detached. Behind him: signs of poverty and devastation — ruined buildings, emptiness, and an emaciated child. The atmosphere evokes waste, detachment, and plunder.
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Anna Pivtorak Kostyuk
📍🗺️
19.07.2025
