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Banking in Congo
刚果的银行业
Cash in a canoe
木船运钞
A new system for paying civil servants puts banks through their paces
公务员工资支付方式翻新，银行加快发展脚步
IMAGINE if, to collect your salary each month, you had to walk to the nearest town, perhaps tens of miles away, to congregate in a school or a football pitch or a church. There, you and your colleagues wait for a man to arrive from the capital, perhaps a thousand miles away, with a suitcase of cash. Most of the time, you do not receive as much money as you should. Sometimes the man does not arrive at all.
可以想象一下，每月为了工资，你必须走到最近的镇子，可能会十几英里远，然后和同事在某个学校或某个足球场或是某个教堂里等，等一个从千里之外的首都来的人，带着一个现金箱。多数时候，你不会拿到应得的钱。有时，这个人也根本不会来。
Until recently, that is how most government employees in the Democratic Republic of Congo were paid. But over the past three years the government has been urging civil servants to open bank accounts, to which their pay can be transferred directly. In the process, it is accelerating the spread of banking in an economy that, according to Michel Losembe, the bow-tied president of the Congolese Banking Association, is “not very far off barter”.
最近，在刚果民主共和国，多数政府职员才用上述方式拿工资。但是过去三年里，政府一直在催促公务员，让他们开设银行帐户，工资直接打入帐户。这个过程加速了银行业在这样一个经济中的发展。这个经济体用打着领结的刚果银行业协会主席米歇尔·洛桑贝的话说就是，“不是先前的易货经济”。
Few countries are as corrupt as Congo. A persistent national joke concerns a mythical “Article 15” of the constitution, which reads “Débrouillez-vous”—“You’re on your own”. Mobutu Sese Seko, a former strongman, used state funds to charter a Concorde to take him on shopping trips to Paris. By the time of his overthrow in 1997, graft was endemic. Government employees were not paid but rather expected to use their positions to make a living.
没有哪个国家像刚果这样腐败。长期以来，全国流传着一个笑话，是关于宪法神秘的“第十五条”，规定“Débrouillez-vous”――“你得靠自己”。 蒙博托·塞塞·塞科曾经是位强人。他曾用国家资金，坐着协和号包机，飞到巴黎购物。1997年下台时，腐败已屡见不鲜。政府职员拿不到工资，而是期望利用手中的权利谋生。
Civil war engulfed Congo in the 1990s and 2000s. As it wound down, government was rebuilt and money again began to flow out of Kinshasa, the capital, to roughly 1m functionaries in the rest of the country. But corruption did not disappear. Among the most prized government jobs was that of accountant: the people responsible for transporting bags of cash to the provinces to hand out to employees.
1990年代至2000年代，内战淹没了刚果，政府千疮百孔。重建后，首都金沙萨再次散金，把钱发给近100万名的公务员。可是，腐败并未消失。政府最值钱的职位是会计，因为这些人负责把现钞袋传给各省，再发给职员。
In 2012, however, the Congolese government started helping civil servants to open bank accounts. Around three-quarters of them—some 670,000 people—now have one. In the process, the government has weeded out tens of thousands of ghost employees, since the embezzlers who invented them could not open accounts in their names without a matching ID.
然而，2012年，刚果政府帮助公务员开通银行帐户。现在，约四分之三的人（总共约67万）都有了银行帐户。在这个过程中，政府清除了成千上万的内鬼，因为盗用公款的人，名不符实，无法开通帐户。
Yet in a vast country with fewer roads than Luxembourg, hardly anyone lives anywhere near a bank branch. So Congolese banks must now do the work the government accountants used to: shipping money to the back of beyond. Cash has to be transported to branches in regional capitals, and thence to account-holders on the backs of motorbikes, in canoes or by foot, explains Oliver Meisenberg, the German boss of Trust Merchant Bank, one of Congo’s biggest.
刚果虽然地域广大，但公路比卢森堡少。在这样一个国家，很少有人住在银行旁边。因此，刚果银行现在的工作就是曾经国家会计的工作：把钱运到僻远地区。刚果最大的银行信托商业银行的德国理事奥利弗·梅森伯格解释说，资金先转到省会城市，再由摩托车、独木舟或是徒步押运。
Bank staff with suitcases of cash make easy targets, just as they did in the west of America in the 19th century. Though they usually travel with army escorts, there have been at least ten armed robberies of bank employees since January, says Mr Losembe. One particularly brutal raid in September in South Kivu, in the wild east of the country, killed 13 people.
银行职员既要保护现金箱，还要力抗匪徒，跟19世纪美国西部一样。虽然通常是武装押运，但1月以来，武装抢劫至少十起，洛赞伯先生说。9月，刚果西部荒凉的南基伍省抢劫特别惨烈，死亡13人。
Congolese bankers hope that the new system will spur the growth of a proper banking sector. At the moment banks are little more than money-transfer companies, and not very sophisticated ones at that. The transfers tend to go only one way—out of Kinshasa—so cannot be netted against each other; instead cash almost always has to be moved physically. Depositors mistrust both banks and the Congolese franc. To attract dollar deposits, banks must pay at least 6% annual interest; rates for borrowers are generally as high as 25%. There is hardly any corporate lending beyond short-term overdraft facilities.
刚果银行家希望，新的支付系统会刺激银行业的适当发展。目前的业务只是转帐，功能还不完善。转帐只从金沙萨单向转出，因此不能相互赢利；而且现金必须靠人力运送。存款人不信任银行和刚果法郎。为了吸收美元存款，银行年利率至少只能是6%；贷款利率通常会高达25%。除了短期透支贷款，几乎没有企业贷款。
A decade ago there were just 50,000 bank accounts in the whole country, which has a population somewhere between 60m and 80m. Now there are 3m. As more employees get accounts, selling them loans and insurance, and moving them from cash to mobile transactions, becomes more realistic. In the meantime, actually receiving their salaries at all marks a big step forward for civil servants.
十年前，全国仅5万个银行帐户，而全国人口为6000万至8000万之间，现在银行帐户300万个。越来越多的职员开通了银行帐户，给他们放贷，出售保险，以及现金交易转向移动交易，都变得更加现实。同时，公务员确实得到工资，这才是大进步。
