** Kinshasa: When the bakery of the debacle owes its life to an ignored pit **
In Kinshasa, as in many big cities, traffic is a permanent puzzle. But on avenue Plateau, the situation has reached a new dimension of absurd. For more than six months, a gaping hole has been sorted in the middle of the road as a monument with ineffectiveness. A pit, dug by agents from the Office des Voirs and Drainages (ODV), has become a game board for the bad habits of the drivers and a field of anxiety for local residents.
When a mother takes the road to buy bread, she surely does not expect to have slalom between cigarettes, waste and fetid smells of urinal. However, it is this reality that the Kinois must have apprehended since September 14 – the date that this hole emerged as an urban anomaly.
The world of town planning is a chess game where pieces only move too rarely, and often at the wrong time. The challenge here is what we could call “reactive town planning”. This pork butcher, whose voice is shaking up, stresses that “the authorities do not anticipate and await the damage to regret later”. But who are these authorities really? Are they too busy paving promises to take care of what’s going on before their eyes?
A breath of concern crosses the testimonies that I have collected: the agents of the ODV promise mountains and wonders, but there is only their response a vague dust above an equally vague pit. In the meantime, this gaping void, surrounded by commercial activity, has become a symbol of the artistic vagueness of urban management in Kinshasa – a city where unpredictability is almost the norm.
Local residents speak of “consequence after consequences”. The rains delight the ground, widening the pit and transforming the clay sand into a real trap for pedestrians. The scene refers to something bigger – this chronic inability to act before it is too late, but never too late for responsiveness.
This pit is not just an inconvenience – it is a distorting mirror of infrastructure management in Kinshasa. An echo of the uncertainty that hangs over the future of merchants and inhabitants of the surroundings. Meanwhile, the neighboring bank, with its glass offices, observes inexpressively. Men in a tie suit do not look shaken by the inconveniences that affect those who dance around the hole like spectra in a haunted house.
At the national level, these stories are not isolated. The infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo is an unfinished project, a promise of progress that cannot see the light of day. The country was built on foundations of dust and forgetfulness, corruption and negligence. Today’s pit is also the inability to think of the city of tomorrow, to anticipate the needs of a growing population.
So who should expect to restore order in the heart of Kinshasa? Perhaps it is time to break this illusion of helplessness and to realize that it is not only a question of repairing roads, but of building a city, a real habitat-a space where humans can live, and not simply survive.
Voices are rising in the ambient crash, but how long will they have to shout before being really listened to? There is, here, a palpable tension between the urgency of acting and the silence of political decisions. In the end, this pit, which usually should only be a fleeting nuisance, has become the symbol of a collective failure – a call for awareness.
This call should resonate in Kinshasa as a rallying cry: it is time to go beyond dread and act. Because basically, these streets, these pits and these promises are our city. This is a pride that we have to claim, not a burden to wear.