Language in education and the media in the evaporating state of the DR Congo

Since the early 1990s, Zaire, renamed “the Democratic Republic of the Congo” (DRC) in 1997, has been led by governments that have increasingly evaded their responsibility to provide the population with basic services, such as security, administrative stability, legal certainty, an energy supply, road infrastructure, health care (or at least a health-care infrastructure), and school education. This situation has gradually led to the disappearance of such services, or to their commodification onto the free market (Trefon et al. 2002; Reno 2006). In the French literature on this subject, this typical late-twentieth-century evaporation ..................