My first visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was in 1999. Soon after touching down at Kinshasa's Ndjili International Airport -- which is quite some distance from the sprawling city of 10 million people -- one of the things I immediately noticed about the central African country was the terrible state of the roads.
When I returned to Kinshasa in 2011, I was stunned to discover that the country had still not completed constructing a road I had seen workmen attempting to tar 12 years before. The realisation hit me like a tonne of bricks. I just could not wrap my head around the unsettling idea that a nation endowed with the richest array of precious minerals on the face of the planet could fail to apply a thin layer of asphalt in 12 long years.
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