President Joseph Mobutu Opens "OAU Village" In Kinshasa | September 1967

Saturday, September 2nd, 1967.
Reuters Text:
"President Joseph Mobutu today (Saturday) formally opened the 41-bungalow village where Africa's Heads of State will stay during their forthcoming Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit. Started last February, the construction of the village has employed about 1,000 Congolese workers and some 40 European technicians.
The village is decorated with works by students from the Kinshasa and Elizabethville art schools, and speaking at the opening ceremony, President Mobutu said it would for ever serve as a symbol of the Congo's determination to free itself, and Africa, from their shackles and backwardness. President Mobutu was accompanied by Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko.
At the village the flags of the 38 OAU member states were already flying. The summit conference itself is due to open on September 11 but will be preceded by a week-long ministerial meeting starting next Monday (September 4). The foreign ministers of Zambia and Mali, Mr. Simon Kapwepwe and Mr. Ousmane Ba, were among the first to arrive.
Meanwhile, one of the Congo's most popular jazz groups, has prepared 38 songs, one dedicated to each of the OAU member states. The main theme of each song is African unity.
Radio Kinshasa announced today that the Heads of State or Heads of Government of 25 and 38 OAU countries would attend the summit. The radio did not list the 25 countries, but M. Marcel Lengema, the Congo's roving ambassador and President Mobutu's personal representative, told a press conference later that all member countries except Malawi would attend.
M. Lengema stressed that all conditions for the security of delegates were being met."
Source: Reuters News Archive.

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Mobutu! How are you absolute Lord and Master of a Nation like the Congo and do nothing with it! You have every geological resource at your disposal and a population which has been trained under severity to toil. All you need to do is apply training and education to the population while taking the revenue from the resource extraction and investing it back into the nation and you have created a superpower. Not just a superpower, but one which is immune from foreign shocks to their industrial supply chain due to the abundance of resources internally. The only thing that Congo doesn't have is oil which it could have seized from the Franco phonic Congo or used its abundant uranium and hydropower resources to create synthetic fuels from its coal supplies. If you're going to be a dictator, don't you want to be dictator over something magnificent? Mobutu was friends with Ceauciscu of Romania, he even was the only person allowed to provide a non locally sourced a dormant for the Palace of parliament in bucharest, why didn't Mobutu take at least the Romanian example at attempting autarky?