Dr. Tshishimbi was a periodic participant to CEREC forums/workshops held in Washington, DC or surrounding towns, whenever he was in the country. He was a key contributor to several advocacy memorandums written by CEREC in its attempts to foster democratic governance and economic development during President Mobutu’s autocratic regime in Zaire. More recently, when Hipolyte Kanambe Kabange, AKA, Joseph Kabila, stole the presidential election of 2011 from Dr. Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, Wa Bilenga joined several other Congolese intellectuals who issued a 3-page statement on February 9, 2012, denouncing Kanambe’s 3rd usurpation of power in D.R. Congo. Wa Bilenga’s insights and arguments, based on his personal experience in politics and knowledge of governance in the country, forcefully permeated the statement. He will be solely missed in our midst as we continue the struggle for not only harnessing our immense resources to benefit the people, but also to prevent the country’s balkanization by those who have waged wars of resources and territory since 1996. These external new economic predators, who have found internal allies, continue to commit genocide and other war crimes with impunity against the Congolese people.
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St. James Catholic Church
Falls Church, Virginia
Saturday, February 25, 2023
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To the Family, friends and acquaintances:
I am here to speak on behalf of the family and in my own name, to celebrate the life and work of our beloved relative and friend and to say goodbye to a wonderful man. Wa Bilenga Tshishimbi was born on June 28th, 1942, the second son and fourth child of Bilenga Shambuyi and Kalanga Muena Nkola, in a small village near Kananga (formerly known as Luluabourg), in what is today the Kasai Central Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a boy, he enjoyed exploring the woods surrounding him, foraging for snacks of mangos and bananas, and swimming in the small tributaries of the Lulua River. When the time came, he was baptized José Ambroise, the name by which most of his schoolmates would come to know him.
Identified as a student with exceptional potential by his teachers, he was transferred to the best schools in the Kananga region, the Ndesha Primary School in 1950, a more advanced school at Tshikaji in 1955, and the Interracial Belgian secondary school known as the Athénée de Kelekele, named after this black township of Kananga, in 1959. Having achieved the highest math aptitude test scores in Kananga, in 1960 he was awarded a scholarship to continue his secondary schooling at the Athénée Royale de Kalina in Kinshasa, then known as Léopoldville. This was a great opportunity of his life, as he fled away from ethnic fighting in Kasai through the BCK Railroad and the steamer on the Kasai and Congo Rivers to reach Kinshasa in the midst of Congo’s struggle for independence. His remaining schoolmates at what became the Athénée de Kalina speak highly of his brilliance, friendship, and generosity.
Having excelled academically in one of the best secondary schools in the Congo, Wa Bilenga was awarded a scholarship to attend the Solvay Business School of the Free University of Brussels in 1963. Skeptical of his abilities, many of his privileged European classmates initially spurned him. By the end of the first semester, it was with a great sense of vindication that he answered the knocks on his dormitory door from Europeans eager to join his study groups. He graduated with honors with a university degree in business administration in 1967.
In 1969, he met and married Mwanza Nkashama Mulumba in Mbuji Mayi. They had three sons: Bilenga Mayiba (1970), Kamba Tshiabasuya (1972) and Mulumba Mulongolodi (1974). Returning to Kinshasa, he began his professional career in government finance where he rose through the ranks to become Managing Executive of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Zaire in 1974. In this position, he began hosting and traveling to meet with dignitaries in the world of development economics, including Yale University Professor Robert Triffin, who advocated for Wa Bilenga’s admission to the program of International and Foreign Economic Administration in the fall of 1975. This is when he first took his family to the United States.
From Yale, he began a Master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, and from there he moved to a doctoral program focused on applied economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1978. This is where his sister Laurette Ngalula Bilenga (best known as Tantine) arrived to help raise his sons. It was my luck to meet this family at Cornell in September 1979.
At Cornell, Wa Bilenga was successful in applying the Foster-Greer-Thorbeck (FGT) Poverty Index to the study of nutrition in poor countries like the Congo (then Zaire). His success in this regard was a factor in his being invited to take a position in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, DC, in 1981. At the IMF, he became Alternate Executive Director of the African Department. In this capacity, he traveled to nearly every country in Africa and beyond.
With his reputation in international development financial institutions, he was appointed Minister of Finance in Mobutu’s Zaire in February 1985. Wa Bilenga told me that Mobutu summoned him up one day to the President’s office and stated, and I am paraphrasing, that you owe your job to the IMF, since they expect you to fight corruption. So, the first thing I want you to do is to prepare for me a report showing how money is being stolen from the government. Ever the patriot, Wa Bilenga prepared a detailed report showing how ministers were stealing the people’s money. He was dismissed from his job as a result of doing what he was asked to do.
While in Zaire, he met and married Mulaja Kongolo (now Emily Mulaja Tshishimbi) in 1985, and together they had four daughters: Kalanga Muena Nkola (1986-1988), Lusa Maweja (1988), Ngalula Tumuteka (1989) and Mishika wa Beya (1995).
Having returned to Cornell in 1987, Wa Bilenga collaborated with Peter Glick of USAID in doing research on the Congo, which resulted in a published work entitled Economic Crisis and Adjustment in Zaire (1993). In 1994, he returned to the family home in McLean, Virginia, and took a position as a Special Advisor to the Executive Director of the African Department of the World Bank, from which he ultimately retired in 2007.
Throughout his life, Wa Bilenga Tshishimbi was well known in the community as a man of real honor and dignity, a loyal friend, a generous host, and an exacting and tenacious conversationalist. I can attest to all of these qualities during 41 years of friendship. Two of the best recollections I have are the three weeks I stayed at his home in Kinshasa in August 1991. I accompanied him several times to a recreational park where he was sponsoring and at times coaching a group of young women basketball players. Several times during each of those three weeks, we had long and very fruitful discussions on the political situation of our country with the head of the Congolese democracy movement, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba.
Those who conversed frequently with Wa Bilenga found him to be, as he was described by Ambassador Howard Walker to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975 as “an acute observer of all things political and economic” both domestic and international. He was an avid reader both professionally and personally, amassing a collection of over a thousand books. For his reading pleasure, he enjoyed the novels of Fredrick Forsyth, John Le Carré and Robert Ludlum.
On the other hand, his favorite activity was playing and watching the game of tennis. A patron of the Citi Open since 1982, he didn’t miss a tournament until the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Initially drawn to the exploits of Arthur Ashe, among his favorite players to watch were Yannick Noah, Bjorn Borg, Roger Federer and even John McEnroe, whose unruly behavior he abhorred, but whose talented “jeu de paume” he admired. In his retirement, he took up the game of golf, and became an avid cyclist, who particularly enjoyed riding about the scenic surroundings of National Mall and the Tidal Basin. Most of all, he thoroughly enjoyed the company of his beautiful grandchildren, Mwanza Mulaja (2009) and Mulumba Mulongolodi Junior (2012).
He will be interned within view of his beloved daughter Kally, at the National Memorial Park in Falls Church, VA. He was very loved and will be very missed.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
The first draft of this obituary was provided by the family.
