By early 1976, Zaire was in a grave economic and financial crisis and faced international bankruptcy. Mobutu and the unproductive political elite sought debt relief from the eleven members of the Paris Club, the World Bank, and the IMF, as arrears mounted rapidly. However, the changes and reforms required by the World Bank, the IMF, and other Western donors threatened the very basis of the elite's power — access to and free use of the nation's resources. The reforms his foreign partners demanded would undermine the heart of his authority: complete personal discretion and the financial privileges and corruption that bound the system together. So Mobutu and the political elite used their control of government institutions to sabotage economic change, by manipulating their donors' economic interests against one another and by exploiting foreign anxieties about the instability that might result from a collapse of the regime.
