Today I'm speaking with an American journalist who divides his time between Europe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And Democratic should really be considered aspirational in this case.

He's been reporting on the politics and economics of Central Africa for over a decade and on Congo specifically for Bloomberg News since 2009.

His work has won several awards including the Edward R. Murrow Award, and I'm delighted that his article, together with his co-authors, Franz Wilde and Thomas Wilson,

describing the Kabila Family's Business business empire earned an honorable mention this year

from the independent judges who select the Trace Prize for investigative reporting. Michael Kavanaugh,

thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. The DRC is a tough neighborhood. It ranks near the bottom

of the Trace Matrix, which tracks transparency across four different domains and it does poorly across

all four. Perhaps you could start by describing your own experience of the DRC. And parts of that country

are combat zones, especially in the east. There have been some horrifying human rights violations.

Most people survive. The statistic is on less than $2 a day, but you've lived there.

Is there a veneer of good governance, or is the corruption pretty blatant?

I would say that corruption is pervasive and blatant, whether it's when you wake up in the morning

and the electricity company has come to your door and is asking for a bribe just to keep the lights on,

or when you walk out the door and you drive down the road and the police are stopping you.

The moment when you get to a meeting with a minister and really what you're asking about

is the latest mineral deal or mines deal in the various payoffs and bribes that were done

to make the deal happen.

So at every level of Congolese life, you see the problems

with weak institutions and you see the problems pervasive of corruption. Of course, you know,

the thing I would say is that the people who hurt the most, I mean, as we all know, right,

corruption is a regressive tax against the poorest. And so what you see is incredible poverty in

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