By Australian journalist Philip Luker

I took her picture in Lubumbashi, the second biggest city in the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo, which is far from being democratic.

It is the world’s richest country for minerals, the world’s poorest country for average annual income per person ($A394) and according to the Save the Children Fund the toughest country for mothers.

Malaria death rates in the Congo

One in thirty mothers like Binti die in childbirth. One province, North Kivu, has three practicing gynaecologists for 800,000 people.

Women average six births each, illustrating the worldwide need for a massive contraception campaign organised by the United Nations and backed by all governments and particularly by the Catholic Church and Islam.

Nineteen per cent of the Congo’s children under five die from malaria. Most people do not have access to clean water.

The Congo has gone downhill since the British explorer Henry Stanley was sent by King Leopold 11 of Belgium in 1871 to find the missing explorer David Livingstone.

Stanley’s welcome, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” went into history.

How many people were killed in the Congo genocide?

The criminal king claimed Congo as his personal territory and sent his soldiers there to kidnap Congolese men to work as slaves to mine Congo’s wealth.

Of 5,000 government jobs before independence, only three were held by local people and there was not a single Congolese lawyer, doctor, economist or engineer when the Belgians packed their bags and returned to Belgium.

They left the country they had taken over for plunder with no administration and no skilled professional or tradespeople.

Second biggest city in the Congo: Lubumbashi

Binti’s home town used to be called Elizabethville, named by the king after his wife.

It is Congo’s mining centre for copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, oil and coltan, a key component of mobile phones. But only foreign mining companies and crooked local politicians have benefitted.

Trainloads of copper go straight from foreign-owned mines to the border. Now as Lubumbashi, Binti’s city has 1.5million people and is Congo’s second biggest city after its capital Kinshasa, the world’s poorest city.

Kinshasa used to be called Leopoldville, which the king named after himself.

Congo has had almost continual civil war since independence in 1960. It is the bloodiest war since World War II. Six million people have died from the war or because of the disease and malnutrition it caused.

Congo has few public services. Health and education have declined since the war started.

The stunted chidlren in the Congo

The plight of women like Binti and children like the one she is expecting is terrible: Congo has the world’s second-highest rate of infant mortality after nearby Chad.

Thirty per cent of children under five are malnourished and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund says 43.5 percent of children under five are stunted.

In March 2018 the UN estimated that two million Congo children risk starvation.

Mobutu Sese Seko ruled Congo from 1965 to 1997 and temporarily renamed it Zaire.

A relative told the sordid story of how he collected money for himself and his family.

“Mobutu would ask one of us to go to the bank and take out a million. We’d go to an intermediary and tell him to get five million. He would go to the bank with Mobutu’s authority and take out ten million. Mobutu would get one and we would get the other nine”

Of all Africa’s corrupt politicians, Mobutu was probably the worst.

The governments of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda sent soldiers into Congo to get rid of Mobutu and he died of prostate cancer in Morocco in 1997.

But peace and prosperity from its huge mineral wealth did not come to the Congo.

Warring tribes started a civil war. There are now many soldiers in Congo but no effective government, more than 19,000 UN peacekeepers but no peace and countless armies with no real purpose except plunder.

If you ever feel life has not been kind to you, think of Binti and the millions like her, born in a country raped for plunder from King Leopold to the present day.