Authenticité (Zaire) Zairians had resumed use of their given names. After Mobutu was forced to flee the country in the First Congo War in 1997, President Laurent Kabila renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Authenticité (Zaire) Authenticité, sometimes Zairianisation in English, was an official state ideology of the Mobutu regime that originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in what was first the Republic of Congo-Léopoldville, later renamed Zaire. The authenticity campaign was an effort to rid the country of the lingering vestiges of colonialism and the continuing influence of Western culture and to create a more centralized
Constitution of Zaire president as President of Zaire itself with total power over government and judiciary (Articles 28 and 30). Mobutism was declared the state ideology (Article 46) and all Zaireans were automatically made members of the MPR (Article 8). Mobutu himself was exempted from the restrictions on power mentioned in the document and given the power to unilaterally modify the document at will. The state of Zaire's legal system as established by the constitution led Marcel Lihau, a jurist and former president of the Supreme Court of Justice who had fled the country, to remark that "Mobutu is the constitution in Zaire".