Gbadolite

Gbadolite or Gbado-Lite () is the capital of Nord-Ubangi Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The town is located south of the Ubangi River at the border to the Central African Republic and northeast of the national capital Kinshasa. Gbadolite was the ancestral home and residence of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, later self-styled as Mobutu Sese Seko where airport, colleges, malls, supermarkets and libraries were built by the President in a program of modernization. Gbadolite is where Mobutu led the summit that would produce the Gbadolite Declaration, a short-lived ceasefire in the Angolan Civil War in 1989. By 1997, Mobutu fled to Rabat in Morocco as the rebels led by Laurent Kabila as the palaces of Gbadolite have been vandalized and looted which marked the end of Mobutu's dictatorship over 32 years of brutal dictatorship and the collapse of Zaire.

==History== Mobutu built Gbadolite into a luxurious town often nicknamed "Versailles of the Jungle". He built a hydroelectric dam on the nearby Ubangi River in Mobayi Mbongo, an international airport, Gbadolite Airport, which could accommodate a Concorde, and three large palaces. As a result, the people of the town had no trouble finding jobs. During Mobutu's regime, Gbadolite also had companies such as CDIA Zaire for farming productions, SOZAGEC for road construction, and SAFRICAS for house construction. The town had a general hospital with high tech facilities, supermarkets and malls, which were destroyed in 1997. Gbadolite had also College Presidentiel, a high school famous for its academic excellence and administered by Jesuit Fathers to whom Mobutu gave the school. This school had a chemistry lab, physics lab, computer lab, Olympic game facilities, and band instruments of all kinds. The town was also famous for its Chapelle Marie la Misericorde, a luxurious church in which Mobutu buried his first wife, Mama Mobutu.