Constitution of Zaire

It provided a renewed legal basis for the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko who had emerged as the country's dictator after the Congo Crisis in 1965.

[2][3] According to academics Merwin Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, the 1974 constitution should be seen as the culmination of a period of Zairean political history beginning in 1970.

[4] The phase was marked by growing national self-confidence and the emergence of Mobutu's Authenticité policy to remove non-"authentic" foreign influences from Zairian society.

[4] Young and Turner describe the 1974 constitution as the "normative embodiment of the Mobutist state at its apogee" and argued that it was an unprecedented legal expression of "centralized, untrammelled personal power".

[7] Young and Turner did, however, note that the "Mobutist state never approximated the leviathan vision embodied in the constitution".