Happy New Year to all of our readers! We return this week with a post about the recent elections in Congo from our own Dr. Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula. In the past, we have had several posts about various elections on the African continent and reactions to them. This week Dr. Murhula discusses the elections, the reactions, and what is needed to strengthen Congolese institutions.
By: Dr. Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J.
Elections at last!
The current US special envoy to the Great Lakes region, Peter Pham, argued several years ago that to save the Congo, the international community should let it fall apart (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/to-save-congo-let-it-fall-apart.html). I argue instead that to save the Congo, what’s needed is to listen to the Congolese people. Salvation coming from outside won’t do much. Standing with the people and for the people in the pursuit of democracy – and against the continuation of the “strong man” politics which the West has pursued in Africa — is critical. The rest of the job will be done by the Congolese people themselves. Western institutions, leaders, and scholars should refrain from prescriptions based on their own imaginations and problematic representations about Africa and Africans.
Throughout history, the voice of the Congolese people has been stifled, silenced, and ignored (https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/africa’s-wealth-and-western-poverty-thought). This is happening again now, when the Congolese people have voted, yet too many are still siding with the “strong man” desperate to retain some level of control and ready to do anything for it. Like everyone else, Africans and the Congolese people need institutions that protect their rights and promote their human dignity against the arbitrariness of uncontrolled powerful. I fail to understand why that deep and human aspiration has been difficult for most policy makers to understand.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has finally held the long-awaited presidential, legislative, and provincial elections. This is the third time the country has held democratic elections since the adoption of a new Constitution in 2005. Joseph Kabila came to power in 2001 in the aftermath of the assassination of his father, Laurent Desire Kabila, but he was elected first in 2006 and then again in 2011 against opposition leaders Jean Pierre Bemba and Etienne Tshisekedi respectively. The Preamble to the 2005 Constitution states that Constitution is meant to end the repeated wars and armed conflicts in the DRC. As the text states, “In order to put an end to this chronic crisis of legitimacy and to give the country every chance to rebuild itself (…); [we need] to set up a new political order, based on a new democratic constitution on the basis of which the Congolese people can choose their leaders, at the end of free, pluralistic, democratic, transparent and credible elections” (the emphasis is mine). Although the elections in 2006 and 2011 were followed by protests and violence, at least the country was engaged in a more democratic process. The next elections should have been held in 2016. Congolese youth, civil society, and the Catholic Church deserve special kudos for their involvement, including the pressuring of the government as well as the preparation, monitoring, and evaluation of the electoral process that finally occurred on December 30, 2018.
Holding elections in itself was no small victory: the role of civil society, youth and the Catholic Church
After much equivocation, postponement, and pressure from both inside and outside the country, the December 30, 2018 election was an amazing new year’s gift to the Congolese People. It was highly significant because it was meant to replace president Kabila at the end of his second and last constitutional term, which should have ended in 2016. As such, in and of itself, it constitutes no small victory for the Congolese democracy.
In 2015, the Commission Électorale Nationale Indépendante (CENI) announced financial, technical, and logistic problems that required postponing preparations for an election. The Congolese government also rejected any financial aid from the international community, alleging reasons of sovereignty. But the Congolese people saw this as president Kabila’s unwillingness to step down. Protests, organized across the country, were met with brute force and police violence. That’s when the Catholic Church, which has monitored the democratic progress in the D.R. Congo since the early 1990s, stepped in to oversee negotiations between the opposition and the government, leading to an agreement on the duration of the transition period and a date for the elections. In the meantime, activist youth movements and civil resistance by non-violent watchdog organizations such as Filimbi and La Lucha (https://www.ritimo.org/Au-Congo-RDC-La-Lucha-et-Filimbi) continued to pressure the government to follow the constitution and organize the elections as soon as possible.
Already in January 2015, I witnessed street protests in Kinshasa, demanding that the Senate reject government attempts to change the Constitution. As a matter of fact, the Congolese Constitution stipulates that certain dispositions, including presidential term limits, cannot be changed. Here is what the paragraph says,
In order to preserve the democratic principles contained in this Constitution against the vagaries of political life and untimely revisions, the provisions relating to the republican form of the State, to the principle of universal suffrage, to the representative form of the Government, to the number and the length of the mandates of the President of the Republic, the independence of the judiciary, political and trade union pluralism cannot be subject to any constitutional revision (the emphasis is mine).
Hence, delaying election preparations appeared to be a breach of the constitution; a ploy and a strategy to buy more time for Kabila to stay in power. And the use of Article 70, which states, “the President of the Republic remains in office until the effective installation of the newly elected President,” coated this usurpation of power with a veneer of constitutional legitimacy.
After eighteen years in power, the balance sheet of the Kabila regime is deplorable. As summarized by Dr. Denis Mukwege, the Congolese 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Congolese people undergo suffering and humiliation on a daily basis [hyperlink to previous post]. In a country that everyone considers to be the most richly endowed on earth, there are unspeakable levels of poverty, while the political elite enriches themselves at the expense of the common good. The Conference of the Catholic Bishops of the Congo (CENCO) wrote a pastoral letter on June 23, 2017 in which it described a sobering picture of the current situation of the nation [hyperlink to previous post]. The title of the message is itself very telling: “Le Pays va Très Mal! Debout Congolais”; that is, “the country is in very bad shape! stand up, Congolese.” The allusion is made to the Congolese National Anthem, “Debout Congolais,” which called on the people to shake off the legacy of years of exploitation and the debasing of the human dignity by the colonial regime. In addition to the current precarity of human life in the everyday, Congolese human rights activists are constantly under threat, frequently jailed, and sometimes summarily assassinated, as in the cases of Father Vincent Machozi in Butembo and Rossy Mukendi in Kinshasa, to name but two. Elections were not only the symbolic exit out of the daily humiliations, but also represented an opportunity for the powerless majority to stand up against a powerful, selfish, and corrupt political elite. It was for these reasons went out to vote for change on December 18.
But even in December 2017, the government was still maneuvering to delay elections. I was again in Kinshasa on December 31 of that year, when the Comité Laïc de Coordination (CLC), a Catholic Lay movement condoned by the Catholic Bishops, called for a peaceful demonstration. After the Sunday morning mass, Catholic faithful and others who wanted to join were instructed to walk across the streets of the towns where they lived, praying their rosaries and chanting religious canticles, as a way to call on the government to respect its commitment to the “Saint Sylvester Agreement,” brokered by the Catholic Bishops exactly one year before, on December 31, 2016, to avoid the country lapsing into political chaos after president Kabila’s constitutional second term expired on December 19, 2016. The opposition agreed to allow just one more year to ensure enough time to organize a fair election. Still, the regime failed to meet even this new deadline, provoking more protests, more violence, and more killings by governmental forces.
Democracy matters and it matters a lot!
Elections are primarily the means through which citizens in a democratic country are called to participate in the political life of their nation by choosing the leaders they would like to have. They offer a unique opportunity to the people to either approve of and reward deserving politicians who serve the cause of the common good and to punish the ones they deem underserving for having failed their mandate to improve the living conditions of the community. The campaign period is when incumbent officials return to their constituents to ask for reelection. New candidates also emerge to court voters by promising an alternative. Both old and new candidates spend time, efforts, and resources to convince voters that they are committed to meet their aspirations and their hopes for better living conditions. With this in mind, one begins to fathom the meaning of the recent elections for the people of Congo.
Banning international observers to “promote DRC’s sovereignty”
Given the government’s record on human rights abuses, the international community also added pressure on the Kabila regime to hold elections. The European Union (EU) refused to lift sanctions on Congolese officials, including the Kabila regime’s hand-picked successor, Emmanuel Shadari. In retaliation, the Congolese government revoked the accreditation of EU Ambassador to the DRC, Bart Ouvry, prior to the elections. It also refused any external observation mission or supervision during the elections, even by former South African president Thabo Mbeki. “Observers tend to behave like proconsuls. They don’t respect the DRC’s autonomy. We want to mark our sovereignty,” Communications Minister Lambert Mende told the AFP. But everyone understands through the government’s earlier prevarications that president Kabila and his regime were not anxious to give up power.
As a result, the Catholic Church – seen to be the most trusted institution in the country – prepared and deployed 40,000 observers around the country to oversee the elections. In its rendition to the diplomatic corps in Kinshasa on January 4, the Conference of the Catholic Bishops of the D.R. Congo (CENCO) congratulated the Congolese people for its determination to participate in this democratic and civic duty, expressing its deepest desire for political change (http://cenco.org/declaration-de-la-cenco-a-lissue-de-sa-mission-dobservation-electorale/).
The Example of Beni
The long queues of voters in Beni give an excellent illustration of this popular determination for change. The government officially barred the people of Beni, along with those of Yangambi and Butembo, from casting their ballots for alleged public health reasons, stating that such a public gathering would spread Ebola. In the last twenty or so years, the martyr town of Beni has come to epitomize the plight of the Congolese people: the recurring attacks by rebel armed groups storming apparently from nowhere have claimed more human lives and traumatized the community even more than the Ebola outbreak. The endless suffering, atrocities, and violence to which the people of Beni are exposed have eroded the little trust the population could invest in their government. But preventing them from voting was seen as punishment because people had rejected the candidate of the Kabila regime during his campaign tour of the region. So, pulling out old ballot boxes and using sheets of paper to write the name of their preferred candidate, they voted in a show of defiance to the regime, even though they knew their votes would not be counted in the final results. Voting in Beni became an expression of civil disobedience in defense of the fundamental right to political participation (https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2018/12/30/2932882-rdc-privee-election-beni-releve-defi-defie-kinshasa-propre-vote.html). It also sent the message that public health in Beni was not being jeopardized by public gatherings (a message that the international community should also take to heart): people still go about their everyday business, attending church on Sundays and going to the market to interact with others.
Why mortgage the DRC’s future once more?
The CENI was initially supposed to announce provisional electoral results on January 6, 2019, but it claimed it was unable to do so because of difficulties in transporting ballots from polling centers to tallying centers. As of that date, it had only tallied 53 percent of the total votes. But in the wee hours of January 10, the CENI stated its official provisional results, proclaiming Felix Tshisekedi, one of the opposition figures, the winner with 38.56% of the vote, ahead of Martin Fayulu, who was given 34 %.
But a week earlier, the Catholic Bishops in Kinshasa had briefed the international community and the diplomatic corps on the polling trends taken from its 40,000 observers, who worked across the country on the election day. The Catholic Church’s revelation of its own voting trends unnerved both the CENI and the government, who warned Church leaders that they had no mandate to proclaim election results and would bear full responsibility for any resulting chaos. However, we are now in an era of leaks of raw primary data, which has become the best way to challenge official rhetoric. Different media analysts – including from the Financial Times, TV5 Monde, RF1, and the Groupe d’Experts sur le Congo (GEC) at New York University — are stating that they have obtained data from CENI’s server which confirm the Church’s figures. Analysis of the leaked data shows that with 86% of the votes counted, Martin Fayulu won 59.4% (https://www.ft.com/content/2b97f6e6-189d-11e9-b93e-f4351a53f1c3). This result is close to the Catholic Church’s data: its observation mission said Fayulu won with 62% of votes cast. Apparently, the CENI delayed its proclamation to buy time and tamper with the results. In the meantime, the outgoing Kabila regime was closing a deal with the Tshisekedi camp. But even more disheartening is the idea that the CENI has no independence as a constitutional institution.
Since January 10, certain voices in Congolese public opinion have been asking the Congolese people to accept the government’s “official” results as the lesser evil, the best compromise possible in the Congolese political quagmire, even criticizing the Church for showing that the government’s figures are wrong. The assumption is that the Congolese only need a peaceful transfer of power after president Kabila: the first time such a transfer would happen in the history of the DRC. But the Catholic Church’s voice that has denounced the electoral fraud is increasingly buttressed by other groups, regional organizations, and international medias calling for a recount of the votes (http://www.africanews.com/2019/01/15/drc-election-hub-top-opposition-candidate-calls-for-debate/).
In this context, a few questions come to mind. Are the Congolese people deserving of what’s right, just, and good and can they at least once get the leaders they chose for themselves? From the inception of the Congo to its independence, the idea that the Congolese could own their country and their destiny has been opposed by those involved in benefiting from the country’s vast wealth. For this very reason, the first ever democratically elected leader of the country, Emery Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1961 for reclaiming the right to dignity and ownership of the Congo. Likewise, when he revoked the shoddy contracts signed by rebel groups with Western multinational companies, mortgaging the sovereignty of the Congolese people, president Laurent Desire Kabila was killed in 2001. For once, the international community needs to stand strong with the people instead of contenting itself with paying lip service to a nation to which it owes so much. It is indeed critically important that Congolese regain their sovereignty and control over their destiny; the recent election offers such an unparalleled opportunity.
Through the churches, the voices of the youth and the human rights protest movements, the Congolese people are asking that their votes be respected, more than that one candidate or the other be favored. That whatever right that applies to other human beings regardless of where they live should equally apply to the Congolese people. That they deserve good institutions and support to protect and guarantee their human dignity. (As a matter of fact, the Catholic Church encouraged Martin Fayulu to follow due legal procedures, and to take matters to the Constitutional Court to challenge the Independent National Electoral Commission’s official results). Democratic participation is among the pillars of the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) through which human dignity is upheld and fostered. Pope Paul VI, for instance, reiterated these principles in a May 14, 1971 Church document, Octogesima Adveniens.
Democracy remains an ideal everywhere and what is happening in the DRC today is a matter of making law and justice prevail over the arbitrariness of power. To say no to the obvious electoral fraud is to begin respecting the Congolese people. It is to begin to put an end to the violence that has plagued the history of Congo. It is simply saying no to evil in the absolute. Indeed, the greatest violence done to the Congolese people is not only the physical death of millions of the Congolese in the last two decades but also the denial of their fundamental rights, as a people having the capacity and the right to autonomy, sovereignty, and freedom. As a result, the Congolese people’s will needs to be respected. They should not put up with fraudulent political behavior – at the expense of justice – and accept a deal struck to hijack the destiny of millions. That outcome can never lead to sustainable peace.
Let us urge the Congolese Constitutional Court to emulate what Kenyan Chief Justice David Maraga did in September 2017 and call for a recount of the votes to proclaim the true winner and save the Congolese democracy. That is why helping the DRC today means calling on those who make up its constitutional court to follow their conscience and reveal the true vote, the only way that we can advance democracy in the DRC. That is the way to go not only for this but also for subsequent generations.