Congo drifts into murky waters

You have to admire Joseph Kabila’s cheek, if nothing else.

On Saturday, at his first press conference in seven years, the long-serving president of the Democratic Republic of Congo said: “We have to have elections as scheduled.”

But they were scheduled for December of 2016. Kabila had been in office for 14 years by then, but somehow he had forgotten that you need an up-to-date voters’ list before you can hold an election.

So he generously offered to stay in office as president for another year while this was done, even though he was not allowed to run for a third term as president.

The various opposition parties and the Catholic Church, which has immense influence in the DRC, were not pleased, but they reluctantly agreed to go along and the election was rescheduled for December 2017.

As it became clear the deadline would not be met, the demonstrations and protests multiplied. And the “security forces” grew more repressive: a recent UN report found that state agents had carried out 1 176 killings in 2017.

Kabila then declared the elections would have to be postponed again, to December 2018.

“Kabila does not have any intention to leave power,” said Felix Tshisekedi, a prominent opposition leader, after the latest postponement.

“His strategy is to spread chaos across the country and then delay elections because he’ll claim there is too much violence.”

The violence is certainly increasing and there is a serious risk that Congo is sliding back towards civil war, but it’s too simple to blame it all on Kabila.

Kabila came to power when his father, Laurent-Desire, a warlord who had emerged victorious in the first civil war in 1997, was assassinated in 2001.

He was 29 at the time – although his father had already made him army chief of staff – and had no political following of his own.

He has subsequently become very rich, but he is still not a powerful figure.

He was put in office by the security forces, now dominated by the men who led his father’s rebel army, and he remains largely a figurehead.

The problem is that they can’t decide who should replace him. It’s all about who has access to resources (read money) within the regime but, meanwhile, 81 million Congolese are being dragged towards another civil war.

The last one, in 1998-2003, killed at least 5 million, mostly from hunger and disease.

They do not need another.

There is already heavy fighting between militia groups and the army, with the majority of the casualties civilians. It would be comforting to believe an election could stop all this, but it can’t.

What is required is a strong and reasonably honest government that can reassert control. It is fantasy to imagine that a country with a per capita income of about one US dollar a day, can be saved by a free election.

Communications are so poor that there is no “public opinion”. Democracy is important, but the Congo is too big, too poor and too ethnically fragmented for that to work yet.

Elections are symbolically important because they embody the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law, but everybody who might actually get elected belongs to a small privileged elite.

The “security elite” have actually been running everything since the turn of the century and the first order of business must be for them to make a deal on who their candidate will be at the next election.

Whoever that is will certainly win – and it hardly matters whether it is Kabila or somebody else.

Those behind the scenes will still pull the strings. But until they reach an agreement about the regime’s candidate, the country will continue to drift, and it is drifting into dangerous waters.

Gwynne Dyer