Incumbent Congolese President Joseph Kabila won another test and seems to be settling in for the long term, notes Gamal Nkrumah When the Electoral Commission of the Democratic Republic of Congo (CENI) this weekend sheepishly announced that the incumbent Congolese President Joseph Kabila won the 28 November elections, it gave a spine-tingling contest an ominous industrial-strength jolt that spurred the Congolese opposition into action. Veteran politician and runner-up, according to CENI, Etienne Tshisekedi, promptly declared himself president-elect. If proof were needed for the incendiary consequences of Western-style multi-party democracy in a resource-rich albeit poverty-stricken sprawling country like Congo it was in ample supply in the presidential poll. Kabila is a ruthless campaigner. He wrong-footed his political opponents. Though he was slow to grasp the intensity of public support for Tsishekedi, Kabila will remain extremely cautious, however. The eastern Kivu provinces -- North and South Kivu -- were instrumental in Kabila's success. Kivu is in the hands of Rwandan proxies within the Congolese army. The irony is that Kivu is an unreliable ally as far as Kabila is concerned. Mbusa Nyamwisi, former armed opposition leader turned Kabila ally, was promptly appointed as a minister to placate him and his followers in North Kivu. The ploy didn't work, and he ended up running against Kabila this time, much to the incumbent president's chagrin. Yet Kabila is hardly what many in the contemporary Congolese political establishment are looking for. His mother, Sifa Maanya, is widely perceived as a Rwandan, a hated ethnic Tutsi foreigner. By implication, the incumbent president himself is viewed suspiciously as an alien by his more xenophobic compatriots. Even though the family insists that she is a member of the Congolese Bangubangu tribe of the mineral-rich eastern part of the country. To his Western backers and local Congolese supporters, Joseph Kabila has a creditable record as a survivor with convincing political acumen. Officially he was born in 1971 in the town of Ankoro on the banks of River Congo, in the country's wealthiest province Katanga, and first became president on 26 January 2001 when he was 29 years old. The eldest of 10 children, he was heir apparent and his father's favourite. After a stint in Makarere University, Uganda, and a military academy in Tanzania, Kabila was dispatched to the People's Liberation Army National Defence University in Beijing, China. Upon Kabila's return from the People's Republic, his father, the then president Laurent-Desire Kabila, duly appointed his son deputy chief-of-staff. The late Kabila the father also promoted his son to the rank of major general. Kabila the son was a leader of the so-called kadogos or child soldiers during the long, gruesome and protracted guerrilla war against the late Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seku. In the presidential race, his militaristic credentials were widely seen as heavy political baggage. As head of the People's Party for Reconstruction and Development (PPRD), he garnered the most votes in the east of the country and his native Katanga, in the south. Congo, one of the largest and most populous countries in Africa, is divided along ethnic lines with Kiswahili speakers concentrated in the east and Lingala speakers in the west. Kiswahili and Lingala are the two major lingua franca languages in the country even though French is the official language. Kabila, is more fluent in English, however, than in French, another bone of contention with the predominantly Francophone political establishment. It is against this background that the stage was set for tribal, linguistic and identity politics in the current Congolese political impasse. This underlies the narrower choice that the Congolese electorate faces. The no-surrender strain in Etienne Tshisekedi's tone is a reflection of his political appeal in central and western Congo. The inhabitants of Tshisekedi's home province of West Kasai have long been disgruntled by the monopoly of power exercised by the easterners, including Kabila. Kasai is the most populous of Congo's provinces and is geographically located in the centre of the country. It is not surprising then that Kabila craftily replaced his presidential rival and former speaker of the Congolese parliament Vital Kamerhe by Evariste Boshab, from the restive West Kasai province. A cohort of opposition figures are emphatic that CENI and the Supreme Court, which declared Kabila president elect, is biased. "The Supreme Court is Kabila's private institution," Tshisekedi complained. Officially Tshisekedi grabbed 32 per cent of the vote, a figure he hotly disputes. Tshisekedi claims to have won 54 per cent of the vote. Third-placed candidate Vital Kamerhe also disputes the election results. This does not mean that Kabila can afford to ignore the problem of tribalism. Mobutu's son Nzanga Mobutu, whose stronghold is in the northwestern province of Equateur where his family hails from, also added his voice with the disillusioned Congolese politicians. He is currently chairman of the Union of Mobutist Democrats, an anti-Kabila coalition. He was deputy prime minister in charge of basic social needs until his summary and unceremonious dismissal by Kabila without cause in March 2011. The eldest son of Mobutu by his then mistress and later second wife Bobi Ladawa, Nzanga is married to Cathy Bemba, sister of Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila's chief rival in the 2006 presidential elections. Curiously enough, Bemba's slogan then was "One Hundred Per Cent Congolese" -- a manifest slur aimed at the supposedly "alien" Kabila. Still, Kabila won 44 per cent of the vote and Bemba garnered 20 per cent. Bemba's support was restricted to the Lingala-speaking west. Kabila was popular in the south and the east. The campaign took on an ugly turn when Kabila supporters accused Bemba of practicing cannibalism claiming that he had no qualms in savouring pygmy flesh. "The pygmies are alive and well," Bemba retorted nonchalantly. That was good politics in his political stronghold in Equateur, but plays less well nationally. Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of Congo's richest men, was arrested in Belgium in May 2008 on an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) based in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC indicted Bemba and former Central African Republic president Ange-F��lix Patass��. The ICC charged both men with murder, rape, torture and pillaging. Kabila's plans for the Congolese people appear rather implausible. Kabila and many of the senior Congolese politicians, with perhaps the notable exception of Tshisekedi, have a deplorable record of human rights violations. So what can be done? The good showing for Tshisekedi indicates that he must be involved in any future government of national unity. The Congolese accepted the results of the 2006 presidential polls, and before that the 2001 election. Congolese voters' drudge to detect which strand of the party predominates. Western observers are just as disenchanted with the results of the elections as are the chief opposition Congolese politicians themselves. "Judges are named by the president after being nominated by the Supreme Council of Magistrates, an institution whose members he also names indirectly," the European Union's election observer noted. "The independence of the Supreme Court has also been called into question by the naming of 18 new judges in the middle of the election campaign." The Atlanta-based Carter Centre headed by former US President Jimmy Carter concurred. The Centre expressed "concern about the lack of transparency," in the [Supreme] Court's handling of pre-election issues. The Congolese were even more outraged. "They are lackeys. The judges, especially the new ones, aren't trained, so there's a loss of credibility," protested Lawyers Without Borders Congo. Kabila's henchmen, however, protested what they see as a gross injustice. "Judicial mechanisms exist so that if someone disputing election results doesn't trust one judge or all the judges, he can challenge the make-up of the court," Congolese Justice Minister Emmanuel Luzolo Bambi said. "You can't prejudge the impartiality of the Supreme Court. You would have to present a specific case of bias after it hears a dispute," Bambi bellowed at his critics. Potentially combustible ethnic divisions appear to have been held at bay. Even so, to his opponents, Kabila seems to be stoking rather than dousing the flames of tribal tensions. In his bid to cling to power, Kabila has played one ethnic or region against another. However, his machinations pale into insignificance in comparison with the crimes of Mobutu. Tshisekedi must reach out to outlying provinces since his power base is centred in Kasai and the Congolese capital Kinshasa in order to be a truly national leader. Tshisekedi saw glimmers of electoral recovery but was sorely disappointed. The strategy of Kabila and his cohorts paid off. Tshisekedi's strategy, pinning success on the back of Kabila's unpopularity in Kasai had flaws, just as the assumption that Kabila would not win in Kivu was mistaken. The child soldiers who prance about in khaki shorts and sport kalashnikovs were used and abused by the Congolese warlords turned politicians. This perhaps is the main difference between the Arab awakening and the Congolese conundrum. Youth spearheaded the Arab Spring. Youth in the Congo were the politicians' pawns.
