Democratic Republic of Congo
The president’s U-turn on elections is likely a strategic retreat to hold onto power
Joseph Kabila is a crafty man who does not give up. After months of wrangling to delay presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for November 2016, Mr Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, decided earlier this year to reverse course and respect the constitution. His about-face was met with much suspicion. Since winning a second and last constitutionally mandated term in November 2011, Mr Kabila has spent almost four years trying to revise the country’s legal charter so that he can stay in office, maybe indefinitely. Months of jockeying to postpone the election sparked nationwide protests in January that left at least 40 dead, according to human rights groups, and more than 350 people behind bars, according to the government. Finally, in February, Mr Kabila agreed to abide by the constitutionally mandated election schedule.
But this has not stymied the president. He now may have something else up his sleeve. Last March Mr Kabila decided to enact a long-awaited law to replace the DRC’s 11 provinces with 26 new ones, as required by the constitution’s Article 2. He is enacting this law, however, five years after the constitution said it should have come into force. Mr Kabila has a hidden agenda, suggests Baudouin Wetshi Amba, the editor of Congo Indépendant, a Brussels-based online publication. Implementing this law will split mineral-rich Katanga, in the DRC’s south-east, into four smaller provinces. Prominent government critics, including Katanga governor Moïse Katumbi, who is considered a potential presidential rival, and provincial assembly speaker Gabriel Kyunguwa Kumwanza, will conveniently lose their jobs.
In addition, creating the new provinces and upholding the electoral agenda will be financially impossible, according to a March 9th column headlined, “New Provinces: a Dangerous Distraction”, on the Congolese online news site 7sur7.cd. Elections are expensive, particularly for a huge country that is usually at the bottom of human development indicators. The elections cycle—starting with local polls in October 2015 and ending with the presidential vote in November 2016—could cost $1.2 billion, according to the national electoral commission. Foreign aid is expected to finance 21% of the DRC’s 2015 $9 billion budget, according to the government.Many are sceptical that the international community will come to the table with even more funds. The DRC’s foreign partners will have trouble financing an electoral process that denies the rights of 10m Congolese citizens who reached the voting age of 18 after 2011 because the electoral commission has not registered them.
The commission’s failure violates the constitution, complained Vital Kamerhe, an opposition party leader, in March. The creation of new provinces is expected to happen before the end of June 2015, after this magazine went to press. These new districts are likely to siphon much-needed government funds. Infrastructure is lacking and the costs to build new provincial capitals to accommodate future governors, legislators and civil servants will be considerable. The simultaneous implementation of the territorial reform and the electoral agenda could lead to bankruptcy, according to 7sur7.cd. If that happens, the electoral commission would have to postpone the polls for budgetary reasons. Observers are left with the irony that Mr Kabila seems to have implemented one constitutional provision with the intention of delaying or dodging the implementation of another. There is reason for scepticism. Since the constitution was adopted in 2006, Mr Kabila has controlled DRC politics through his recurring habit of ignoring the charter or changing key provisions.
For example, the government has not distributed 40% of national tax revenues to the provinces, as stipulated in Article 175, fuelling frustrations in Lower Congo and Katanga provinces. Mineral-rich Katanga is the major contributor of revenues to the national purse, providing about $1 billion, or 68% of the country’s total in 2012, according to a 2014 report from the Oslo-based Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. In 2012 Katanga received just 5.8% (or $88.4m) of total disbursements, according to the report. The current constitution allows change after a petition of 100,000 citizens is submitted to the Senate and National Assembly. Both bodies of this bicameral legislature either approve it by a simple majority and submit it to a national referendum, or they can pass the proposal with a three-fifths vote. Mr Kabila and his allies used the three-fifths vote option in January 2011 to amend Article 71, which stipulated that a candidate needed to win more than 50% to avoid a run-off election.
Now the electoral law allows a candidate to win with a simple majority. This suits a powerful incumbent since it forestalls the possibility of two or more losing candidates forming a coalition in the second round. Still Mr Kabila was not able to win the presidential election in 2011 without incident. The election, which Mr Kabila won with 49% of the vote, was marred by allegations of fraud. The US-based Carter Center found the poll “to lack credibility”. The EU observer mission reached similar conclusions. In January 2011 the legislature also amended the constitution’s Article 198 to give Mr Kabila the power to sack elected governors. Before the change, provincial assemblies elected the country’s governors and had the sole power to fire them. Now the president can dismiss governors by decree should a “serious crisis” threaten the functioning of provincial institutions.
With his hand strengthened, Mr Kabila began testing the waters for two other constitutional revisions: Article 70, which limits presidential terms to two; and Article 220, which stipulates that the number and the duration of presidential terms cannot be subject to a constitutional revision. The secretary-general of Mr Kabila’s People’s Party for Reconstruction and Development first floated this idea in a June 2013 book, “Between the Revision of the Constitution and the Starvation of the Nation”. Constitutions need to be changed periodically to avoid “sclerosis”, Évariste Boshab wrote, creating speculation that the ruling party was preparing citizens for a revision of Article 220. Four months later, in October 2013, the government organised a month-long round of talks in Kinshasa, the capital. Politicians and civil society were invited on the pretext of strengthening national cohesion, which had been harmed by the controversy over the allegedly rigged 2011 election.
In reality, the talks were held to gather consensus to hold a referendum to amend the constitution to allow Mr Kabila to run for a third term. Countervailing pressure came from all sides. Etienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress, the largest opposition party, boycotted the talks, as did other opposition groups and civil society organisations, which spoke out against the proposed referendum. The influential Roman Catholic Church added its voice to the chorus. The powerful Congolese Bishops National Conference has on several occasions expressed its formal objection to the removal of Article 220. Several of Mr Kabila’s former political allies—including Mr Katumbi and Mwenze Kongolo, the former interior minister—also called for respecting the constitution. Opposition was so widespread and fierce that holding the referendum would have created serious trouble. The government considered removing Article 220 by a three-fifths majority of both legislative houses, but divisions within the parties allied to Mr Kabila eliminated this option.
Frustrated by his failed past efforts, Mr Kabila and his allies adopted a new tactic this year. On January 17th, the National Assembly amended the electoral law to require that a national census be held before the next election. A census would have significantly delayed the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 2016 and kept Mr Kabila in power. Again, mass demonstrations and diplomatic pressure forced the president to abandon the plan. On January 23rd, after a week of protests, the Senate adopted an amended version of the law, which made elections not conditional on completing a census and upheld the constitution’s electoral schedule. Although the opposition claimed victory, it came at a high cost. Since the deaths and arrests in January, at least 421 bodies were found in March in an unmarked burial ground in Kinshasa. Human Rights Watch has said that bodies went missing during the protests over the proposed electoral law changes and government crackdowns on gangs last year and in 2013. The government disputes this and says it has opened an inquiry.
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://digitalmallblobstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wp-content/2018/01/AIF-44-Misser.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]François Misser is a Brussels-based journalist. He has covered central Africa since 1981 and European-African relations since 1984 for the BBC, Afrique Asie magazine, African Energy, the Italian monthly magazine Nigrizia, and Germany’s Die Tageszeitung newspaper. He has written books on Rwanda and the DRC. His last book, on the Congo River dams, is La Saga d’Inga.[/author_info] [/author]
