Did an Election Help Africa’s Largest Failed State?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

A chaotic presidential election held Dec. 20-21 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has fueled unrest in the country, with five opposition candidates calling for protests, predictably followed by violence. With the usual massive delays and bureaucratic chaos, did it offer the country any hope?

After years of political instability and coups, it was the first election since the transfer of power between former President Joseph Kabila and the current head of state, Felix Tshisekedi, in 2019. The latter, who was seeking a second, five-year term, won – of course! He obtained 73 per cent of the vote, with his nearest challenger, Moise Katumbi, at 18 per cent. Voter turnout was a dismal 43 percent. It was, as it always is, neither free nor fair.

This matters since the DRC is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a land mass of more than 2.3 million square kilometers -- an area the size of Western Europe -- with an estimated population of more than 100 million people, encompassing about 400 disparate ethnic groups.

The country is rich in natural resources, with 70 per cent of the world’s reserves of coltan, a highly prized mineral used to make mobile phones, 30 per cent of the world’s diamonds, plus large quantities of cobalt, copper and bauxite.

But life remains hard for most people, due to conflict, corruption and many decades of poor governance dating back to the colonial era under Belgian rule.

The eastern Congo, where most of the mineral wealth lies, has been ravaged by conflict for three decades, involving some 120 insurrectionist groups. The powerful M23 rebels, supported by neighboring Rwanda, controls the territories of Masisi and Rutshuru in North Kivu.

It is impossible to know how many lives have been lost in the various conflicts in the country over the past three decades – it is estimated that about 5.4 million people may have died, mostly from hunger and disease. The wars also involved interference by so many neighbouring states that many have called it “Africa’s World War.”

Tshisekedi main challenger, Moise Katumbi, is a wealthy businessman and former governor of Katanga province. The leader of the Ensemble Pour le Changement (“Together for Change”) party, he maintains that the result has been tainted by “massive fraud.” But he won’t challenge the outcome “because the courts are not independent.”

Other opposition leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege and former oil executive Martin Fayulu, also protested.

Katumbi is a far more interesting politician than the incumbent, and hails from a part of the country that once tried to secede from the DRC. His Greek-Jewish father Nissim Soriano fled the Greek island of Rhodes, then under Italian fascist control, in 1938 for central Africa, and married Virginie Katumbi, a Congolese Lunda woman of royal birth, from the traditional pre-colonial Kazembe kingdom.

Katumbi suggested his prior success while governor of the country’s richest province, Katanga, would become “the pilot programme for Congo.” His record there between 2007 and 2015 saw the building of roads, increased access to drinking water, doubling the number of children in school, and enacting mining regulations.

He made the bulk of his fortune in mining. He founded the Mining Company of Katanga (MCK) in 1997, which in 2004 joined forces with Anvil, a Canadian firm, to become AMCK Mining. Anvil had been accused of backing a deadly Congolese army mission near one of its mines that resulted in at least 70 civilians being killed.

Katumbi left the DRC in 2016 after he was accused of hiring mercenaries by the government of President Tshisekedi’s predecessor, Joseph Kabila. He was sentenced to three years in prison in absentia and barred from returning to the country to take part in the 2018 election. However, he returned home in 2019 after the charges were dropped.

There’s irony in this, because his home base, Katanga, became a major hot spot after the DRC became a sovereign state in July 1960. Moise Tshombe, the leader of a secessionist movement, declared the southernmost province of the Congo to be an independent nation.

With its copper belt and lucrative mining operations, it was the wealthiest province of the Congo. Despite UN regulations forbidding countries from directly supporting the secessionists, Tshombe gained support from both foreign powers and local elites.

Ethnic animosities were also a major factor in the secession. The area was predominantly populated by the Lunda and Baluba ethnic groups, who had a sense of exclusion from the wider Congolese community. The secession lasted three years. Only after the fighting ended in 1963 was the region gradually reintegrated into the country.

From its origins in 1885 as the personal property of an avaricious European monarch, Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo has endured a history of mass violence, protracted wars, chronic misrule and endless plunder.

In their book The Future of Africa: A New Order in Sight? political scientists Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills suggest that “it is time to ask if provinces such as the Kivus and Katanga (which are themselves the size of other African countries) can ever be improved as long as they fall under a fictional Congolese state. The international community should say, plainly and simply, that the DRC is not a sovereign state.” Sad but true.