Demonstrators at an opposition rally in Kinshasa on September 19, 2016,
demanding that President Joseph Kabila step down. PHOTO | AFP
So the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long-awaited presidential
election campaigns are finally here. Outgoing President Joseph Kabila
must be feeling rather happy with himself and with the way things are
going.
There was a time when he had become a villain of
sorts, with everybody believing he was bent on clinging on to power,
come what may.
Then he pulled the proverbial carpet
from under his critics’ feet. At the very last minute before nominations
for presidential candidates closed, he unveiled the official candidate
of his party, the People’s Party for Development and Democracy and its
collection of allies, the Common Front for Congo (FCC).
He wasn’t one of the big boys whose names had been floated by experts and casual commentators.
Kabila
went for a candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, whom some have
flippantly dismissed as an unknown but who, as a former provincial
governor, deputy prime minister and interior and security minister as
well as the ruling party’s permanent secretary, is anything but.
Adding
to his visibility is his fairly recent targeting for sanctions by the
European Union on charges of human-rights abuses linked to the
incarceration, torture and killing of political activists and opponents
of the government.
Meanwhile, pundits in the media
suggest Shadary will have difficulty defeating a candidate or candidates
fronted by better-known and wealthy opposition figures such as Moise
Katumbi, former governor of Katanga Province, and former rebel leader
Jean-Pierre Bemba.
This seductive reading of the
situation ignores the extent to which the government and the ruling
party and its allies have gone to ensure that candidates on the other
side go into the campaigns literally with their arms and legs tied.
Perhaps the most potent of the manacles with which they will have to contend is the shockingly short campaign period.
Resources
In
a country as vast as the DRC and with its physical infrastructure as
dilapidated as it is, the government seems to think that only a month is
needed for the campaigning, during which candidates are expected to
traverse its entire territory.
They may have the
financial resources necessary to surmount this particular obstacle, and
this in itself is debatable, but it is unlikely they can put together
the logistical operation to pull off a credible campaign within four or
five weeks against a ruling-party candidate with government support at
his disposal.
It is the kind of situation that allows
one to imagine that even a billy goat dressed in ruling party colours
would win the elections.
So, come December 23, I would
bet my money on Shadary being declared the new president and the
opposition crying foul, and rightly so.
Meanwhile
Kabila, whose future plans remain the subject of much animated
discussion, will be having the last laugh, having outmanoeuvred almost
everybody, including the international community who had seemed to want
to ensure they had a say in what happened.
The
outmanoeuvring of the international community, however, will not be
without its own cost. This becomes clear when one considers the specific
steps Kabila took to keep them at bay.
He very
smartly cloaked himself and to some extent his government in nationalist
garb, which manoeuvre he used to reject money offered to the government
to help preparations for the polls.
Financial assistance
Of
late, the rumour mill in Kinshasa has been churning out stories about
this, one of which is that some international actors or their agents or
collaborators have been “pushing” the government to accept financial
assistance towards funding the elections.
The
government has so far been playing hard to get, and has gone ahead and
injected a few hundred million dollars of its own money.
The
trick is to ensure that it retains the space it needs to “manage” the
process in its own way, without outsiders snapping at its heels and
hectoring it to do this and that.
There is some debate
regarding whether the rejection of outside help is clever, whether it
can last to the end (jusqu’au bout), and whether it won’t hurt ordinary
Congolese whose immediate needs the government continues to neglect
because “there is no money.”
This debate raises some
important questions, not only about politics in the DRC, but also
elsewhere on the continent. One is what price we ordinary citizens pay
for politics in general, and for competitive elections in particular,
and whether it is a fair price.
The other is why we
hold elections of the kind we are unable to finance without eating
significantly into national coffers and rendering governments unable to a
significant degree to respond to citizens’ immediate needs.
Yet
another is why international actors insist on pushing for forms of
politics in Africa that they know governments have no capacity to
finance without external help and the manipulations such help makes
possible.
These questions flooded into my mind after I
heard that, while the Kabila government was being smug about rejecting
external assistance, large numbers of public servants had not been paid
salaries, and pensioners had not received their pensions.
I would have loved to ask some of them what they thought of the political manoeuvres going on around them.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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