Martin Fayulu, Congo’s outsider scents power

Other African leaders have rallied to his cause after huge electoral fraud

Martin Fayulu may be the most wronged man in world politics. The oil executive turned political leader won the Democratic Republic of Congo’s historic presidential vote last month by a massive margin only for the country’s electoral commission to declare someone else the victor.

The huge electoral fraud, uncovered this week by the Financial Times, threatens to halt a remarkable rise for the former Exxon Mobil man. But if Congo’s rightful president-elect feels aggrieved he shows no signs of bitterness — yet.

“I won’t let the victory of the Congolese people be stolen,” he says over a patchy phone line from the heaving riverside capital, Kinshasa. “If they don’t get the truth now, no one will trust any election ever again.”

Mr Fayulu is a rare breed among senior Congolese politicians, most of whom sit at the head of a large party or have ricocheted between opposition groups and government posts as the giant copper-producing country has lurched from crisis to crisis.

Elected to the capital’s provincial assembly and the national parliament in 2006, much of Mr Fayulu’s political career has been spent mobilising grassroots support in the country’s biggest city — a warren of teeming slums, pulsating music and crumbling colonial villas. The political party he formed in 2009 had only three seats in parliament before last month’s election. Its scruffy headquarters opposite the country’s national stadium was often without electricity, cloaked in darkness.

During the election campaign, though he sat at the head of a popular coalition, his rivals said he was a marginal figure who lacked experience in public office. For many Congolese people, who have suffered for years at the hands of corrupt and self-serving officials, it was his very status as an outsider that meant they voted for him.

The FT’S analysis of two separate sets of voting data showed Mr Fayulu won 59.4 per cent of the vote — a conclusion supported by the election observation mission run by the country’s Catholic Church.

“Martin has spent less energy making his case to internationals than earning the respect of the Congolese people, who feel sold out by the entire political class,” says Tom Perriello, a former US Special Envoy to Congo. “I was always struck in meetings how he focused on principles, not personal gain. That’s rare in any country, including my own.”

It would be a game changer in Congo, a nation created at the end of the 19th century as the personal fiefdom of the Belgian King Leopold II that has been plundered to enrich its leadership ever since.

Born in Congo’s capital in 1956 in the final years of Belgian rule, Mr Fayulu was the seventh of eight children. His father was employed at a Belgian-congolese industrial plant and his mother was a market trader, hawking home-made doughnuts and other goods. The family was lower-middle-class at best, he says, and after his parents divorced he made it to university in Paris only through the generosity of his extended family.