DR Congo at a historical turning point
UNCERTAINTY hangs over the date of presidential and legislative elections, yet President Joseph Kabila’s term expires on 19 December 2016 and he is not eligible for re-election. The opposition rejects the possibility of Kabila continuing in office as elections are organised. But there is an alternative. The Congolese can forget about elections and instead imagine a different way of organising their society away from liberal democracy.
It is now argued that political governance by the exercise of a high degree of the monopoly of violence and human rights abuses, hitherto characteristic of many political regimes in Africa during the Cold War era, has come to be regarded as an exception rather than the general rule in post-Cold War dispensations across most of the continent. Arguably, the period since the late 1980s in Africa has witnessed a renewed effort at reorganising the African political space in ways that would make the exercise of power more attuned to the demands of the citizenry.
By the mid-1990s, the momentum for political reforms had effectively become an unstoppable Africa-wide movement. The continent over, the single-party and military dictatorships that had been erected in the course of the period from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s gave way — one after the other — to domestic popular pressures for not only liberalisation but even outright democratisation of the political space. This post-Cold War wave of democratisation ushered in the restoration of multi-party politics, the organisation of elections, the licensing of private electronic and print media, and the removal of the worst restrictions on the organisation of public political meetings.
There, therefore, seemed to be growing agreement as to how political power should be transferred — the holding of periodic and democratic elections (‘electocracy’) being the sine qua non of political stability and of society’s peaceful development. As Lanciné Sylla once posited, if the winds of democracy are blowing over Africa today, one reason may be that democracy provides a rational solution to the problem of succession. Liberalisation of the political regime in a sense, Sylla further maintains, forces a country to establish a rational system for transferring power.
Particularly in post-Cold War sub-Saharan Africa, there has been a rapidly growing reliance on electoral processes as the principal way to legitimise governance at national, regional, and local levels. Coming from the context of a bipolar world from where the crisis and the collapse of one side (Communism) seemed to have validated the victory and superiority of the other (Capitalism), Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba pointedly noted that the political death of bureaucratic socialism has propelled the parliamentarian mode of politics (which includes liberal democracy) to a hegemonic position. Celebrants of capitalism in the West, Wamba-dia-Wamba underscored, have seized the occasion to intensify the propaganda for a free market economy and multi-party democracy. Hence, this Western-induced parliamentarian mode of politics has been perceived as an inescapable means for stimulating the development of democratic politics; for choosing representatives; for forming governments; and for conferring legitimacy upon the new political order.
2011 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) would have been the year for post-independence Congolese people to undergo a liberal democratic experiment of free and fair elections for the second time ever since the country acceded to national sovereignty in 1960. In 2006, in a bid to end a two-decade long series of armed conflict, which plagued the country in what has been termed as the “worst humanitarian crisis” Africa has ever suffered since World War II, elections were held after a three-year transition from which Joseph Kabila emerged as the elected president. Compared to the previous experiment, the 2011 presidential and legislative elections were conducted in an even more charged socio-political atmosphere — a revision of the 2005 promulgated Constitution having taken place less than a year to the polls.
Marred by significant irregularities and malpractices compromising the very stated agreeable standards of liberal democracy, these elections could not have brought any significant contributions to a radical transformation of a nation yet known for its post-independence democratic deficiencies. Already at the time of the Congo controversy during the Leopoldian rule more than a century ago, Adam Hochschild posits that the idea of full human rights, political, economic, and social for the Congolese people was a profound threat to the establishment of most countries on earth; perhaps, it still is to date. To add insult to the injury, what seemed to have mattered most for the incumbent regime in 2011 was mere regime consolidation against all odds.
Ironically, though less surprisingly, celebrants of the liberal democratic order in the West (the United States of America as its vanguard) came in handy to rubber-stamp the outcome of these 2011 general elections with little to no consideration of dissenting views from within the Congolese body politic. To levy even a weightier critique against this incumbent regime, citing Karl Marx, it came to signify the “unlimited despotism of one class over other classes.”
The otherwise little-hard-earned precedence of the 2006 elections was simply erased by the 2011 performance. With (i) a political elite (as forming a comprador bourgeoisie) in connivance with international capitalists (whether from previous metropolises or otherwise) deeply involved in cancerous deals of corruption which robs its citizenry of the basic expectations and the subsequent sheer lack of fight against it; (ii) a quasi-absence of state institutions (more so security and judicial apparatuses) to protect the inalienable freedoms of the citizenry; (iii) a continuous tendency by the so-called international community to unquestionably embark on massive support for periodical general elections in the midst of sheer primitive accumulation of capital and human insecurity devouring the citizenry at the expense of state inertia/indifference, one is left to question the yet omnipresent faith in the gospel of liberal democracy at this historically peculiar political juncture of the Congo situation.
The debate over a constitutional crisis looming large
2016, though not yet through, arguably presages a looming crisis of legitimacy of power on the political tapestry of the DRC. Joseph Kabila, at the country’s presidency since 2001, will have exhausted his constitutionally legitimate hold onto power on 19 December 2016, following his previous and constitutionally last re-election for a five-year term of office in 2011.
For the body in charge of the organisation of the elections — Commission Electorale Nationale Indépendante (CENI) — as for the ruling party and its political coalition (Alliance pour la Majorité Présidentielle, AMP), the holding of this year’s presidential and legislative elections is squarely conditioned by the review and updating of the 2011 voter register — an exercise which calls for a new population census, taking minimally sixteen months (slipping into August 2017).
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