Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
charts the history of the Congo’s own democratic traditions, and argues
that outside intervention has not assisted their development.
The
people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo went to the polls in July
2006 to elect a president and 500 members of the national assembly, the
lower house of parliament. (The senate is to be elected indirectly by
the provincial assemblies in December 2006.) As faithful organs of propaganda
for the dominant interests of the contemporary world order, many international
media outlets repeatedly told their audiences that these ‘historic’ elections
were the first free and democratic elections to be held in the Congo since
independence from Belgium in 1960. The elections themselves were paid
for to the tune of over $500 million, and supervised by an international
community with a marked preference for Joseph Kabila, the incumbent president:
the major world powers were keen to legitimise their current client regime
in Kinshasa, so that they could continue unfettered to extract all the
resources they need from the Congo. There appeared to be a general consensus
that Congo was incapable of sorting out its problems without massive outside
intervention.
For
the record, there is need to recall that the African independence struggle
of the post-war years was a social movement for democracy and social progress,
waged against colonialism in its triple manifestations as economic exploitation,
political repression and cultural oppression through racism and the colour
bar. In the Congo, the commitment to the ideals of democracy was so strong
that in spite of the instability brought about by the post-independence
crisis involving the army mutiny, the assassination of Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba and US interference through the umbrella of the United
Nations Congo Mission, the rule of law and the rules of the game of parliamentary
democracy were for the most part respected. In May 1965, free and democratic
elections were held in the Congo, without international supervision or
international observers. Out of the total of 137 parliamentary constituencies,
the results were disputed in only five constituencies. Why is it then
that, 41 years later, the country has no capacity to organise its own
elections autonomously, and what does this have to tell us about the Congo’s
transition from dependent to independent status and sovereignty?
From
the Belgian Congo to Mobutu’s Zaire
As
a popular movement for democracy and social progress, the independence
struggle was a great national awakening in the Belgian Congo, as in the
rest of colonial Africa, with people from all walks of life ready to shed
fear in order to manifest their permanent aspirations for freedom and
their desire for a better and more secure future. Given the Congo’s impressive
ecological diversity, with its rich mineral and non-mineral resources,
there were great expectations that the country’s natural wealth would
now be utilised to improve the living conditions of ordinary men, women
and children. Unfortunately, independence and its aftermath did not fulfil
these expectations. The democratic experiment was ended in November 1965,
when army chief Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (who later changed his forename to
Sese Seko) staged a coup d’état, ostensibly to end a political stalemate
involving the refusal of President Joseph Kasavubu to retain Moïse Tshombe
as prime minister. Whereas such stalemates have been common currency in
countries such as Italy, and indeed Belgium, since 1945, the situation
in the Congo was decried as political chaos by the Western media. They
welcomed Mobutu’s takeover as the insurance needed for Western access
to Congo’s copper, cobalt, gold, diamonds and other resources. (This was
in fact Mobutu’s second attempt at a military putsch. His first venture
in militarism had been in September 1960 when, under the guidance of the
CIA, the Belgians and the UN forces deputy commander, he played a key
role in removing Prime Minister Lumumba from office.)
After
the 1965 coup, Mobutu dismantled the institutions of parliamentary democracy
to set up personal rule. He soon began to think of himself as the Congo’s
new king, the successor to Leopold II as the rightful owner of the country
and its abundant resources.1 The sense of personal ownership
was so strong that in October 1971 Mobutu saw fit to change the country’s
name, unilaterally, from ‘Congo’ to ‘Zaïre’. Internally, his dictatorship
was backed up by military force and a party-state apparatus from which
he recruited his cronies and retainers. Externally, he was supported by
the United States, France and Belgium. When they were needed, the three
external powers intervened militarily to save the dictator from armed
insurgents who were seeking to overthrow him. But after more than thirty
years in office, that support finally failed to materialise in 1996-97:
Mobutu by then was no longer useful, because of the end of the cold war,
and his increasing failures in controlling the country. No longer able
to hang on to power, he was forced to flee the country in May 1997, and
died in exile in Morocco less than four months later.
The
Sovereign National Conference
Had
Mobutu respected the resolutions of the Sovereign National Conference
(Conférence nationale souveraine, hereafter CNS),
convened by popular democratic forces in 1991, he would have been
able to retire honourably as part of a transition period to democracy.
The CNS was a broad representative assembly that convened between August
1991 and December 1992 in Kinshasa, with the aim of setting up the institutions
and legal framework necessary for the restoration of democracy. Its aim
was the transfer of power from the dictator and his allies to those who
supported democratic change and national sovereignty. However, because
of Mobutu’s resistance to change (in which he was assisted by external
forces), and also through failures and mistakes within the movement for
change itself, the CSN was not able to fulfil its remit. This led to a
period of weak government, which was unable to resist the subsequent outside
intervention by bordering countries. But although the CNS initiative stalled,
its legacy continues to be an important part of the country’s independently
developed democratic tradition.
Mobutu
rejected the honourable exit option offered by the CNS, because of his
own vanity; the influence of his Congolese entourage, whose privileges
were threatened by the change of regime; and the encouragement of some
of his foreign backers, who were apprehensive about the consequences of
the practice of democratic governance for their interests in the Congo.
This was likely to mean a rupture with a tradition of externally imposed
rulers, more beholden to their foreign mentors than to a domestic constituency.
The
CNS had been set up with the aim of bringing about precisely such rupture,
as well as a break with all other practices detrimental to the rule of
law and the construction of a developmental state - authoritarianism,
impunity, nepotism, incompetence. In this it was broadly similar to a
number of other African national conferences in the 1990s, following the
example set in early 1991 in Benin. National conferences had become popular
in Africa as democratic forums of all the relevant social forces of a
nation, designed to take stock of what had gone wrong in the past and
to chart a new course for the future. They were conceived as a combination
of truth and reconciliation commission and constitutional commission:
they provided a forum for national catharsis in the African tradition
of conflict resolution through the palaver, whose decisions are binding
on all parties and groups; and they also represented a modern rule of
law mechanism for restoring multiparty democracy. In a country like Congo-Kinshasa
(then Zaïre), which lacked the minimum infrastructure for free and fair
elections, the national conference was also seen as the most appropriate
forum from which a transitional government could emerge to prepare the
way for multiparty elections and social democracy - the kind of democracy
that Africa needs, as Claude Ake has argued: ‘a social democracy that
invests heavily in the improvement of people’s health, education, and
capacity so that they can participate effectively’.2
The
CNS was the largest and the longest running national conference in Africa.
Its 2,842 delegates represented all social classes and strata of the Congolese
population, including representatives of state institutions, political
parties, other civil society organisations, the intelligentsia, the private
sector, and traditional authorities. Its course did not run smoothly from
the beginning, however - it was interrupted by politically instigated
looting by unpaid soldiers in September and October 1991, and then illegally
suspended by the Mobutu regime in January 1992. In February 1992, a peaceful
Christian demonstration in favour of reopening the Conference was violently
suppressed by the Israeli-trained Division spéciale présidentielle
and the German- and Egyptian-trained Garde civile. More than
thirty people were killed, with bibles and candles in hand. For the democracy
movement they became ‘the martyrs of democracy’, entitled to the same
heroic status as the martyrs of independence who fell in January 1959
in Kinshasa, during the insurrection against Belgian rule.
Overcoming
these obstacles, the CNS then met uninterruptedly between April and December
1992. During this eight-month period, it accomplished a lot of work in
examining the record of the past and making recommendations for the country’s
future. With 23 commissions and over 100 sub-commissions, the conference
dealt with virtually every conceivable aspect of our national life, with
subjects ranging from assassinations and ill-gotten property to economic
policy, political structures and minority rights.
The
Conference rejected the recommendations that came from its Economic Affairs
and Parastatals Commissions, since they were perceived as being little
more than a straightforward endorsement of the Washington economic consensus.
The CNS was all the more upset in that these proposals, which included
advocating the wholesale privatisation of state enterprises, came from
people who had only recently deserted from Mobutu’s inner circle - the
very people who had been busy plundering the country and already had privatised
much of the state and its resources. They were now arguing that if the
state enterprises were legally privatised, they would be willing to bring
back the millions of dollars they had stashed away in foreign banks and
securities, in order to purchase the enterprises and invest in their rehabilitation.
For most delegates, the real question was the restitution of these ill-gotten
gains to the Congolese state, so that the enterprises could be rehabilitated
through strict respect for their missions and mandates, and effective
and transparent management. Privatising state enterprises would simply
mean selling them on the cheap, to individuals, both foreign and national,
who were more interested in profits than in the public welfare.
In
addition to rejecting the wholesale privatisation of public enterprises,
the CNS came up with another position that met with the open disapproval
of Western embassies in Kinshasa. This was the resolution that all of
Congo’s debts had to be renegotiated, and that the state had no obligation
to repay ‘odious debts’ - those that had never benefited the country in
any substantial manner, since the money had been embezzled by Mobutu and
his cronies, all too often with no action being taken by the lenders,
who were fully cognisant of the corruption involved.
With
these two radical positions, the CNS refused to toe the neo-liberal party
line, rejecting the dogmatic and anti-democratic affirmation of a single
model of socio-economic organisation. This radicalism on economic policy
and the election to the post of prime minister of Etienne Tshisekedi,
a radical nationalist who would put the country’s interests above those
of the rich North, helped to diminish the enthusiasm of the United States
and its Western allies for the CNS. Thus, while they offered lip-service
recognition of the Tshisekedi government, these advocates of democracy
and good governance did little to help it consolidate its power against
the onslaught of Mobutu, who used all means possible, including military,
to retain control over revenue-producing parastatals and key economic
agencies. The Western powers were quite relieved when opportunists in
the pro-democracy coalition subsequently abandoned Tshisekedi in April
1994, joining hands with Mobutu’s followers in the Parliament of Transition
to elect Léon Kengo wa Dongo as prime minister.
As
I have argued elsewhere, Kengo’s return to the prime minister’s office
was for all intents and purposes the restoration of the Mobutu regime.3
Kengo had been Mobutu’s most trusted and longest-serving prime minister
between 1978 and 1990, and was thus an unlikely prime minister for the
overseeing of the transition to democracy. In fact allowing the inclusion
of a party such as Kengo’s Union des démocrates indépendents (UDI)
in the democratic opposition coalition was a major tactical weakness.
The leaders of the UDI were technocratic opportunists, beholden to foreign
interests and the richest people in the Congo, and determined to reposition
themselves for political office in the new democratic dispensation. Indeed,
Kinshasa’s free press and radio trottoir (street radio or rumour
mill), which continued to function in spite of other setbacks to the planned
transition to democracy, saw no democrats among them. To popular delight,
they dubbed the UDI union des dinosaures impunis, or union
des détourneurs incorrigibles. With this group taking over the transition
to democracy, the hopes raised by the CNS and its comprehensive plan of
democratisation and social transformation, were simply dashed.
In
1996, with Kengo safely at the helm, the powers that be felt confident
that the establishment of a National Electoral Commission (Commission
nationale des élections, CNE) would not perturb the kind of democratic
transition they had envisaged for the Congo - that is, one that would
take place under the careful tutelage of the dominant powers of the world
system, and the international organisations under their control. Having
served as deputy president of the CNE, and leader of the opposition half
within it, I had a very useful vantage point from which to understand
the underlying dynamics of the situation. Prime Minister Kengo and Internal
Affairs Minister Gérard Kamanda wa Kamanda did their best to undermine
the work of the commission. Kengo himself called into the question the
integrity of members of the commission, and in eight months, the CNE received
only 4 per cent of the budget that Parliament had allocated for it. Meanwhile,
the Ministry of Internal Affairs was making arrangements to carry out
duties that the Electoral Law had clearly vested in the CNE, and this
led to a confrontation between the ministry and the commission.
As
for the international community, it showed none of the overwhelming support
for the CNE that it later gave to the 2004-2006 Independent Electoral
Commission. Indeed, one of its key representatives, the United Nations
Development Programme Resident Representative, openly supported the Kengo
government. I came to the conclusion that the CNE was becoming a waste
of time, and resigned in September 1996. Then in October 1996 Rwanda moved
to destroy the Hutu refugee camps in the Congolese border cities of Goma,
Bukavu and Uvira, thus launching the war that ultimately interrupted the
democratic transition, and paved the way for the coming to power of Laurent-Désiré
Kabila in May 1997.
The
dictatorship of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, 1997-2001
Who
is Laurent-Désiré Kabila and how did he become the Congo’s president?
For twenty-five years, between 1960 and 1985, Kabila was a major actor
in Congo’s guerrilla wars. He started his career in this regard in the
resistance against the Katanga secession in 1960-63.4 In 1964-6
he served as second in command of the eastern front of the popular insurrections
for a ‘second independence’. In 1967, following the defeat of the insurrections
in the east (by a counter-insurgency effort led by the US and Belgium,
and involving white mercenaries from Europe and Southern Africa, as well
as Tshombe’s former Katanga gendarmes, brought back home from exile in
Angola), Kabila founded his own party, the Parti révolutionnaire du
peuple (PRP). From its guerrilla base in the mountains along Lake
Tanganyika, the PRP waged an intermittent armed struggle against the Mobutu
regime until 1985. Kabila kept the PRP as his vehicle for revolutionary
change in the Congo, but he himself switched from being a warlord to become
a business operator; it is a well known fact that even during his halcyon
days of guerrilla warfare, he preferred the comforts and pleasures of
city lights to the rigor of the bush.5
In
1996, when the disintegration of the Mobutu regime provided the Rwandan
regime with the opportunity to destroy the bases of the Hutu extremists
in eastern parts of the Congo, it became useful to find a Congolese cover
for the Rwandan invasion; and a coalition of states in East and Southern
Africa, including Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda
and Zimbabwe, were also resolved to get rid of Mobutu and needed an ally.
Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a retired Congolese revolutionary, was ready and
willing to take charge of the propaganda war as leader of the national
struggle to liberate the Congo from Mobutu. Three other groups joined
Kabila to form the Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la libération
du Congo (AFDL) in October 1996.
The
seven-month war that resulted in the fall of the Mobutu regime was waged
mainly by units of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), and not by the AFDL,
which did not have a military organisation capable of defeating Mobutu’s
army. The exception in this regard were Congolese exiles who had accumulated
military experience as auxiliaries of the Angolan army, and who were allowed
by Angola to join the AFDL campaign. Known as tigres, these
men showed their mettle in defeating Mobutu’s Serbo-Croatian mercenaries
at Kisangani, his presidential forces near Lubumbashi, and Jonas Savimbi’s
fighters at Kenge in the Bandundu province. In addition to pursuing and
killing Hutu refugees, RPA units led Kabila’s AFDL in a long march that
culminated in a triumphant entry into Kinshasa in May 1997. In Lubumbashi,
Kabila announced the fall of the Mobutu regime, changed the country’s
name back to ‘Congo’ and proclaimed himself president.
By
announcing the fall of Mobutu, and changing the country’s name with the
stroke of the pen (just as Mobutu had done a quarter century earlier),
Kabila accomplished what a democratically made decision of the CNS could
not do. When, in August 1992, the overwhelming majority of CNS delegates
had voted to give back the country its original name, and to pave the
way for the retirement of Mobutu, the international community had chosen
to follow Mobutu in not recognising these decisions as sovereign and binding
on all parties. But in May 1997, not only did the international community
take notice of Mobutu’s ouster and the change in the country’s name, it
moved quickly to recognise the new name and the newly self-proclaimed
ruler.
The
message that the world community of nations sent to the people of the
Congo and Africa as a whole in these two instances is loud and clear.
Changes through democratic means and the rule of law in Africa are not
as deserving of unequivocal support as changes through the barrel of a
gun. Leaders who have come to power by the latter means have actually
been touted by the US State Department and its collaborators in academia
as the ‘new breed’ of African leaders - bold, self-reliant, and persons
on whom Washington can rely for long-term strategic alliances. Unfortunately
for these ideologues, however, Kabila failed to live up to expectations,
and the so-called ‘new breed’ has shown itself as being made up of the
same material as the old breed of authoritarian rulers - except that they
seem willing to regularly hold multiparty elections, while taking every
precaution not to lose them.
As
a self-proclaimed ruler initially backed by external powers, Laurent-Désiré
Kabila did not see the need to win the people’s confidence. His project
of personal rule was diametrically opposed to the social and political
democracy that had been on the national agenda since 1956, and to the
democratic vision and legacy of the CNS. It could not satisfy the deepest
aspirations of the Congolese people, who had already created for themselves
a space of democratic freedoms and liberties during the struggle for multiparty
democracy against the Mobutu regime. Kabila failed to recognise the fact
that, had it not been for the erosion of Mobutu’s power following popular
opposition, and in particular the CNS in 1992, he and his Rwandan allies
would not have been able to march from Goma to Kinshasa without a significant
military challenge from Mobutu’s army.
Kabila
squandered the political capital he had earned in overthrowing Mobutu.
On two separate occasions, he failed to seize a rare historic opportunity
to unite the country behind him: he could have led a collective effort
to rebuild the social and economic infrastructure destroyed under the
previous regime following in his rise to power; and he could have led
a patriotic war against the invasion of August 1998, following his break
with his Rwandan allies. Instead of making common cause with the democratic
forces that emerged from the CNS, and thus merging the revolutionary legitimacy
of overthrowing Mobutu with the democratic legitimacy of the CNS, he opted
for personal rule, relying on relatives and cronies. With its adventurism,
amateurism and unorthodox ways of conducting state business, his regime
did not succeed in making a clean break with the past. Furthermore, he
reversed the growing freedoms of the twilight of the Mobutu regime - the
free press, freedom of expression and the right to organise freely. He
was also unable to defeat the Ugandan and Rwandan forces that invaded
after his break with them, and had to rely on the support of forces from
countries such as Zimbabwe and Angola. At the time of his death, large
parts of the country were occupied by Rwanda and Uganda, who were linked
to Congolese-based political allies, which in turn contributed to political
division within the DRC.
Kabila
has not been greatly missed since his assassination in January 2001, either
internally or by the governments that supported his war effort, for whom
he had become a great burden. He was a major stumbling block to the peace
negotiations, and particularly the inter-Congolese dialogue after the
Lusaka Agreement of 1999, which had established a process to lead to peace
and new political institutions. The Agreement had marked the end of the
war but had not ended the occupation of large parts of the country.
Joseph
Kabila and the internationally supervised transition, 2001-2006
Joseph
Kabila, Laurent-Désiré’s son and successor, was soon to become very popular
internationally, for committing his government to the inter-Congolese
dialogue. Having failed to control either the CNS or Kabila, the international
community now looked to Joseph Kabila - a 29-year old with no experience
in government and international affairs - for the establishment of their
tutelage over the Congo. And this tutelage seems to have been accepted
by the representatives of Congolese political and civil society organisations
that participated in the inter-Congolese dialogue that subsequently took
place in Sun City, South Africa. The comprehensive and inclusive accord
reached at these talks, signed in Pretoria in December 2002, provided
for a new process of transition to constitutional government, but this
was to be under the aegis of an International Committee to Accompany the
Transition (Comité international pour l’accompagnement de la transition,
CIAT) as a formal institution of the transition. The CIAT is made up of
representatives of the five members of the UN Security Council, plus Belgium,
South Africa, Angola, the African Union and Congo-Brazzaville (the country
currently holding the AU chair), and it is chaired by the Special Representative
of the UN Secretary General in the Congo and head of the United Nations
Mission in the Congo. According to informed sources, France and the United
Kingdom have played a major role in drafting most of the CIAT positions
concerning the management of the transition. William Swing, the UN Special
Representative and a former US Ambassador to DR Congo, is the chief coordinator
of the international tutelage over the country.
Begun
with approximately 360 delegates staying in the luxurious hotels of Sun
City in February 2002, the inter-Congolese dialogue had its ups and downs,
but the negotiations eventually resulted in the adoption of the Pretoria
Agreement and an interim constitution for a two-year transition period,
which could be extended for one more year if the electoral commission
demonstrated that it had material difficulties in holding free, fair and
democratic elections within the allotted time. As it turned out, delays
in the transitional process were caused not by material difficulties but
by the slowness of the government and parliament in enacting enabling
laws, in a conscious scheme to prolong their tenure; the transition was
illegally extended, and elections were not held until July 2006.
The
arrangements for the period of transition between the agreement and elections
under the new constitution consisted of a complex set of institutions,
including a ‘presidential space’ of five members, which comprised of a
president and four vice-presidents. The Kabila regime retained the presidency,
and one vice-president’s post; the latter went to Abdoulaye Yerodia, a
close ally of the elder Kabila and a man who had distinguished himself
with virulent anti-Tutsi rhetoric during the battle of Kinshasa in August
1998. Of the three remaining posts of vice president, one was allocated
to the Goma branch of the Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie
(RCD-Goma), the Rwandan-backed rebel group established in August 1998;
one to the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC) of Jean-Pierre
Bemba, the Ugandan-backed
rebel movement, which enjoyed popular support in the Equateur province;
and one to the unarmed opposition. The fact that power was to be shared
by the three major belligerents, with the unarmed opposition as a useful
appendage, was a major flaw of the Sun City/Pretoria agreement. It condoned
the idea of achieving power by the barrel of a gun, and conferred impunity
on the leaders and their lieutenants - many of whom were awarded ministerial,
parliamentary or parastatal positions.
In
addition to transitional institutions of state sovereignty - government
and a bicameral parliament, courts and tribunals - five democracy-supporting
institutions were established, as follows: the independent electoral commission;
the high authority of the media; the national observatory of human rights;
the truth and reconciliation commission; and the commission on ethics
and the fight against corruption. It is interesting to note that, with
the prevailing tendency of confusing democracy with elections, it is the
electoral commission that received massive support from the international
community. With the exception of the media watchdog unit, which did receive
some support, the other democracy-supporting institutions had few resources
with which to become effective.
The
2003-2006 transition will be best remembered for the vanity, corruption,
incompetence and total disregard for the welfare of Congolese citizens
displayed by the authorities. Money is the religion of the political class
in Kinshasa, and the current rulers see power not as a tool for peace
and development but as a means for acquiring and maximising their wealth.
The elder Kabila started making business deals with foreign entrepreneurs,
including rogue businesspersons, even before he took power in May 1997.
And, in reports on the illegal exploitation of Congolese resources and
other forms of wealth, a UN team of experts have identified prominent
individuals in the entourage of current President Joseph Kabila as looters
of natural resources in alliance with foreign interests. Today, the privatisation
of land, mining, forests and other national assets for the benefit of
foreign entrepreneurs and their Congolese associates at the highest levels
of the state goes on unlawfully, against existing laws and against the
interests of both the people and the state.
As
actors in and beneficiaries of this plunder, the former belligerents have
no interest in establishing the rule of law and integrating their armed
groups into a single national army. The army integration process has proceeded
very slowly, with the belligerents keeping some of their best fighters
in parallel units or private militias. Thus, Kabila’s presidential guard
is not part of the integrated army, but it is deployed all over the country.
Likewise, Vice President Jean-Pierre
Bemba is rumoured to have thousands of well-armed troops of his own; while
Vice President Azarias Ruberwa, the RCD-Goma leader, can count not only
on his own troops but also those of renegade Tutsi officers and ultimately, troops from
Rwanda. In such a situation, there is no guarantee that losers in the
electoral competition might not be tempted to use force in order to retain
power. And peace is still elusive in four areas of the northeast: the
Ituri District of Eastern province, North Kivu, South Kivu, and North
Katanga. Here, the array of armed groups involved in looting resources
and killing innocent civilians includes rebel groups from Uganda and Rwanda
and Congolese militia known as Mai-Mai, who have shifted from their original
goal of fighting foreign invaders to turf fights over territory and resources,
in acts bordering on banditry. The Rwandan and Ugandan rebels do not represent
any immediate danger to their countries of origin, but the latter still
exploit the apparent threat as a pretext for incursions into the Congo
to loot its abundant natural resources.
The
United Nations force of 23,000 persons, including 17,000 troops, has failed
to put an end to the armed conflict in the northeast, yet the international
community is spending approximately 1 billion dollars a year on it. The
European Union also deployed over 2000 troops of its own as reinforcements
during the four-month period of elections, with an estimated expenditure
of $5 to $7million. Add to this the $500 million spent on the elections,
and it is difficult not to argue that all of this money could have been
better spent. It could have been used to assist local communities in rebuilding
their infrastructures, and to create jobs to promote greater human security,
thus helping to remove the severe problems faced by many young people,
and the sense of hopelessness that leads to their enrolment in militia
groups. In themselves, elections cannot solve the underlying issues of
security. What is needed is a restructured and integrated national army;
the reunification, pacification and reconstruction of the country; the
restoration of territorial integrity; and the establishment of the authority
of the state over the entire national territory.
Conclusion:
the legacy of the CNS for Congo’s democratic transition
There
is no doubt that the Congolese people are tired of too-long a transition
and would like to have democratically elected leaders whom they can hold
accountable, at least at the next elections. But in a country that has
been torn asunder by years of plunder and neglect, elections for elections’
sake will simply become a ritual without meaning if they cannot lead to
substantial change in building effective institutions and in delivering
badly needed basic services to the population. As the culminating point
of the Congolese democracy movement in the 1990s, the CNS helped people
to shed their fears of the dictatorship, gave greater impetus to the culture
of freedom and political discourse, and promoted the right to discuss
public affairs freely and to criticise the government. The consolidation
of an independent press, the increasing clout of civil society, and the
growth of popular forms of political debate and organisation have all
increased the capacity to resist authoritarianism and oppressive rule.
All
this is evidence of the Congolese people’s own democratic traditions.
And these must continue to play a central role in the democratic transition,
particularly the legacy of the CNS, which established the crucial building
blocks of democracy; these remain its major achievement, and the source
of its legitimacy as a defining moment in the political history of the
Congo.6 In its clarity and comprehensiveness, the CNS provides
essential guidelines for the political future of the country. It follows,
then, that however credible and successful any elections held during the
current internationally supervised transition might be, they cannot succeed
in effecting a genuine democratic transition if they are not faithful
to the democratic legacy of the CNS.
In
order to achieve the convergence between this legacy and free and fair
elections, the Congo must complete its transition from colonialism to
genuine independence; from a dependent territory with 60 per cent of its
budget and key policies coming from outside the country to a truly sovereign
state with its own social project and capacity to make and implement its
own development policies. This requires that the country be governed by
independent, patriotic and democratic leaders. And these are likely to
emerge not from political parties financed from abroad, by foreign business
enterprises involved in looting the country’s economy, or by misappropriated
state revenues, but rather from mass democratic movements bent on emancipating
the country from foreign control and the culture of corruption. We need
leaders who put the interests of the country and its people above their
own narrow class interests. For such leaders, the democratic legacy of
the CNS will remain the alpha and omega of the democratic transition in
the Congo.
1.
See the interesting portrait in this regard in V.S. Naipaul, ‘A new king
for the Congo,’ The New York Review of Books, 26 June 1975.
2.
Claude Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa, Brookings Institution,
1996, p132.
3.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s
History, Zed Books, 2002, pp203-204.
4.
This secession played a major role in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba.
5.
During Che Guevara’s seven month stay in the Congo bush in 1965 he witnessed
only one visit by Kabila to his guerrilla camp. See William Galvez, Che
in Africa: Che Guevara’s Congo Diary, translated by Mary Todd, Ocean
Press, 1999.
6.
For a summary of the legacy of the CNS see my monograph entitled From
Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Second and Revised Edition,
Nordic Africa Institute, 2004, p.11.
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