Fleeing the chaos

After praising last week’s remarkably peaceful election, scenes of chaos like this are understandably causing alarm amongst national and international observers. Most acknowledge that the mishandling of ballot papers is the result of poor organisation and terrible logistical planning rather than some sort of generalised conspiracy. But any opportunity for claiming the election was a fraud is bound to be exploited by those who lose out.

Meanwhile, a group of us decided to sneak away from it all and reclaim our week-end: picnic, barbecue, camping, invigorating moonlight swims in the fast-flowing river, lounging in the hammock with a book, mid-afternoon snooze… Dure, dure la vie au Congo!

A week in the life

Introducing the one and only Dieudonné, gardener and handyman par excellence.

(If you're wondering about the picture he's holding, don’t miss these scenes from Fred’s life – until Monday, after which you’ll have to find him in the archives.)

Disenfranchised youth

In the little mountain village where I observed the elections, by 3pm most people who wanted to vote had already done so. By law the polling stations had to stay open until 5pm, but the queues had dwindled to naught, and there was no one left outside. No one except these kids, who half-jokingly, half-seriously insisted that they too wanted to vote. The youngest one could barely talk, but when I asked in very broken Swahili who he wanted to vote for (“President, wapi?”), he answered loud and clear, “Kabila!” Then it turned out that the oldest ‘kid’ in the group, whom I estimated to be no more 15 years old at a push, was in fact 22, had a voter’s card, but hadn’t yet built up the nerve to vote. So to my gentle encouragement and his small friends’ boisterous teasing and cheering, he shyly fulfilled his civic duty, shuffling into the polling station timid and embarrassed, and coming out again some 10 minutes later with just the widest grin in the universe. Welcome to democracy.

The trigger of Africa

Perhaps it’s election euphoria, perhaps it’s the excitement of an impending holiday to France, but this morning I am in love with the Congo.

All the more reason to fret. All of us who worked so hard for the elections climaxed too early. Like the high school graduate who throws a party and burns his notes when he passes his exam, only to discover that he needs those same notes at university, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief and skipped a little dance of jubilation on 30 July. Now we are finding it hard to rekindle the motivation to work long hours all over again. And yet, without wanting to sound too melodramatic, we are at the brink. This country is at the brink. It could still go either way.

In Kinshasa, Jean-Pierre Bemba has already announced that he is in the lead, whilst Kabila supporters are convinced that their man will pass first round (i.e. that he has received more than 50% of the national vote). The most likely outcome is that Kabila will be in the lead with less than 50% of the national vote, and that there will be a second-round stand-off between Bemba and Kabila. This will incense both sides. It will also mean a clear chasm between the west (with Bemba said to have received 60% of the votes in Kinshasa and Bas-Congo) and the east (where Kabila is said to have received up to 90% of the votes), and a second-round debate focussing even more intensely on issues of ‘congolité’ – who is and isn’t ‘properly’ Congolese, and who is therefore more entitled to choose the country’s future president.

But for the time being, although the individual results of each polling station have been posted outside the station, the official provisional results will only be available in three weeks, after electoral officials have compiled the results. Heads of polling centres and policemen are busy transporting millions of ballot papers from centres all over the country to 62 compilation centres. These are then dumped rather irreverentially in big piles of sealed and unsealed black plastic bags, to the horror of election observers and the exasperation of election officials who have to sift through them to find the all-important results sheets. If there was ever any doubt, it is now clear that any recounting of the ballots in the case of a dispute will be virtually impossible. Still, the counting in each polling station happened in front of political party witnesses and observers, so what really matters is the compilation of the 50,000-something results sheets.

Meanwhile, the biggest security threat today is the thousands of electoral agents and police officers who worked tirelessly from 5am on 30 July to the morning of 31 July, often without food, drink or sleep, and who haven’t yet received the pay they were promised. A rather unfortunate glitch in an election that has cost well over $400 million.

Several people have been asking me, over the past few days, if I have heard the expression, “Africa is shaped like a gun, and the DRC is its trigger.” Kinshasa is wrought with tension over these elections and their results. And yet the crazy irony is that people outside Kinshasa flocked to the booths because they thought it would bring them lasting peace. I watched one bowed old man in Wellington boots dance triumphantly as he walked out of the polling station after casting his vote. Isn’t that more important than winning or losing? Isn’t that more important than politics?

Elections in pictures

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