News update

Wow, the last two weeks have been just crazy. It’s always the same when a team of consultants is brought in: they have just a week or two to do everything, they have dozens of people to meet every day, and they are expected to come up with novel ideas that people on the ground doing the job day-in, day-out haven’t thought of. Of course, since the days are filled with meetings, we are expected to work in the evenings, and if by some miracle we have a few workless hours one evening or on the week-end, we feel obliged to entertain, show the visitors around town, take them souvenir shopping, etc. So park your private life for a couple of weeks, there’s a mission in town! I’ve been in their shoes many a time, so I really can’t complain. Still, call me a bureaucrat, but I look forward to the next ten days of quiet, in-my-own time report writing. Insh’allah.

So what’s been going in DRC since I took my eye off the ball?

The new political leadership has been emerging slowly, for starters, with a happy outcome for the President. The new government was finally announced on 5 February: sixty state ministers, ministers and vice-ministers, no less! And the country now boasts eleven new provincial assemblies, seven pro-Kabila and four pro-Bemba; a new senate with a comfortable majority for the presidential coalition and quite a few dinosaurs from the Mobutu era reappearing as senators; and, since Friday, a confirmed list of governors and vice-governors, with only one province going to the opposition. Bemba has accused Kabila's camp of buying votes for governors and senators, elected indirectly by members of the provincial assemblies. But the real losers are the women: only four ministers and four vice-ministers out of sixty, and only five senators are women – not much in a country whose Constitution promotes gender parity!

A funny story from this week: following the announcement of the new Cabinet, three people with the name Kasongo Ilunga showed up at the Prime Minister’s office to claim the post of Minister of Commerce. The newspapers claim that even the Prime Minister’s office wasn’t sure which of the three men Gizenga (the PM) actually meant to make minister, so the mystery continues – only in DRC, vraiment!

The other big story of the past couple of weeks is the shootings in Bas-Congo. During the election of governor and vice-governor of that province, the newly-elected members of the provincial assembly voted for the PPRD candidate (the party close to Kabila), despite an MLC majority (Bemba’s party) in the assembly and amid suspicions of corruption ($10,000 per vote). The spiritual leader of the Bundu Dia Kongo, an anti-government political and religious group which many qualify as a sect, was on the lists as an MLC candidate and was therefore not elected. The violence started when the police in Matadi, Bas-Congo’s capital, searched the Bundu Dia Kongo headquarters and found weapons. The Bundu Dia Kongo organised demonstrations in several cities throughout the province, during which some twenty people were killed. In the town of Muanda, an angry crowd ransacked a number of public buildings and killed four police officers and two soldiers. The police then called in the army, and hundreds of soldiers opened fire on the crowd without summation. They then pursued the Bundu Dia Kongo followers into their church, which was subsequently burnt down. According to the UN mission in Congo (MONUC), 134 people were killed in the clashes, or ‘massacre’ as more and more people are now calling it. The Minister of Interior has since been confirmed as one of six ministers of state – a vote of confidence from the President and Prime Minister at a time when some might have expected his resignation.

I'm cheating. This picture was actually taken in Katanga a few months ago,
but the riot gear was standard issue and would have been the same in Bas Congo.

MONUC will shortly publish a report on what happened. In the meantime, it has been busy discussing its future. Its mandate was supposed to expire last 15 February, but many both within and outside DRC called for an extension: a recent Oxfam report entitled 'A Fragile Future' (which I haven’t yet read) argues strongly that premature withdrawal of the UN from the DRC could see a return to all-out fighting and a humanitarian crisis. For now the Security Council has extended the UN’s mandate in DRC by two months, but most people expect it to be extended by at least two years. Except perhaps President Kabila, who seemingly deliberately chose to underplay the January visit of the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon: the poor man, who had specifically chosen the DRC as his first ‘southern’ country visit, arrived in Kinshasa unheralded and was made to travel all the way to Kisangani to meet the President.