On the ground, in the East, the progress of the rebels has further accelerated.
A year ago, the presidential and legislative elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ended painfully. Deemed “chaotic”, in very diplomatic terms, this election which was to take place over one day, December 20, ultimately stretched over eight days.
In total opacity, without the slightest legal basis, the electoral operations continued to lead to the triumph of Félix Tshisekedi in the presidential election (73% of the votes in a one-round ballot with more than 20 candidates!) and the tidal wave of his political family and his support in the legislative elections (more than 450 elected officials out of the 500 in the National Assembly). Despite his absolute majority, the President of the Republic will struggle to set up an executive which will be headed – a first in the DRC – by a woman, Judith Suminwa Tuluka, appointed four months after the election. We will have to wait two more months, until June 12, for his government to be installed, proof of the difficulty of managing this large presidential majority united in a heterogeneous Sacred Union of the Nation (USN).
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Constitutional revision
The reappointed president, after a first electoral charade in 2018, therefore officially has a majority which allows him to consider a revision of the Constitution. But the Head of State could be tempted to go further and call into question article 220 of this 2006 constitution which locks in the number and duration of the mandates of the President of the Republic. For the political opposition, there is no doubt that Félix Tshisekedi wants to stay in power beyond his two “legal” mandates.
Martial and provocative as usual, the head of state, who embarked on a short tour of the Congo at the end of the year, only increased the certainties of the opponents by declaring in particular, during a speech in mid-November in Lubumbashi, capital of the Haut-Katanga province: “No one is going to change my position on revising or changing the Constitution.”
The determination displayed by Félix Tshisekedi pushed the powerful Catholic Church and its Protestant sister to issue warnings in the face of this presidential desire. The National Episcopal Conference of Congo, (Cenco), through the voice of its secretary general Monsignor Donation Nshole, has positioned itself clearly against the change or revision of the Constitution and launched, in October, a call for general mobilization to discourage this project which she describes as “dangerous” for the country.
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“Hell on earth”
In his homily on the occasion of Christmas Eve at Notre Dame du Congo Cathedral, in Kinshasa, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo did not return directly to this question of constitutional reform but he painted a portrait of the DRC marked in particular by non-existent infrastructure, a surge in market prices, generalized insecurity which makes the country look like “hell on earth”. The Archbishop of Kinshasa continued by calling on the authorities to “question”. “We call on everyone, especially all those who have a bit of responsibility, to stand up so that this misery can finally end. When you are a leader, you are first and foremost there for the happiness of the people and when the people are in this disastrous state, it should be a challenge to the authorities. What have we done to get the people to this point?” For many observers, Cardinal Ambongo’s homily was also a demonstration that a change in the Constitution would not provide the beginning of a solution to this descent into hell.
The words of Félix Tshisekedi also led on December 16 and 17 to a rapprochement between Moïse Katumbi, former governor of unified Katanga and president of the opposition party Ensemble pour la République, and Joseph Kabila, the former head of state and moral authority of the FCC, another opposition political group which refused to participate in the December 2023 elections which it presented as “an indigestible farce”.
The two men know each other, they traveled a long way together before falling out in 2014, when the Kabila clan suggested that its leader could also be tempted by a third mandate contrary to the Constitution. The divorce between the two men was then inevitable. After long negotiations, Joseph Kabila finally announced his withdrawal from the political scene, before imposing Félix Tshisekedi at the head of the country in 2019.
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Kabila and Katumbi, who spoke face-to-face for several hours during this reunion in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, published a joint statement in which they “firmly affirm their opposition to any constitutional reform which, in the current conditions, proves to be illegal and inopportune and whose ultimate goal escapes no one: the consolidation of the dictatorship through a presidency for life in the DRC”. The text further recalls that “no one is the owner but the tenant of power, the democratic lease being for a fixed period under the conditions provided for by the Constitution”, before calling on “all Congolese to actively resist the will displayed by the power in place to break the republican pact”.
The Eastern Front
The two men still welcome the “ongoing efforts at the regional and international levels […] aimed at bringing peace to the DRC” and “condemn illegal forces, including mercenaries and foreign troops, on the national territory”. Because alongside these political tensions, the country is still facing the advance of the Congo River Alliance/M23 rebellion in the east. The AFC of Corneille Nangaa, the former boss of the Independent National Electoral Commission (Ceni), whose birth was announced barely over a year ago, on December 15, 2023, continues to progress and now occupies today the vast majority of the province of North Kivu.
Faced with this movement, supported by Rwanda, the Congolese government relies mainly on local militias, often responsible for abuses and predations, recycled into wazalendo (patriots), on the Burundian armed forces sent to the front line, the FDLR opposed to Rwandan regime and Western mercenaries. A patchwork as dangerous as it is unmanageable supposed to interact with the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC) which, for their part, seem less and less supported by the Congolese regime despite the millions of euros which leave the state coffers month after month to strengthen their capacity and which essentially make it possible to line the pockets of certain high-ranking officers and other businessmen.
American position
Faced with this “Congolese front”, despite the proactive, even triumphalist, announcements from the Congolese authorities, the rebel troops have further accelerated their progress since the beginning of December, pushing towards both the north and the west of North Kivu. .
The city of Goma, the capital of the province with its 2 million inhabitants, has been largely surrounded for many weeks but remains under the management of Kinshasa thanks, above all, to American pressure which refuses to see the city fall – “too much symbolic” – in the hands of the rebels. In less than a month, the American Democratic administration will hand over the reins to the Republicans, less favorable to Kinshasa’s positions in a regional context increasingly impacted by the crises in the DRC, notably between Burundi and Rwanda but also in Zambia. , as the illegal arrests of opponents of the Tshisekedi regime who benefited from refugee status granted by the UNHCR have just shown.
