DRC Congo elections expose Africa's weakened democracy

DRC President Felix Tshisekedi. [AP photo]

The just-concluded General Election in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which handed incumbent President Felix Tshisekedi, a second term in office, indeed, by African standards, lived up to expectations.

As with similar processes elsewhere on the continent, there were inexplicable delays and claims of irregularities. In short, the exercise followed an all-too-familiar pattern of an unclear process that yields predetermined outcomes.

Held on December 20, the elections were meant to give the Central African nation of well over a hundred million people a new president, members of the National Assembly, those of the 26 provincial assemblies and, for the first time under the 2006 Constitution, a limited number of members of the Commune (Municipal) Councils.

The government extended the amount of time allocated to voting in some parts of the country to December 21, and some polling stations were still open as late as December 24, according to French news agency AFP.

The Union for Democracy and Social Progress's (UDPS) Tshisekedi, who first came to power at the end of former President Joseph Kabila's 18-year reign in 2019, was declared the winner of the presidential race with 73.34 per cent of the vote.

Moise Katumbi of the Ensemble party garnered 18.08 per cent. And Martin Fayulu, believed by some to have been the real winner of the December 2018 presidential poll that first brought Tshisekedi to power, managed a mere 5.33 per cent.

In certain territories around the country, such as Kwamouth, Masisi and Rutshuru, voting was made impossible by armed conflict.

And officially, there were 26 candidates running for president, including Denis Mukwege, winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, and two former prime ministers, Adolphe Muzito (2008-2012) and Matata Ponyo Mapon (2012-2016).

Matata Mapon, however, withdrew, alongside a few others, from the race in favour of Moise Katumbi.

In the weeks leading up to the polls, there were reports and claims of a plot, allegedly hatched in Nairobi, to influence the outcome of, especially, the presidential race.

DRC Congo is endowed with mineral deposits, including gold.

And there have been claims in the past of outsiders conspiring with natives to have designs on electoral process outcomes for business and, possibly, plunder.

Unfortunately, however, such is the character - and quirk - of African democracy.

It's been - and still is - our way of doing things in Zimbabwe, where incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa controversially "won" a new term in office, with 52.60 per cent of the vote held on August 23-24, 2023.

In Nigeria, where reportedly under 30 per cent of registered electors cast their votes in the February 25, 2023 presidential election of which Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress was declared winner with only 36.61 per cent.

In Uganda, where watchers project "a 2026 poll roadmap laden with an all-too-familiar supreme law review impulse"; in Rwanda, set to go to the polls in July 2024, with the incumbent Paul Kagame, the de facto leader of the Great Lakes country since the 1994 genocide who's "won" elections since 2003, expected to seek a fourth term in office.

And in Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Guinea, Mali, Chad and Gabon, where, between 2020 and 2023 alone, largely popular military coups followed either disaffection with government or what the people - and the army - perceived as a travesty of democracy.

Except for a few African states such as Ghana, Botswana, Zambia and South Africa, where a semblance of democracy shores up near-enviable regional and international standing, the rest of the continent, including Kenya, is but an electoral stage.

A cast of international power barons and a section of the local political elite weaves and delivers mutually palatable perceptional delectation out of - a skein of intrigue - after which then follow five or seven years of the people being fobbed off with the European Union (EU) and African Union's (AU) staple jive of "democracy being imperfect" and "a work in progress."

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