The elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo were won by the incumbent president Félix Tshisekedi with 73 percent of the votes. Moise Katumbi came second with 18 percent; Denis Mukwege, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, received less than one percent. The opposition parties call the elections a sham and do not recognize the results.
After the announcement of the results on Sunday, army and police turned out en masse in the capital Kinshasa and the southern city of Lumbumbashi, home of the opposition candidate Katumbi. There were some clashes and more violence is feared in the coming days.
“We call on all Congolese to take to the streets en masse to demonstrate against election fraud,” the opposition candidates said in a joint statement. The final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which must validate the outcome. This Court is full of Tshisekedi supporters and the opposition therefore does not want to appeal and is demanding new elections.
Aeroplane
It is unclear whether, and if so on what scale, the elections have been manipulated in the country of almost a hundred million inhabitants. There is no doubt that the organization was extremely poor. A report by forty thousand observers from Catholic and Protestant churches concludes that a quarter of the polling stations did not open and that violence took place at 152 polling stations. The church mission documented “numerous cases of irregularities likely to affect the reliability of the results.” She reported more than five thousand incidents that resulted in voting procedures having to be aborted.
Two-thirds of the polling stations opened too late, and in thirty percent the voting machines did not work. The polls were extended by one day by the Electoral Commission – according to the opposition, this is unconstitutional – and in some areas even by more days. For the opposition, these problems are part of a premeditated plan for fraud.
Congo is four times the size of France but has a road network as large as that of Luxembourg. The most efficient mode of transportation is by plane or boat and the fact that large areas are covered in deep jungle makes communication between parts of the country difficult. Therefore, elections have always been a parody of the disorder in this vast country, but this time the chaos was extreme.
Fragmentation
Turnout in the elections that started on December 20 was around 43 percent. An estimated 1.7 million voters in eastern Congo were unable to cast their votes due to the activity of numerous armed groups competing for influence and resources. Tshisekedi had promised an end to this armed anarchy five years ago, but it actually increased. Another half a million people have been displaced from their homes in recent months, leaving seven million civilians displaced across the country, a global record.
During the election campaigns, Tshisekedi took several sharp swipes at neighboring country Rwanda, which he considers partly responsible for the armed anarchy in the east. With his new mandate, Tshisekedi may start beating the war drums even more towards Rwanda. His major problem, however, is the weak and corrupt national army, which is no equal to the highly disciplined national armed forces in Rwanda.
In his aggressive language towards Rwanda, Tshisekedi can count on widespread national support. However, these election results also show a fragmentation of national unity. Tshisekedi received great support in his residential area of Kasai in the center of the country and in Kinshasa. His opponent Katumbi, on the other hand, attracted votes in the south. In the turbulent east and south lies the Eldorado of Congo: the extremely large reserves of all kinds of raw materials, including coltan ore, which contains minerals necessary for a green energy transition in the world.