Congo (87 page)

CHAPTER 14

THE RECESS

Hope and Despair in a Newborn Democracy

2006–2010

T
HE LIGHT WAS STILL FRAGILE AT SIX IN THE MORNING.
P
ASCAL
Rukengwa had to get used to the silence in his native village. What a difference with Kinshasa! Bushumba was thirty-five kilometers (about twenty-two miles) from Bukavu; this was his home region, this was where he came from, and even though he had lived for years in the frenetic capital, this was where he would vote. For the first time. Pascal was forty-two. The last time there had been free elections in his country, he was one year old. “I’m voting for life,” he said, “to be able to live. This act is a new beginning.”
¹

He saw how busy it was already. At this early hour there were rows of people waiting in front of the polling place. Some of them had spent the night in front of the door.
²
This was not a Sunday like any other.
Mamans
had put on their best
pagnes
. Some men wore ties and spit-shined shoes. Teenagers were showing off their mirrored sunglasses. Young women had had new extensions braided into their hair. Patiently they stood in line, holding their orange polling cards.

Pascal Rukengwa had no time for pride or sentimentality, but in a way this was his day too. This was what he had been pushing for for years. He was one of the twenty-one members of the CEI, the national electoral committee that had organized the enormously complex voting process. “All hope was focused on us, but we had to learn everything as we went along. Sometimes I felt like a stranger in the jungle, where an animal could come along and tear you apart [at] any moment. Wasn’t all this hope out of proportion to our capacities? At some places people had never even seen a computer.” The United States and the European Union provided massive financial support. At almost half a billion dollars, the largest part of it from Europe, these were to be the biggest and most expensive elections ever organized by the international community.
³

Pascal looked around. Around the country, fifty thousand polls were opening their doors at this very same moment. Forty thousand observers from home and abroad were keeping an eye on things.
⁴
During the last few months, a quarter of a million polling officials had crossed the country, providing the people with information.
⁵
The ballot boxes had been taken by helicopter, truck, and motorbike to the remotest corners of Congo. At some spots in the jungle, they even went by canoe or were carried by porters.

But today it was happening. Sixteen million people descended on the polling places, refugees even left their plastic huts. Pascal’s background was in South Kivu’s
société civile
, the congeries of nongovernmental organizations. “Free elections, that was the most urgent desire of the Sovereign National Conference. For the people it was transformed into a magic moment, but for me it was a day full of stress. A pregnant woman waiting in line fainted, and the closest hospital was ten kilometers [about six miles] away. A child became unwell and then died. I kept driving back and forth. That day I didn’t have a single moment to myself. But honestly, I had no idea that the people attached so much importance to choosing their leaders.”

Despite a few minor incidents, the voting took place with great dignity. In the polling places—often nothing more than a larger hut—the voters were handed the necessary forms. The ballot card for the presidential election listed thirty-two names. Joseph Kabila was among them, of course, alongside Jean-Pierre Bemba and Azarias Ruberwa, the rebel leaders who had been made vice presidents. Antoine Gizenga was on it as well, the man who had once served as deputy prime minister under Patrice Lumumba. And Nzanga Mobutu, the son of. In addition one had Pierre Pay Pay, the former director of the national bank and Oscar Kashala, a physician who had come back to Congo from America. The ballot card for the parliament was a good deal more complicated. There were ten thousand candidates for five hundred seats in the house, divided over more than two hundred and fifty political parties. The form consisted of six large sheets of paper with a passport photo of each candidate beside the name; one-third of the country, after all, was illiterate. Little old ladies asked officials to cross off “Monsieur Sept” (Mr. Seven) for them. That was Kabila, whose Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie (PPRD) had been placed seventh on the ballot list.

When the polls closed, the counting began. Wherever possible that took place on the spot, to avoid ballot-box fraud, although that meant things were not always simple. “We had no electricity,” Pascal Rukengwa said, “and the flashlights they had given us didn’t work. There was no money to buy candles, but the people went off looking for them. We handled things ourselves. At some of the polling places the people actually slept beside the ballot boxes, to make sure nothing went wrong.”

The image of brave citizens counting votes by candlelight in a hut, often after having eaten nothing all day, is intensely moving. The image of fatigued men and women sleeping with their arms around a sealed ballot box, as though it were a shrine or a child, can leave no one unmoved. The elections’ biggest winner was the common Congolese man and woman.
⁶
Before sunup the next day, many of the counts had already been phoned or texted through to the computing centers. The miracle had taken place.

Pascal Rukengwa flew back to Kinshasa. On August 20, 2006, three weeks after the elections, the definitive results were announced. None of the many thousands of observers had reported any large-scale fraud, and the surprising outcome seemed to confirm that: no one had an absolute majority. Kabila took 45 percent of the votes, Bemba 20 percent. Coming in third with 13 percent was old Gizenga, a man who had not campaigned but relied on his historical aura. Pascal: “The electoral returns led to enormous frustration: Bemba knew he hadn’t won and Kabila realized that he was not a shoo-in. There was a lot of shooting in the city. The Bemba supporters focused all their rage on Kabila and on us. They suspected the CEI of partisanship, while we were actually amazed that Bemba had raked in so many votes! We had to meet in a basement. I wasn’t sure I would be alive at the end of the day. The Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) tanks took us to the public broadcasting station to announced the official results. I sat on the floor, between the soldiers’ legs. It was an old tank, it had trouble starting. They actually make a sound like a huge diesel generator, did you know that?”

The election results showed that a striking fault line ran through the electorate. Kabila had won in the east of the country. In provinces such as North Kivu, South Kivu, Maniema and Katanga, he achieved Stalinist scores of more than 90 percent (of up to 98.3 percent in Maniema and Katanga). Hardly remarkable, though, when one realizes that he himself came from the east and was seen there as
l’artisan de la paix
(the crafter of peace), the man who had stopped the war. Bemba triumphed in those western provinces not directly affected by the war (Bas-Congo, Kinshasa, Bandundu) and his own Équateur. The fault line corresponded roughly with the border between Lingala-speaking and Swahili-speaking Congo. For a time, people feared for a macroethnic conflict.

The day after the results were announced, Kabila’s guards fired on Bemba’s residence in Kinshasa, by their own account after being provoked by his bodyguards. What they didn’t know was that Bemba was at home at that moment, in a meeting with virtually all the major Comité International d’Accompagnement à la Transition (CIAT) ambassadors. The shooting went on for hours; Bemba’s private helicopter was destroyed. The skirmish came to an end after an intervention by the MONUC and EUFOR, the European peacekeeping force.

Calm was restored, however, and the second round of the presidential elections was held in a largely peaceful atmosphere on October 29. As is usual in such second rounds, the number-one candidate made a deal with number three. Kabila promised to appoint Gizenga prime minister in exchange for his following. He also won the support of number four, Nzanga Mobutu, who was given the post of minister of agriculture. Mobutu Jr.’s conversion to the presidential fold was portentous; he came from Équateur, which was Bemba’s province as well. Kabila’s cartel, the Alliance pour la Majorité Présidentielle (AMP), now housed both his own PPRD and Gizenga and Mobutu’s parties. Truth
can
be stranger than fiction: that the son of
mzee
Kabila was now cutting deals with the son of Marshal Mobutu probably caused more than one ancestor to turn over in his grave. It was as though the children of Churchill and Hitler had banded together to form a political party.

Kabila took 58 percent of the votes, Bemba 42. On December 6, 2006, two days past his thirty-fifth birthday and newly married, Kabila was inaugurated as the Congo’s first democratically elected president since Joseph Kasavubu. With that, the Third Republic finally became a fact. Mobutu had heralded the end of the Second Republic in April 1990, but the transition to a new political system had taken more than sixteen years, sixteen years of hunger, poverty, war, and death, sixteen years of despair and hopelessness.

W
ERE THINGS REALLY GOING TO CHANGE
? From day one, many in Kinshasa were skeptical. Kabila considered himself the candidate of the Western world. Although the elections had proceeded correctly by all accounts, the people of Kinshasa, the Kinois, remembered all too well how Louis Michel, then European commissioner of development cooperation and a former Belgian minister of foreign affairs who was extremely active in Central Africa, how this “big Loulou” with his cigar and his pats on the back and his guffaws, how this man, who for many Congolese had been the very epitome of the always-elusive “international community,” had said on TV in a less guarded moment that Kabila represented “the hope for Congo.”

Abbé José Mpundu, the highly acute cleric who had helped organized the March of Hope, was quite scornful. “From 1990 to 1995 I fought for elections that would not be like the charade we got this time. It was a parody, orchestrated by the international politico-financial Mafia! I wanted to vote for Tshisekedi, but he had relegated himself to the sidelines, so I just voted for Bemba. They let us play a bit part. It was one big, worthless Mafia gambit. For a lot of money, the international community bought itself the president it preferred; we would have been better off passing the hat around to finance the elections and building our own ballot boxes. At least then they would have been our own.”

Abbé Mpundu’s extremely critical comments were not all the exception in the capital. Electoral commissioner Pascal Rukengwa came from the east, where the people had voted en masse for Kabila. On December 6 he was present at the inauguration, but he was not impressed by what he saw. Of course, there were lots of important guests, lots of heads of state. And yes, Tshala Muana had sung beautifully. But everything seemed to be organized so amateurishly. “There weren’t enough seats. People had to stand outside in the sun for hours. I was invited to the dinner, but it was a complete chaos. The room was full of people who hadn’t been invited, so I couldn’t get in. It wasn’t organized very well, it wasn’t very professional.” Those were only details, of course, but Pascal found the day’s substance fairly dubious too. Western observers were pleased with the president’s speech. Hadn’t he spoken powerfully about “the five building sites,”
les cinq chantiers
, of national reconstruction? Wasn’t that a reference to infrastructure, water and electricity, education, employment, and health care? And hadn’t he literally said that “the recess was now over”?

Pascal wasn’t so sure: “I had no faith in it. That story about the five building sites, I thought that was rather childish. If a government doesn’t address those essential tasks, then what is it there for? He wasn’t on the campaign trail anymore, was he? As far as I was concerned, the recess was still going on. It was the same hesitant, immobile man. But looking back on it now, I can only conclude that I was being too positive about the whole thing.”
⁷

H
OW TO DESCRIBE
C
ONGO
on the eve of the Third Republic? Statistics, percentages, and figures are not enough. The world reveals itself in crumbs and grains of sand. How to describe this vast area?

By saying that it was a fertile country where many ate only once every two days? That countless of its people suffered from hemorrhoids due to an imbalanced diet of manioc? That people who had no money to buy hemorrhoid salve, if it was there to be bought at all, simply treated themselves with cheap, imported toothpaste? Yes, good friends of mine have told me that. Cuts were treated with brake fluid, burns with vaginal fluid. They shined their shoes with a free condom; the lubricant made the leather glisten. Women who wanted fatter buttocks, they said, inserted a bouillon cube in their vagina. Others gave themselves enemas of beef extract.

How to describe a country? A country that was not a state but still had more than half a million civil servants, older men and women who didn’t enter retirement because that didn’t exist and so just kept going to the office, amid file cabinets brimming over with moldy, termite-ridden files, hoping for a smattering of wages and dreaming of a bit of good governance.
⁸
In a patient hand they filled out endless forms and treated the civil service hierarchy with great awe; just because a state exists only on paper does not mean it is unreal, on the contrary. In Bunia, a letter had to make its way across seventeen different desks before receiving a reply.
⁹
In Boma I met a city librarian without a library.