03:52 GMT 30th January 2012
Veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi has also claimed victory and attempted to rally his supporters for his swearing-in as president.
On December 23 in the capital Kinshasa, which voted for the opposition by two to one, state police used teargas to disperse supporters ofTshisekedi and his Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party from the city's main Martyrs stadium and from around their leader's residence in the capital's Liemete district. ' It's banned. There is already an elected president who has been sworn in,' a source close to the head of the country's police toldAFP news agency. 'We cannot have another swearing in. It's an act of subversion.'
The Congolese Supreme Court confirmed official results on December 16 showing that Kabila won with 49 per cent of the vote against 32 per cent for Tshisekedi, who disputed the results as fraudulent and declared himself president even before international observers had pronounced their doubts on the veracity of the outcome. Human Rights Watch reported that Congolese security forces have killed at least 24 people and arbitrarily detained dozens more since Kabila was announced the winner on December 9.
'Since Joseph Kabila was declared the winner of the presidential election, security forces have been firing on small crowds, apparently trying to prevent protests against the result,' said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. 'These bloody tactics further undermine the electoral process and leave the impression that the government will do whatever it takes to stay in power.'
The BBC reported more violence in the central city of Mbuji-Mayi, where official tallies show that 97 per cent of voters supported the 79 year-old Tshisekedi. The BBC also observed emerging and striking patterns of electoral fraud from the official vote tally. For instance, the number of polling stations where the results were discarded by the electoral commission because of electoral violence or logistical problems is consistently higher in areas where the opposition vote was high.
Such areas include Kinshasa, where nearly one in five polling stations was not included in the election result, compared to less than one per cent in Katanga where 90 per cent of voters chose Kabila. The voting process was extended by a few days after voting materials arrived late in many constituencies. As Ben Shepherd of the UK thinktank Chatham House observed, 'The challenge of conducting nation-wide elections is immense: 60,000 polling stations in a country the size of Western Europe,with extremely limited infrastructure and weak administrative capacity, and with less assistance than in 2006, make for chaotic polls.'
Shepherd added, 'Facing a likely choice between accepting a democratically dubious result and risking chaos by rejecting it, it is perhaps unsurprising that the international community has quietly declined to involve itself too deeply.'
Belgium and France have condemned the elections as flawed. US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland concurred, saying they 'lacked transparency and did not measure up to the democratic gains' seen in recent African elections.
But as with many such election disputes on the continent, there is often a gulf between the verdicts of foreign observers and that of African inter-governmental institutions. This may be because African governments prefer to view their democratic glass as half full whereas westerners see it as half empty. South African President Jacob Zuma, who also chairs the Sadc bloc in which the DRC is a member state, congratulated the people of the DRC for holding a 'successful' election.
Sadc monitors reported to Zuma that 'elections in the DRC were conducted in accordance with the DRC Electoral Law, the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections and the July 2002 Durban OAU Declaration on The Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections in Africa'. In short, Sadc gave its seal of approval and will henceforth welcome Joseph Kabila into its councils as the legitimately elected leader of the DRC.
The verdict puts paid to any hopes on Tshisekedi's part that regional pressure could be brought to bear on Kabila to resolve the electoral dispute either by announcing arerun of the polls or sharing power with the opposition, as happened in Zimbabwe after its disputed presidential election run-off in 2008. Ironically, President Robert Mugabe was the only foreign leader to attend Kabila's swearing-in ceremony.
'We are one with them (Congolese) as they celebrate the victory and his party and having won, and won thunderously against Tshisekedi. He has won a democratic election,' Mugabe told journalists after the ceremony. 'This must send a clear message to those who had other ideas. Any attempt to nndermine that democratic government will be resisted by Africa, Sadc and Zimbabwe which has been a partner to the Congolese people.'
Zimbabwe sent thousands of troops to the DRC in 1998 to back Kabila's father, Laurent, as his regime was threatened by a Rwanda and Uganda-backed rebel advance from the east of the country in what came to be known as Africa's First World War. After his father's assassination in 2001 , Kabila junior took over as president and saw the country through its post-war transition from 2003 to elections in 2006.
But his second inauguration proved to be an uneasy affair. With army tanks deployed in the streets to pre-empt potential protests by Tshisekedi's supporters, Kabila took his oath of office and delivered a message of national unity, describing himself as the president of all Congolese and vowing to create more jobs in his next five-year term. Decades of dictatorship and civil war have condemned what is potentially Africa's richest country to poverty and misery.
'I want to reassure here all those whom I did not persuade to vote for me. I invite them to believe in my determination to truly be the guarantor of the Congolese nation in all its diversity,' he said.
Shepherd noted that the diminished international presence in the latest elections was in part down to the changed circumstances in the DRC since its last elections. 'The 2006 elections marked the formal end of a three year post-conflict transition in the DRC, after a decade of violence. Rival political camps retained significant military capacity, in Kinshasa and elsewhere, and the risk of slipping back into war was very real, ' he observed.
In assessing the potential for a relapse into armed conflict following these elections, it is instructive to consider that Tshisekedi is a civilian politician who has never sought power through means of arms. Having served as the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's prime minister, Tshisekedi's commitment to democracy is rather ambiguous. However, he is not known to command a militia and, at nearly 80, does not have the energy for the kind of protracted bush wars such as have been fought by the 40 year-old Kabila and his father on their march to wrest power from Mobutu.
The DRC opposition failed to coordinate their electoral onslaught on Kabila and as such diminished their chances of unseating the incumbent whose control of the levers of state was always going to give him a superior advantage. Co-ordination between the key opposition figures, Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe, was unachievable in part due to personalities, according to Shepherd. With his longstanding career as shadow president, and having nearly succeeded in unseating Mobutu in the early 1990s, only to be pushed to the periphery of Congo's politics by war, Tshisekedi is said to see himself as the rightful president of the country. As such, coalition-building and its attendant prospects of power-sharing will have held very little appeal to him.
He will be 84 when the next election comes round, and given that this was clearly his last shot at power, there is a probable risk that he might push the envelope aggressively in seeking to settle his electoral grievances with Kabila. Assessing the DRC's political system, Shepherd contends that the advent of elections in the DRC was seen by the political class as a means to replace Mobutu at the helm of the state rather than a dispensation for promoting reform and democracy. 'Therefore individuals stand for election for reasons that have little to do with politics as understood more generally, and more with positioning themselves to be offered a lucrative position in the hierarchy,' he explained. In this sense, perhaps a significant role in Kabila's government will appease the old veteran of Congolese opposition politics.
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