presidential election occurred late in the night of Sunday, December
4. With 52.91% of votes tabulated from the 168 CENI regional
"compilation centers," the trend from the two previous partial results
remains steady, unchanged, and statistically sound: Kabila maintains
his lead with 4,841,555. It now seems statistically impossible for
Tshisekedi to reverse that trend: he's at 3,402,642.
As could be anticipated, Tshisekedi and his sycophants have rejected
these results and second-guessed the unplanned CENI incremental
releases of partial results as "politically motivated." (A smart move
by CENI, in my view, this gradual release of steam.)
And sticking to UDPS worn-out talking-point of describing CENI Chair
Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda as partial to Kabila, Tshisekedi proffered yet
another one of his routine Armaggedon-crazed and raving imprecations
on Saturday.
Said Tshisekedi: "UDPS rejects these results, and warns Ngoy Mulunda
and Kabila they should respect the will of the people... Failing that,
they risk committing suicidal acts!" Adding that he was mulling
issuing a doomsday "mot d'ordre" (watchword)!
Whatever that means... Wait a minute! Maybe the man seriously means
what he says. Who knows? He's been behaving like a loonie for quite
some time. He may seriously expect to see Kabila and Mulunda enact a
dramatic public murder-suicide at the sight of UDPS murderous mobs his
"watchword" would loose upon the city and the country!
Not to be outdone, crushed presidential hopefuls Vital Kamerhe and
Léon Kengo wa Dondo--including the paper-weight and farcical
presidential candidate Nicéphore Kakese-- followed suit. The most
extremist in this cast of sore losers is Kamerhe. "This joke has been
going on for too long," Kamerhe exclaimed, in an unprovoked non
sequitur. "And we got to put a stop to the theft of the resources of
our country!"
This deleterious climate has prompted the national conference of
Catholic bishops (CENCO), which had deployed more than 30,000
electoral observers countrywide, to withdraw from a post-electoral
seminar with international NGOs it was planning on attending.
A sad Mgr Nicolas Djombo, CENCO president, painted a frightening state
of the country at the moment: "The image we're evincing is that of a
bullet train headed straight against a wall!"
No wonder SGSR and MONUSCO Chief of Mission, Ambassador Roger Meece,
held today an emergency meeting with Kabila and Tshisekedi--no doubt
to ask both sides to hold their horses. According to Radio-Trottoir,
the powwow was all about Meece attempting to convince defeated Kabila
to agree to a Kenya-like power-sharing arrangement with Tshisekedi!
(BTW, the fetid swamp of rumors that Kinshasa and the rest of the
country have become should serve as a warning for worse to come to
politicians who forget to prioritize education and public libraries in
government's investment budgets.)
In the streets, Kinois are convinced they are witnessing the biggest
electoral fraud in the recorded history of the event. "Mulunda is
making up numbers as he goes along," I heard today a Kinois angrily
say of CENI chair. "A fucking numerologist!"
On Kasa-Vubu Avenue in Kalamu Commune, two young mechanics repairing a
lemon were exercised at the sight of a heavily-armed riot police
patrol jeep--these patrols are ubiquitous now. They were particularly
outraged at the (false) rumor of a curfew in Kinshasa starting at 9 pm
tonight (Monday). "They think we're gonna fight at night?," one of
them sneered. "We'll hit them in broad daylight!" The pair also told
me that Rev Mulunda will be announcing the provisional final results
tonight at midnight plus 1 second (!), which would be Tuesday (I
couldn't verify this claim, though it's widely held citywide)...
Some of these rumors even made evening news on Radio France
Internationale--like the one alleging that 3 thousand Kinois have
already fled to neighboring Brazzaville to weather the storm of
Tshisekedi's fatwa. These rumors are so out of hand that the
government had ordered at one point mobile phone service providers to
shut down their SMS functions! A worrisome precedent in a country
courted by China!...
The funniest comment I heard today was in Bandalungwa commune. It came
from a disgruntled pro-Tshisekedi woman, a shopkeeper, who wrongly
thinks she'd been disenfranchised by Rev Mulunda. She angrily waved
off an evangelical street preacher who was attempting to pull an
Allelujah-for-money stunt in front of her shop, and yelled after the
confused Man-of-God:
"You, mofo, I don't believe in protestant pastors anymore!
Vote-riggers! Thieves! Crooks! Satanists! Numerologists! I'm going
back to the fold of the Catholic Church!"
I was tempted to remind the good woman that the once much-maligned
Appolinaire Malu-Malu, the predecessor of Mulunda who presided over
the 2006 election, is a Catholic priest: he was also called a
"vote-rigger," a "satanist," and a "numerologist"! But I looked around
and smelled insurgency in the crowded corner of the street. And I
suddenly remembered I was a Swahili-speaker who, in the eyes of the
Kinois these days, is worse than Lucifer: a Rwandan clone to be
expurged from the People's Republic of Kinshasa!
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