The People's Republic of Kinshasa: "A bullet train headed straight against the wall" (Mgr Nicolas Djombo)

The third round of CENI announcement of partial results of the 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!