CENI female official slugging it out with Bana-Congo
Behind Brussels Police buffer
Brussels, Friday, September 23, 2011
Video screen capture: Alex Engwete
Johannes Fabian is an anthropologist whose books read as thrillers. In one of his memorable books— Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa—Fabian recounts how in the late 19th century, a whole clan of the Bena Tshilenga, in what is today the Kasai Occidental Province, changed its name to Bena Diamba or “Children of Hemp.” The clan chieftain and his sister had decreed that henceforth all clan members had to ritually smoke hemp on a daily basis! As could be anticipated, this didn’t sit well with the colonial authorities when colonization was thereafter streamlined. Belgian colonial administrators forced the Bena Diamba to shed that name and go back to their roots as Bena Tshilenga, and hemp smoking was banned—a law still enforced today. Fabian, as an anthropologist fascinated at seeing culture as an artifact made out of whole cloth, seems to be partial to the Bena Diamba cultural engineering!
I’ve here called the Bana-Congo “informal sovereigns” (after Thomas Blom Hansen) and “Doppelgänger anticitizens” (after Comaroff and Comaroff). I will also now refer to them as “Children of Hemp” as well, in light of the way they behaved as hemp smokers toward CENI Chairman Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda this past weekend in Brussels. (Traditionally and culturally, in the DRC, by smoking hemp, you choose to cast yourself in the fringes of social discourse as a "mad person"—whether you inhale it or not.)
On Friday, Rev Ngoy Mulunda held a press conference after meeting with donors’ representatives in Brussels. But at his arrival at the meeting venue, he was assailed by pro-Tshisekedi Bana-Congo who were chanting: “Assassin! Rapist! Vote rigger!”
Without the buffer of Brussels police, no one knows what might have happened. Outside the hotel where the meeting was taking place, Bana-Congo “combatants” (as UDPS supporters are called) vowed “to kill him, his family, his children, and his entire generation” if on December 6, Tshisekedi is not announced as president-elect.
A crazed Mwana-Congo combatant issuing a fatwa against Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda
“We will kill him, his family, his children, and his entire generation”
Video screen capture: Alex Engwete
But Rev Ngoy Mulunda isn’t a man to be easily intimidated. He requested to meet with a delegation of the Bana-Congo, who viciously ranted instead of engaging in a civil exchange with the CENI chairman. He reminded them of his work in apartheid South Africa as an aide to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in Togo, in Liberia, eastern Congo and Kinshasa—in the latter two localities, he’d helped in collecting thousands of weapons. He also told Bana-Congo to send in electoral observers on the ground. Bana-Congo representatives’ position was their old broken record: Kabila is a dangerous Rwandan usurper, who might even have Rev Ngoy Mulunda “poisoned” if the latter was seen as collaborating with the Bana-Congo! The Bana-Congo did, however, raise a valid issue: the injustice of denying Congolese expats the right to vote—an issue beyond the purview of CENI.
As this was going on in Brussels, a pro-Kabila group, calling itself “Anti-Combatants” and donning PPRD yellow polo shirts with Kabila effigies, sprang up in Paris where they held a demo at the Gare du Nord metro station, the “very gates of Paris,” they said. The interesting thing about this group is that it’s made of Kinois men and women—and Lingala speakers to boot, not the usual Kabila’s constituency. Things will come to a head when this group crosses path with hardcore Bana-Congo “combatants.” And, when this happens, it will be something akin to what I recently saw emblazoned on a t-shirt, “Look out! There’s fuss about!,” with the picture of nightstick-wielding cops battling an unruly crowd of gangbangers.
Pro-Kabila Kinois “Anti-combatants” at the Gare du Nord in Paris
“Look out! There’s fuss about!”
Video Screen capture: Alex Engwete
2) Radio-Trottoir: Tshisekedi’s health declines
While pro-Tshisekedi “combatants” in Brussels are vowing to kill Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda and his “entire generation” in the likely event that their leader isn’t declared president-elect on December 6, Radio-Trottoir back home in Kinshasa is spreading rumors concerning the declining health of the “Sphinx of Limete.” Pro-Kabila media in Kinshasa are relaying the following rumor: “According to press sources that leaked the scoop, the trip of the politician and candidate to the presidency of the Republic [Tshisekedi] would be justified by health reasons. According to the same Sources, the deterioration of the health condition of the opposition has motivated his [trip abroad].”
Note: 1) the use of the conditional mode in the first sentence; and 2) the redundancy of the second sentence, in which the verb leaps to the affirmative mode in an attempt to turn the assumption into a certainty. We’ll see more and more of these linguistic gimmicks coming from all sides in this electoral cycle.
Be that as it may, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the next National Assembly to add to the electoral law a provision about presidential candidates’ health status.
3) CENI: Number of MP candidates jumps to 19,000 and counting
On Friday, September 23, CENI published the provisional list of the remaining constituencies of Bandundu, Equateur, and Kasai Oriental—which made the number of MP candidates jump to 19,000. This number might grow after the hearings at the Supreme Court of Justice on the petitions of the rejected candidacies. These hearings were slated to take place from September 24 [some other sources put the start of the hearings on September 22] to September 27.
All these 19,000 candidates are competing to fill 500 seats.
According to L’Avenir, this jump from the 9,632 MP candidates in 2006 to the whopping number of 19,000 this year could be explained by mind-boggling perks associated with the position of MP in a country with a rate of unemployment of “80%”!
L’Avenir details these perks as follows: the “‘famous jeep’ [SUV], a fabulous [monthly] salary of $6,500, immunities, bonuses, etc.” L’Avenir failed to include paid missions overseas, pensions, salary increases voted by MPs themselves (the outgoing Parliament started out with a monthly salary of $5,000), and free first-class medical care!
There are, however, some political parties that are already crying foul upon reading the published lists of MP candidates. In the Ituri constituency in Orientale Province, one political party decried the fact that PPRD lined up 10 MP candidates for 5 seats to be filled, which is in violation of Paragraph 2 of Article 22 of the Electoral Law, which stipulates the following:
“A list presented by a political party, a political cartel or a candidacy presented by an independent is declared irreceivable if it carries the name of one or several ineligible persons, it carries a number of candidates greater than the number of seats determined for each constituency, it carries the name of a candidate in more than one electoral constituency for the same level [of elected seat].”CENI Orientale officials scrambled to come up with an explanation. And they did come up with one such explanation: a computer glitch. CENI officials claim that the candidates of another political formation whose acronym is similar to PPRD—that is, the Parti du Peuple Pour la Paix et le Développement (PPPD)—were carried onto the list of PPRD by this technical glitch!
The most important thing to note in what would be a short-lived controversy is that the person who brought to the attention of CENI this apparent violation of the Electoral Law is a candidate of the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques du Congo (AFDC), a party belonging to Kabila’s own cartel Majorité Présidentielle (MP), but whose leader, MP Modeste Bahati Lukwebo of South Kivu, has always been a thorn in the side of his own pro-Kabila group. In May 2010, he was branded in the pro-Kabila media as one of the “Gang of Four” (with Olivier Kamitatu, Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi, and José Endundo) who were out there to sabotage Kabila’s presidency. In light of the recent pro-Kabila media attacks against Planning Minister Olivier Kamitatu Etsu over an alleged assassination conspiracy against the Raïs involving presidential candidates Vital Kamerhe and Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi (see my recent Grim Reaper sightings), MP Modeste Bahati Lukwebo must brace himself for renewed media lynching over this alleged “technical glitch” his party official uncovered.
MP Modeste Bahati Lukwebo (South Kivu)
Chairman, Alliance des Forces Démocratiques du Congo (AFDC)
Pro-Kabila politician
A Permanent thorn in the side of the pro-Kabila alliance
0 comments:
Post a Comment