In the previous post I incorrectly wrote that Jean-Pierre Bemba's wifewas elected MP in Equateur. It was instead two sisters of the jailedMLC leader who were elect...
Thursday, 29 December 2011
CENI releases partial legislative results: Conservation Minister José Endundo defeated in Equateur
Posted on 08:29 by Unknown
The board of the independent national electoral commission (CENI)started releasing partial legislative election results yesterday,Wednesday, December 28, on prime time TV. Further results are expectedtoday evening.This follows a one-week freeze of CENI's activities ordered by itsboard. CENI had then requested the participation of electoral expertsfrom the U.S. and Britain in the wake of the outcry over presidentialelection results. American experts are due to arrive by this week'send whereas their British and African counterparts are expected to...
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
The People's Republic of Kinshasa: "A bullet train headed straight against the wall" (Mgr Nicolas Djombo)
Posted on 15:26 by Unknown
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...
Larry Devlin, Congo CIA Chief of Station: in his own words
Posted on 15:26 by Unknown
Someone in the household pointed me to my Kinshasa library where I fou Larry Devlin, "Chief of Station, Congo" (Public Affairs, New York, 2007, p.95):I'll never forget my reaction of total, fall-to-the-floor shock. "Jesus H. Christ!" I exploded "Isn't this unusual?"(...)"Who authorized this operation?" I asked."President Eisenhower," Joe said. " I wasn't there when he approved it, but Dick Bissel said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed." (...)He handed over several poisons. One was concealed in a tube of toothpaste. If Lumumba used it,...
The People's Republic of Kinshasa: "A bullet train headed straight against the wall" (Mgr Nicolas Djombo)
Posted on 15:22 by Unknown
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...
Larry Devlin, Congo CIA Chief of Station: in his own words
Posted on 15:21 by Unknown
Someone in the household pointed me to my Kinshasa library where I fou Larry Devlin, "Chief of Station, Congo" (Public Affairs, New York, 2007, p.95):I'll never forget my reaction of total, fall-to-the-floor shock. "Jesus H. Christ!" I exploded "Isn't this unusual?"(...)"Who authorized this operation?" I asked."President Eisenhower," Joe said. " I wasn't there when he approved it, but Dick Bissel said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed." (...)He handed over several poisons. One was concealed in a tube of toothpaste. If Lumumba used it,...
The People's Republic of Kinshasa: "A bullet train headed straight against the wall" (Mgr Nicolas Djombo)
Posted on 15:19 by Unknown
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...
Saturday, 24 December 2011
In response to Mel's comment to my previous post
Posted on 16:01 by Unknown
It's so strange that you, of all people, would not give me the benefitof the doubt, that I could be speaking from personal politicalconviction--however wrongheaded this choice might seem to you. Onceagain, I don't belong to Kabila's propaganda machine and if I did Iwould be directing my energies to writing pamphlets for the Congolesedomestic audience and in French. Besides, I'd be living large in Kin,not bumming survival money from my US-based family or wasting precioustime of enjoying the many bounties of the Congolese capital in drearybusiness...
Tshisekedi's bloody trail & the farce of lecture on democracy by the West
Posted on 13:13 by Unknown
A startling irony of the much overlooked DRC history is that the venueof Martyrs Stadium where Tshisekedi insisted on staging hisswearing-in farce is the very site where one Prime Minister and threeministers where hanged on trumped-up conspiracy charges called"Pentecost Conspiracy" in 1966--a conspiracy hatched in the criminalminds of Mobutu and his then right-hand man, Interior Minister EtienneTshisekedi, in order to do away with the remnants of President JosephKasa-Vubu's regime they had toppled in 1965. (Tshisekedi's long-running role as Mobutu's...
Friday, 23 December 2011
UDPS looses Baluba youth gangs upon Kinshasa
Posted on 08:11 by Unknown
(This post is emailed via mobile phone after much delay: internetconnexion was cut off during the riots.)Tshisekedi was planning his mock swearing-in ceremony on Friday,December 23, at 11:00 Hours Kinshasa Time (GMT + 1) at Martyrs Stadiumin Kinshasa (in my previous post I mistakenly identified the venue asTata Raphaël Stadium). But that didn't happen. For one, the RepublicanGuard has been surrounding the stadium with tanks for several daysnow. Secondly, a heavy police deployment was able to disperse thethrong of Baluba youth gangs that had had...
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Kabila sworn in Prez with Robert Mugabe in attendance
Posted on 04:23 by Unknown
The swearing-in ceremony of Joseph Kabila as DRC president took placethis morning at the Cité de l'Union Africaine, in Ngaliema Commune, inKinshasa. The ceremony was carried out live by RTNC, thegovernment-owned broadcasting system.Besides the Western ambassadors accredited to Kinshasa (including theUS Ambassador), Zim Prez Robert Mugabe was the only head of state inattendance. The other remarkable guests included the South AfricanForeign Minister, the prime ministers of South Sudan and Rwanda aswell as representatives of other African countries.Presidential...
Saturday, 17 December 2011
DRC Supreme Court of Justice finds Vital Kamerhe's petition groundless & proclaims Kabila Prez
Posted on 01:10 by Unknown
The Supreme Court of Justice ( CSJ) proclaimed on Friday December 16Joseph Kabila as winner of the November 28 presidential election. TheCourt in fact confirmed the figures of the provisional resultsreleased earlier by the national electoral commission (CENI).Vital Kamerhe was the sole presidential candidate to file a petitionMonday to the Supreme Court requesting that the elections be simplyvoided.The formal hearing on Kamerhe's petition at the Supreme Court was heldon Thursday and broadcast later on national TV. Kamerhe's 21-memberlegal team...
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Squandered elections & broken narratives of "un-nation-ness"
Posted on 08:56 by Unknown
It's now dawning on people--including myself--that the November 28general elections may have been squandered. Brushing off the combinedand overlapping criticisms of the Carter Center and the EU observationmissions now becomes a perilously tenuous and untenable rationalstance. Something fishy did happen at the centers of votes aggregation("centres de compilation") of Lubumbashi in the Katanga Province andKinshasa. The most astonishing thing about the alleged systematicrigging and opposition disenfranchisement is that it was unnecessaryand outright...
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
CENI Chair lashes out at Carter Center and politically-tainted Kinshasa Cardinal
Posted on 05:18 by Unknown
CENI Chair Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda convened a press conmference Mondayevening to lash out at a damning Carter Center report intimating thatthe elections were deeply flawed--though it stopped short ofquestioning the overall results or the rankings of presidentialcandidates as given by CENI. Seething with outrage, Rev Mulunda alsoaddressed a devastating comment made the same day by Kinshasa CardinalLaurent Mosengwo charging that the results published by CENI reflected"neither truth nor justice." (Ealier in the day, as he was being cuedfor a live...
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Tshisekedi insurgency fizzles out
Posted on 11:00 by Unknown
After being holed up for two days, people in my neighborhood--one ofthe hotbeds of Tshisekedi insurgency--finally got out of their homesas public transportation resumed. The neighborhood was also reelingfrom the losses it suffered during the riots. A man was hit in thehead by a stray bullet while sitting in his compound. A youngdemonstrator who resisted being taken away by cops by sprawlingspread-eagled on the pavement was bayoneted in the right foot and leftto bleed on the street.Last night, in the downpour that started at around 2 am, inmates...
Saturday, 10 December 2011
Madman Tshisekedi: "I won with 75%!"
Posted on 01:56 by Unknown
Madman Tshisekedi is at it again. He outright rejects the presidentialresults announced by CENI in the afternoon of Friday, December 9, thatgive Kabila a winner by a landslide with 48.95% (Tshisekedi got32.33%).He claimed, in an interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI),that he won with 75% (!), and hence, is DRC president-elect! Askedabout Kabila's score, Tshisekedi placed it at around "22% or 33%."He further insists that as the Supreme Court is a "Kabila'sinstitution," he's not going to file any legal challenge and wants the"international...
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Radio-Trottoir Feed: "No Country for Elections"
Posted on 11:06 by Unknown
Kin is tense, awaiting the publication this evening of the provisionalpresidential election results by CENI.The opposition, belatedly rallied around Etienne Tshisekedi, seems tohave found another wrong tree to bark. It now demands that CENIproduce, alongside the provisional results, the "real affidavits"("procès-verbaux" or "PV") by polling station underlying thosenumbers.The opposition is backed in this demand by Western diplomatic missionsaccredited to Kinshasa.Some diplomats even appear to have now considerably watered down theirinitial sweeping...
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
1) Donnybrook at Selembao & 2) Kudura Kasongo nabbeb at Beach Ngobila crossing
Posted on 15:57 by Unknown
1) Donnybrook at SelembaoA donnybrook pitting a 20-jeep-strong patroling police convoy againstSelembao Commune residents erupted in the morning of Wednesday,December 9. Significantly, the disturbance took place on ex-Avenue du24 Novembre, about 800 meters south of Makala Central Prison.Residents, who woke up angered by CENI 48-hour postponement of theannouncement of the provisional results of the presidential election,saw the police show of force as a blatant attempt at intimidation andstormed the road--hurling insults and projectiles at the patrol....
Monday, 5 December 2011
The People's Republic of Kinshasa: "A bullet train headed straight against the wall" (Mgr Nicolas Djombo)
Posted on 14:10 by Unknown
The third round of CENI announcement of partial results of thepresidential election occurred late in the night of Sunday, December4. With 52.91% of votes tabulated from the 168 CENI regional"compilation centers," the trend from the two previous partial resultsremains steady, unchanged, and statistically sound: Kabila maintainshis lead with 4,841,555. It now seems statistically impossible forTshisekedi to reverse that trend: he's at 3,402,642.As could be anticipated, Tshisekedi and his sycophants have rejectedthese results and second-guessed the...
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Tight Swahili-Bandundu Bulkhead snuffs out Tshisekedi (CENI partial results)
Posted on 05:02 by Unknown
CENI had started releasing partial results of the presidential election but its website was swiftly hacked. CENI Chair Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, flanked by the full board of the electoral commission, has resorted to Plan-B: reading out partial results as they are trickling in at press briefings. The trend is now shaping up: just as in 2006 against Jean-Pierre Bemba, Kabila has taken out 6 out of the 11 provinces of the DRC: all the eastern Swahili speaking bloc of provinces, plus the southwestern province of Bandundu, the stronghold of "Patriarch"...
Saturday, 3 December 2011
To Jason Stearns & other friends: I'm fine, but under heavy medication
Posted on 05:54 by Unknown
It's only today that I got to check out my email account--where I found Jason Stearns' comment advising friends to check out on my whereabouts as my silence was worrisome. Thanks for the query, Jason. I'm fine, but most of the time out of it: I'm mostly sedated, under heavy medication... I got sick, the day after the elections: I was diagnosed with severe malaria and nasty typhoid. That's what you get living in the squalor of Kinshasa slums. Strangely, on the eve of the elections, I was discussing Jason Stearns' Congo theory and his new book against...
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