DRC Catholic Episcopal Conference tones down sedition theology of Kinshasa Archdiocese

The Catholic Episcopal Conference of Congo (CENCO) met in an extraordinary plenary session from January 9 to 11 to discuss the November 28 general elections. Politicians, especially those close to Kabila, were awaiting with terror the release of CENCO's statement on Thursday, thinking that  it would be in a piece with the recent sedition theology developed by the Kinshasa Archdiocese.

CENCO's statement, albeit couched in tough wording, stopped short of calling for open sedition--as did the homily of last Saturday mass delivered by Mgr. Albert Kisonga, the auxiliary bishop of Kinshasa, who gave a strange exegesis of Romans 13:1 ("there is no authority except from God") upon which he superimposed Acts 9:1 (Saul "breathing threats and murder")...

In the event, CENCO's statement, based on the report by Catholic election monitors, was devastating both to CENI and the government.

In its recommendation to Parliament, for instance, CENCO urges it "to urgently review the composition of CENI which no longer enjoys the confidence of the population and to integrate into it the representation of the civil society for more independence; additionally, to realize that the people won't let pass any attempt to modify the locked-in articles of the Constitution" (among the "locked-in articles" of the Congolese constitution is the article pertaining to the president's maximum two terms in office which can't be changed anyway, lest the person attempting the change be accused of high treason).

In my view, despite its relatively sober tone by comparison to the earlier fatwas issued by Cardinal Monsengwo and Mgr. Kisonga, CENCO's statement is none the less outrageously meddlesome. The Congolese state is secular and cannot yield to the dictates of some prelates, no matter the guise of drag queens in which they issue their fatwas!

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1) Mutiny defused but blackout in Bukavu; and 2) Kabila's twin sister elected MP in Katanga

1) Mutiny defused but blackout in Bukavu

The mutiny that broke out on Monday January 9 around midday in Bukavu
lasted for about one and a half hour. It was defused after
negotiations with the mutineers. The mutiny was caused by the
mutineers' perception of Kinshasa's double standard, according to
information pieced together by Bukavu residents. Apparently, "Kabila's
soldiers billeted in Bukavu are better and regularlarly paid, whereas
Bukavu's units eke out a living with miserly salaries sporadically
paid," my relative told me over the phone.

Though the shootout had abated in the afternoon, electricity was cut
off in the evening in the provincial capital. This blackout scared
city residents who remained holed up in their homes.

2) Kabila's twin sister elected MP in Kalemie, in Katanga Province

Independent MP candidate Jaynet Kabila, the president's twin sister,
was elected MP in Kalemie, one of her family's strongholds in
Katanga--the other stronghold being Manono, where her younger brother,
Zoe Kabila, also an independent candidate, is poised to win. (The
incoming freshmen parliamentarians will feature an interesting cast of
generational "reproduction" of the Congolese political class:
Tshisekedi's sister and son have also been elected in their stronghold
of Oriental Kasai. Pierre Bourdieu readily comes to mind...)

Jaynet Kabila got 35,569 votes (the first in the constituency),
whereas the MP-elect who trailed her came a distant second with 10,648
votes.

CENI Chair's son, Emmanuel Ngoy Mulunda Nyanga, also an MP candidate
in the same constituency, was third with 9,413 votes. Some in Kinshasa
Radio-Trottoir think CENI Chair Rev Daniel Ngoy Mulunda Nyanga is
actually "the" Ngoy Mulunda Nyanga elected in Kalemie! I spent close
to a half-hour today trying to dispel such nonsense uncannily uttered
by university students!

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Army mutiny in Bukavu, South Kivu Province

A relative just called to inform me that intense shootings have just
erupted in Bukavu, the provincial capital of South Kivu Province. The
garrison has allegedly mutinied over soldiers' embezzled pay! At this
writing, Bukavu residents are cowering, holed up in their homes.

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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!

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Larry Devlin, Congo CIA Chief of Station: in his own words

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, he would appear to die from polio.

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1) Kengo wa Dondo mugged in Paris by doppelganger anticitizens; and 2) Tshisekedi discovers the "Arcana Imperii"

1) Kengo wa Dondo mugged in Paris by doppelganger anticitizens

Pro-Tshisekedi doppelganger anticitizens mugged former presidential
candidate and Senate President Léon Kengo wa Dondo at Paris Gare du
Nord in the evening of Saturday, December 31, 2011. Kengo, who was on
private visit, had just arrived by train from Belgium.

As Kengo was entering the hired limo awaiting him, he was spotted by
pro-Tshisekedi Congolese Paris residents who spontaneously jumped him.
The limo driver then took off, careening into the traffic where
unfortunately the vehicle was then stuck into the massive traffic jam
of Paris rush hour (after 5 p.m.). In hot pursuit, the couple of dozen
Congolese "informal sovereigns" soon caught up with Kengo's vehicle
and resumed their violent beating. By the time French cops arrived on
the scene of the attack, Kengo was unconscious, bleeding profusely,
with several broken or missing teeth!

DRC authorities angrily reacted to the vicious attack and DRC Foreign
Minister summoned on New Year's Day Kinshasa French Ambassador for an
explanation for what Congolese authorities describe as the cavalier
manner in which Western authorities treat aggressions against
Congolese officials overseas. As of this writing, Kengo is still being
treated at a Paris hospital.

2) Tshisekedi discovers the "Arcana Imperii"

It now becomes apparent that, after swearing himself in irrelevancy,
Etienne Tshisekedi is now discovering the hard way what Roberto
Calasso called the "Arcana Imperii" in his famous book entitled "The
Ruin of Kasch," that is, the mysteriously elusive ascent or genealogy
of power.

In his New Year's message to the Congolese nation, Tshisekedi bemoaned
the fact that he still lacked the "imperium" necessary to exercise
power (the imperium being, according to Webster's, "the right to
command or to employ the force of the state: SOVEREIGNTY"). Tshisekedi
then begged security forces personnel to abandon Kabila in order to
allow him to get the much needed "imperium."

Well, this is a way of acknowledging that the only legitimacy he
wields lies in his own head and in the mind of his tribal diehard
followers.

Anyway, Radio France Internationale (RFI) has temporarily lost its FM
signals in DRC for covering Tshisekedi's New Year's message to the
nation. According to Communication Minister Lambert Mende, RFI is
sowing confusion in the mind of Congolese by continuing to entertain
Tshisekedi's unconstitutional "pantalonnade" (slapstick comedy)...

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Stampede at Kinshasa Western Union outlets

This past week saw a stampede at Kinshasa Western Union
outlets--culminating on New Year's Eve when they were thronged by
Kinois who got remittances from family members living overseas.

Yesterday, a member of my household who got $100 from Lexington,
Kentucky, and $150 from Bukavu (!) spent 4 long hours in queue
before being served--and this after trying 2 other overcrowded Western
Union outlets.

A couple of years back, a DRC Central Bank official put an annual
estimate of the size of these remittances at more than $2b! In other
words, if Congolese exiles were to stop the injection of these
remittances, DRC's fragile economy could bottom out overnight. That's
all the more reason to give Congolese expats furtther rights (like the
right of dual nationality) and a say in domestic politics (the right
of voting at DRC's embassies and consulates).

In the meantime, Western Union is doing brisk business in
Kinshasa--with ubiquitous outlets all over the Congolese capital--as
well as in other parts of the country.

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