On January 9, the Constitutional Court of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) confirmed incumbent President Felix Tshisekedi’s landslide victory in the hotly disputed December 20, 2023 election, but failed to pull the Central African nation out of its full-blown electoral crisis.
According to the DRC’s Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) and highest court, Tshisekedi legitimately won a second and final five-year term in office with an impressive 74 percent of the vote, ahead of Moise Katumbi and Martin Fayulu, who placed second and third respectively. However, in the eyes of many, including failed presidential contenders Fayuli and Katumbi, the country’s synchronised presidential, local, provincial and national polls were a complete “farce”, and perhaps even less trustworthy and legitimate than the shambolic 2011 and 2018 elections.
The joint observer mission from the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ of Congo (ECC) said they documented 5,402 cases of serious irregularities at polling stations. The churches said these alleged anomalies – malfunctioning voting devices, unopened polling stations, vote buying, plundering of polling materials, shoddy electoral lists, and ballot stuffing – could have compromised “the integrity of the results”.
On Christmas Eve, while the shambolic election was still ongoing in many localities where the state failed to open polling stations on election day, the Archbishop of Kinshasa Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo voiced the feelings of countless angry voters in the country when he said: “What should have been a great celebration of democratic values quickly turned into frustration for many.”
Indeed, it was extremely frustrating to see the DRC repeat the mistakes of the past, ignoring insistent warnings. Last April, for example, Fayulu, who many independent observers believe won the country’s controversial December 2018 presidential poll, published an opinion piece on this very page warning his country was “heading towards another sham election” and encouraging CENI to change course and ensure a “free and fair” presidential poll before it is too late.
Denis Kadima, the president of CENI, however, chose to ignore this and other similar counsel.
Confident as ever, he even launched a thinly veiled attack on the opposition a few days before the polls opened, claiming there were “political groups in this country that are not ready for elections” who “discredit the process, no matter what we do’’. When the sheer scale of the electoral fiasco became obvious in late December, Kadima went on to call Fayulu and other candidates who understandably demanded a rerun “bad losers”.
In the end, Fayulu and others refused to challenge Tshisekedi’s win in court, saying state institutions were not trustworthy or independent. Now, the Congolese people are forced to accept the results of a clearly bungled poll and a leader with a crisis of legitimacy for the second time in five years.
It is time to admit that electoral malfeasance and incompetence have become a substantial menace to societal cohesion, peace and development in the DRC. And regrettably, this is a widespread and deep-rooted problem across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.
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