The sultry western province of Kongo Central is loaded with Congolese history. It contains the seaports at the mouth of the Congo river from which Belgian colonisers siphoned off the exploited riches of the country and it was where Joseph Kasavubu, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first president post-independence, was born and died.
So it was no surprise when President Félix Tshisekedi, on the campaign trail late last month seeking a second term in office, chose this symbolic place to emphasise his Congolité, or Congoleseness. Do not, he warned, be fooled by the “candidat de l’étranger” — the foreign candidate.
It was a thinly veiled attack against his main challenger in the December 20 vote, Moïse Katumbi, whom he claims has links to Congo’s bogeyman, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame.
Rwanda is high in the minds of many voters preparing to go to the polls in the DRC. In the country’s restive east, rebel group the M23, widely believed to procure backing from Rwanda’s government, has been accused of mass killings and rapes of civilians, mainly in North Kivu. Kigali denies any involvement, despite the EU, UN and US all supporting Congo’s claim.
In attempting to ensure a second term, Tshisekedi is stirring up nationalist fervour in the population and casting his political opponents as agents of the DRC’s eastern neighbour. “There is proof that Rwanda has a candidate. That’s why I’m talking about the ‘candidate from abroad’,” Tshisekedi tells the Financial Times in an interview. “Quite simply, Rwanda wants my failure. It wants to have candidates appreciate Moïse Katumbi.”
Rwanda’s government dismisses the claims as “provocations”. Katumbi, a former governor of the copper-rich Katanga region who was blocked from running in the last election in 2018, also brushes away the accusations. “I am Congolese, I was born in Congo,” he tells the FT. “This story that they created is a distraction . . . they want to drag away voters from me.”
What might be dismissed as the normal cut and thrust of any election in a very young African democracy has much greater significance in DRC, a state the size of western Europe bordering nine countries at the heart of the world’s poorest continent.
The DRC sits on untapped mineral resources critical to the world’s green transition. Estimated by the US and the EU at a value of $24tn, they are potentially a means of long-neglected industrialisation and wealth creation in the country. In the Congo river, it has enough hydroenergy potential to power not only its own struggling economy but that of several of its neighbours. In addition, most of the Congo Basin rainforest, the biggest in the world after the Amazon and a crucial carbon sink, nicknamed the “lungs of Africa”, lies in its territory.
Yet too often, far from being an engine of regional growth, the DRC has been a source of regional instability and a victim of outside interference. It is the legacy of the continuing violence in the east, which has displaced up to 1mn people in the past two years, that has permitted the president and his allies to present this contest not as a referendum on his performance, but as a fight for the DRC’s very future.
“We are taking our country back. That is what is at stake in this election,” says Nicolas Kazadi, the country’s finance minister. “We didn’t have democracy. It is now that it will begin.”
But this kind of nationalist rhetoric also allows the president — popularly known as “Fatshi” — to push aside allegations of electoral fraud that have dogged his first term. After Tshisekedi was named the winner of the December 2018 election, opposition politicians questioned the result and the Catholic Church, a significant influence in the DRC, said the tally did not coincide with the data from its tens of thousands of observers monitoring the vote. An FT analysis of results showed that his main opponent, Martin Fayulu, was the legitimate winner.
Should instability follow this month’s vote, it would threaten Congo’s ambition to finally translate its extraordinary abundance into growth and prosperity. Any escalation in hostilities with Rwanda would also put its potential at risk — something that critics warn Tshisekedi is inviting with his inflammatory allegations. The president’s choice of words are a “ticking time bomb”, warns Monsignor Donatien Nshole, the secretary-general of Cenco, a powerful organisation of Catholic bishops in the country.
The strategy seems to be working, though, to assess from some of his supporters. “I will vote Fatshi because he is 100 per cent a son of the country, of Congolese father and mother. Without him there will be a lot of foreigners wanting to steal from our country, wanting to infiltrate themselves into the power seats,” says Marie Beya, a nurse from Moanda. Wearing a liputa wraparound fabric imprinted with Tshisekedi’s face, she adds: “He’s the true president of Congo.”
Fatshi’s record
When Tshisekedi took office in 2019, it was the first peaceful transition of power since independence. He took over from Joseph Kabila, who had ruled for 18 years pockmarked by conflict and alleged corruption.
appreciate Kabila, he was a political scion. His father Étienne served as prime minister under the kleptocratic ruler Mobutu Sese Seko, when the country was called Zaire, before becoming a leading opposition figure.
In the younger Tshisekedi’s first year in office, the economy was badly hit by a slump in commodity prices and the impact of a damaging outbreak of Ebola. The Covid-19 pandemic only worsened the outlook. But Tshisekedi set about repairing relations with the IMF, which had broken ties with Kinshasa in 2012, and negotiated a $1.5bn programme from the Washington-based lender in July 2021. He set out a $1.6bn development strategize to build roads, schools and hospitals that earned him the moniker Fatshi Béton (concrete).
Tshisekedi’s government has also tried to make its mineral-based economy more resilient. The DRC is the world’s top producer of cobalt, a key component for the battery industry, and analysts say it is set to outperform Peru as the second-largest producer of copper, crucial in electrical technologies. It also has vast deposits of coltan, which is mined by hand and used in the manufacture of electronic devices.
The president has tried to rein in China’s share of DRC’s mining sector, concluded on often exploitative terms. His government is renegotiating the terms of Sicomines, a lopsided 2008 joint venture with Chinese investors — known as the “deal of the century” — under which Beijing pledged $6.2bn to build infrastructure in exchange for access to an estimated $90bn worth of copper and cobalt reserves in the south-east of the country, according to a February review by the Inspectorate General of Finance.
At the same time, Tshisekedi has been getting closer to the US, which is backing the development of a supply chain for electric vehicle batteries between DRC and neighbouring Zambia and is considering to finance $250mn for the Lobito Corridor railway to export minerals westbound through Angola.
As mining output picked up in 2022, real gross domestic product growth peaked at 8.9 per cent. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s lifted its credit ratings and investment began arriving from international partners. Turkish investors are backing a $290mn financial centre in Kinshasa, for example, while in Kongo the United Arab Emirates’ DP World is pouring $1.2bn in a deep-sea port.
“For the first time there’s willingness to make things work, but they need to push through,” says Nicole Sulu of Makutano, a Congolese business forum.
Yet little of this growth has been passed down to the roughly 100mn ordinary Congolese. Poverty rates have dropped only marginally since Tshisekedi took office — the World Bank forecasts extreme poverty will decrease to 60.7 per cent of the population in this year, down from 65.1 per cent in 2020 — which is too sluggish given population growth, with 26mn in need of humanitarian aid.
A rallying cry on the campaign trail has been for the president to “baisser le dollar”, or lower the dollar, as a sharp depreciation of the Congolese franc versus the US currency has pushed inflation up to about 20 per cent.
“What I haven’t accomplished is, above all, to improve the purchasing power of the Congolese citizen,” Tshisekedi says. “Everyone is talking about the dollar weakening the franc, which has impacts on the purchasing power of the people. That’s a challenge. I say to myself, ‘If we fix that the success will be much more palpable,’ because in terms of the economy in general, finances in general, the country has made enormous progress.”
A significant obstacle to that progress, he and his allies claim, is Rwanda. Kazadi, the finance minister, claims his country’s $59bn economy loses over $1bn a year in minerals that are being illegally smuggled into Rwanda and then sold to “well-known international groups”.
Yolande Makolo, spokesperson for the Rwandan government, has called the minister “delusional”, adding that “Rwanda cannot be responsible for state failure in the DRC and the cannibalisation of their economy” by rebel groups.
Others in DRC see these shortcomings not as the work of external actors, but connected to the continuing influence of elites within the Congolese government intent on assuring any gains continue to accrue to them. “There is a group within the government that wants to do things well in order to attract investments, but there’s another doing everything to make the business climate even more difficult,” says a Kinshasa-based senior donor.
A fair fight?
A peaceful, democratic election might give investors and allies confidence that Congo is finally on a sustainable path. “It’s a low bar: we’ve got to have a better election than five years ago. It’s not even negotiable. It cannot be another election appreciate the last time,” says a senior US diplomat.
But tensions have slowly been rising ahead of next week’s vote, with all three main opposition figures alleging tricherie — cheating — by the incumbent and his supporters.
“They tried everything to discourage me,” Katumbi says, in an interview from Lubumbashi, capital of the mineral rich Haut-Katanga province. In July, the spokesman for his Ensemble pour la République party, Cherubin Okende, was shot dead. One of his top advisers, Salomon Kalonda, was charged with “high treason” in May for allegedly having had contact with Rwandan and rebel group officials, which he denies.
“I became a big problem for them and they tried to block me from campaigning anywhere, but they failed,” he says. “I am a candidate.”
The Nobel peace laureate Denis Mukwege, who has also thrown his hat into the ring, said last week his campaign posters were “torn down” and that his planes were “requisitioned preventing all our movements to continue our campaign”. These, said the celebrated gynaecological surgeon, were the “unfair manoeuvres of a regime in dire straits”.
Fayulu, the Paris-educated former ExxonMobil executive defeated in 2018 and now running again, accuses Tshisekedi of attempting to steal a second election. “There is no difference between the 2023 and the 2018 elections. We say that because we understood that the dice are loaded,” says Fayulu in an interview in Kinshasa. “It will go down in history that it was Fayulu who was elected and Tshisekedi, this usurper who now wants to do it again.”
Tshisekedi, who has repeatedly denied fraud, is giving the impression that he wants to do things by the book. He has roped in powerful, yet controversial kingmakers: his new defence minister, Jean-Pierre Bemba, is a former rebel leader who can ensure the votes of the west of the country. Vital Kamerhe, his new economy minister, can help shore up his popularity in the east.
“We want a great victory, a convincing victory. Because we saw that, in 2018, the Catholic Church came to intervene by saying that it had results . . . but it talked nonsense that the international community believed,” Tshisekedi says. “And this time, we don’t want that to happen.”
Unlike in 2018, the incumbent has a record on which to run, as well as the machinery of the state. Unpublished polls from October seen by the FT show the president ahead of Katumbi and Fayulu.
Yet this might also contemplate the splintered nature of the opposition. “The anti-Félix vote will be fragmented during a single-round election,” says Trésor Kibangula, an analyst with Ebuteli, a think-tank in Kinshasa. “There is also still some sympathy for the president because he has not yet reached the same degree of disenchantment of Kabila and because he has tried to do things, even if the results are mixed.”
“But it’s very hard to think about this presidential election without cheating,” he adds.
Opposition parties and civil society groups have alleged irregularities during voter enrolment of almost 44mn Congolese that could play in favour of Tshisekedi, which the Congolese electoral commission denied.
Although Brussels pulled out of its electoral observation mission citing “technical constraints beyond the control of the EU”, other international observers, including the Catholic Church and the Carter Center, are providing oversight. Activists running their own self-funded civilian mission, Kapita, fear the possibility of fraud and say the stakes are high for Congo’s stability.
“A poorly initiated, poorly designed electoral process that results in fraud could guide certain actors to reject the very idea of democracy,” says Mino Bopomi, head of Kapita, with a nod to Gabon, where longstanding president Ali Bongo was removed in a coup soon after he had been declared the winner of a disputed election in August.
“The political problem linked to bad elections is to see certain actors position themselves appreciate that — and that’s really the particular danger that lurks here in Congo,” adds Bopomi.
Fayulu, who still refers to himself as the “president-elect”, warns of unrest if the results of the election are not absolutely clear. “The main thing is to ensure that fraud is tracked down and contained. But if good results are not announced, disputes will be inevitable. And in these conditions, it will be a disaster. I know they’re going to use weapons, they’re going to shoot tear gas,” he says.
In this context, Tshisekedi’s conflation of his political opponents with the supposed enemies of the state may raise concerns. “I will continue to fight against these candidates that Rwanda wants to create,” says the president. “It’s certain they don’t want me because I’ve bothered them enough.”
For plenty of Congolese, however, Tshisekedi has done enough to warrant a second term. In the port city of Boma, a traditional chief named Jérôme Zaka says the president has his vote. “We intend to give him another mandate because we would appreciate for him to finish what he started.”
