CLAUDE KAMANGA MUTOND, Kinshasa | Wednesday 12.40pm.
PEOPLE suspected of economic crimes such as hiking prices in the Democratic Republic of Congo will now be court-martialled and sentenced to death if found guilty, the DRC government announced.
Counterfeiting money, hiking prices and setting arbitrary foreign exchange rates are now considered “high treason” in the DRC, Justice Minister Jeannot Mwenze Kongolo said. He said that the government of President Laurent Kabila decided to take these steps after realising that huge amounts of counterfeit money have been injected into the east of the country.
According to Kongolo, other economic crimes are also being committed in the east, which is held by the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy, backed by Uganda and Rwanda. “The enemy, using accomplices inside the country, has been injecting counterfeit money into the market while business people colluding with the enemy have been charging exorbitant prices and wildcat exchange rates that no economic parameters justify,” added Kongolo.
“In this time of external aggression [such economic crimes] severely compromise the security of the state because they are being perpetrated in collusion with the enemy” in the aim of “sapping the morale of our troops and seriously perturbing the social situation of the population so as to discourage it from mobilising fully in support of the war effort war started in early August, the socio-economic situation in the DRC has deteriorated sharply. The prices of commodities and services have shot up while the exchange rate of the Congolese franc has plunged more than 64% against the dollar.