Joseph Kabila, the interim president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has shot himself in the foot with the coup-plot fiasco he engineered two weeks ago.
Internationally he has infuriated two of his principal backers — South Africa and the United States — by unjustifiably holding 22 of their nationals for 10 days, claiming they were planning to topple him.
He rubbed salt in the wound by parading the men publicly and insisting they were mercenaries even after releasing them at the weekend.
Domestically, he has needlessly angered his partners in the interim government by failing to consult them before embarking on this crude, machismo exercise.
These are former political opponents who joined him in supporting the yes vote in last December’s constitutional referendum and are now rivals again for the presidential and legislative elections on July 30.
By acting strongly to counter an alleged coup plot, he believes he has boosted his tough image and also injected some fear into his rivals.
He is increasingly concerned about Harvard-educated Oscar Kashala, who has returned from the United States to fight the election.
Kabila is confident of support from the governments of France and Belgium. However, the United States has not yet shown its hand and he fears that Washington’s head may be turned by the 56-year-old oncologist whose website illustrates an impressive whirl of networking with the movers and shakers in the last remaining superpower.
By showing up Kashala as a man backed by foreign mercenaries, Kabila believed he would weaken this opponent’s position as a heavyweight and credible contender.
He was banking on strong official anti-mercenary positions in South Africa and the United States — both of whom have an unhappy history of being embarrassed by the action of their nationals as soldiers of fortune.
This was why he insisted that the 19 South Africans, three Americans and 10 Nigerians he deported last weekend were, in fact, mercenaries but that, with elections looming, his government could not afford to get involved in the drawn-out process of prosecuting them.
The fact that none of the three countries is contemplating any further action against the men underlines how mistaken he was.
Kabila’s erstwhile supporters are concerned not so much by his muddled strategy as by the crude action implementing it.
”No one in his right mind would orchestrate a coup in the DRC with 17 000 United Nations peace-keepers present,” says Herman Hanekom of the Africa Institute. ”His action has only confirmed how badly these peacekeepers are needed in the DRC to maintain security during the elections because the official security forces have been exposed as being loyal to Kabila rather than to the government of that country.”
The government is divided over the mercenary issue. Vice-President Azarias Ruberwa declares that the ”DRC government has never actually debated the 32 mercenaries issue”. He criticises the government for ”dysfunction and lack of seriousness”.
Ruberwa is sceptical of Kashala being implicated in a ”plot to take power by force” and believes the whole matter is ”an intimidation” by the Minister of Home Affairs, Theophile Mbemba Fundu.
Needless to say, Kabila’s coup ploy was given short shrift by the Kinshasa media.
The acid test, however, will be the visit of the UN Security Council to the DRC next week.
Ambassadors of the 15 member nations will have noted US, Nigerian and South African statements dismissing Kabila’s coup-plot claim.
On their seventh visit to the country for what is about to become the most expensive election operation undertaken by the world organisation, they will leave the interim president in no doubt that the occasion calls for statesmanship, not cheap tricks.