Election banners festoon the rutted main road that divides the village, but no candidates have come to press for votes from these cassava farmers whose lives seem locked in another century. Three stopped clocks adorn a wall of the chief’s home.
Children draw polluted water by hand from shallow wells. Women walk kilometres to collect firewood. They’re only 100km south of Kinshasa, the capital, but have no
electricity. Yet the political chatter is lively and savvy as villagers prepare to join about 25-million of the DRC’s 58-million people in their first free elections of a president and Parliament in 46 years.
Sunday’s vote in the heart of Africa puts one of its largest, most populous and potentially wealthiest countries among those that have embraced democracy, however fitfully, in recent years. If the vote sparks peace and growth in a country ravaged by colonialism, then dictatorship, then war, it will be proof any nation on the continent can cast off the weight of history to reach for a better future.
”We need a really credible head of state, one that will take his duties seriously, that will help provide a good quality of life to alleviate the misery, and that means creating jobs that pay a livable wage, not such a pittance that it’s hardly worth waking up in the morning,” said Guylain Kasongo, a 25-year-old farmer.
He said his small manioc plot makes him only about $100 a year — half the cost of school fees, books and uniform for his eight-year-old daughter. He also works loading trucks and carrying giant bundles of produce — ”like a pack mule” — and still doesn’t make enough to send his younger girl to school.
Plus he has to help out his father, an army captain. ”He only makes $30 a month, but in the past three months he’s received only one payment of $20,” Kasongo said.
In a country of jungles and huge rivers with only 500km of paved road, the United Nations effort to pull off this election is a logistical nightmare. Soldiers and rebels left over from the wars of 1996-2002 continue to terrorise eastern DRC, forcing about 360 000 people from the their homes this year despite the presence of about 17 500 UN peacekeepers.
Delivering ballot slips requires a daily airlift by hundreds of aircraft, with armies of Congolese to move them on by boat, bicycle or on foot to the farthest village in this Western Europe-sized country.
It is bound to be an imperfect election, but Congolese have seized the moment with gusto. Despite a prohibitive $50 000 registration fee, 33 Congolese are running for president and 9 500 for 500 legislative seats. In some districts, so many candidates are running that the ballot slips look more like six-page
newspapers.
The candidates are a mixed and not entirely promising bag: former rebels accused of killing, looting and pillaging resources former cronies of Mobutu Sese Seko, the late and little-lamented dictator of 32 years Mobutu opponents who served in his government and fell out with him and the front-runner, Joseph Kabila, who has headed a transitional government for four years.
UN officials have chastised government officials for refusing to allow political rallies and for encouraging soldiers and police to break up opposition rallies. Politicians have received death threats and at least one has fled the country. Scores have died in election-related violence.
The DRC last elected a leader in 1960 when it won independence from Belgium, which had done little to prepare it for self-government. The man elected prime minister was the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, a left-winger who planned to kick out white colonisers and their exploitative mining companies. He escaped a CIA plot to poison him, only to be assassinated by Congolese troops as Belgian officers looked on.
Mobutu, an army officer, managed to control the country and win international support by projecting an aura of pro-Western reliability while amassing a huge personal fortune. But in 1996 an alliance of rebels invaded the country and overthrew him. Laurent Kabila, father of the present interim president, took power.
Then neighbouring Rwanda’s genocidal war spilled over its borders and a regional battle began over control of vast resources that include 30% of the world’s cobalt and 10% of its copper.
Country after country plunged into the war — Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola. All sent troops to support Kabila in return for mining concessions.
Four million people died, mainly from strife-driven hunger and disease, and left the country in such disarray that even now, the UN estimates 1 200 people — half of them children — die each day in fighting or of diseases ranging from HIV/Aids to bubonic plague and malaria.
Kabila was assassinated by a bodyguard in 2001, and his son, now 35, took over. It was he who pressed for the peace deal that set the stage for the vote, and he has managed in that time to persuade Western governments that he is fit to govern.
Mining companies from Australia, China, India, the United States, Britain, Canada are all hoping to do business here.
When some German politicians baulked at sending troops to help secure the election, Defence Minister Franz-Josef Jung reminded them that ”German industry will benefit from the stability of a region rich in raw materials”. Germany sent 780 troops.
Congolese, understandably after a history that includes CIA plots and invasion, are wary of outsiders, particularly from a West seen as powerful and driven by selfish interests.
Ndaku ya Pembe teacher Jacques Makuka noted that the weapons used in wars in the DRC and elsewhere in Africa come from the West, enriching private entrepreneurs or tying dictators to government military suppliers. He wondered whether the arms that come to Africa from white nations are ”here to create disorder in Africa so that Africans remain in misery?”
With so much at stake, the question on many Congolese minds is what happens after the votes are counted — a process likely to take weeks.
In that time, Congolese predict some unlikely alliances and worry whether losers will accept defeat gracefully, whether the winner will serve all of the DRC and not just his allies, whether those like Kabila who have their own personal militias will disband them.
In Ndaku ya Pembe, retired soldier and bookkeeper Tendayi Felicien is not hopeful. ”The politicians use trickery at elections and lie. They think they can buy our votes with a beer. But once we give them power, they will forget all about us.” – Sapa-AP