Antoine Gizenga, new Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), on Wednesday began talks on forming a coalition government to address problems of reconstruction, his spokesperson said.
Gizenga (81) was appointed last Saturday by President Joseph Kabila in line with deals reached among political parties in the vast DRC, which has just begun its first year since independence in 1960 with democratically elected institutions and a history of devastating conflict behind it.
The administration is expected to be made up politicians belonging to parties in Kabila’s Presidential Majority Alliance; the Union of Mobutist Democrats led by Nzanga Mobutu, son of the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko; and Gizenga’s Unified Lumumbist Party.
”From today contacts have begun with organisations belonging to the coalition who will provide the people and resources capable of running the ministries,” spokesperson Godefroid Mayobo told journalists.
A meeting is scheduled this Friday at government headquarters between the prime minister and party chiefs belonging to the Kabila camp, he said.
The consultations, originally scheduled to start on Tuesday, were delayed for technical reasons, the government office said.
Kabila has mandated Gizenga to form a broad-based government, replacing an unelected transitional one formed in 2003 under a long, United Nations-supervised process to end a regional war that had brought more than six foreign armies into the DRC since 1998.
Before spending many years in exile once power in the vast Central African country was seized by the dictator Sese Seko, Gizenga was deputy prime minister in the first government after independence from Belgium, headed by Patrice Lumumba. — Sapa-AFP