I had an interesting conversation with Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba and his self-effacing partner-in-crime, Jacques Depelchin, the other week.
We were talking, naturally, about the Congo, DRC, call it what you will. Both are from there and are relatively minor players in current Congo politics. While the big guns, Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba, thrash it out on the main stage, guys like Wamba and Depelchin scratch away at the sidelines, putting out feelers, nudging in the facts as they see them, hoping to make some sort of an impact in the long term.
I first met Depelchin at the Sun City shindig organised by the South African government some years ago to bring the contending forces of the Congo round a series of round tables to sort out the mess that the country has palpably become. Wamba was somewhere in the forest of tented conference sessions, so my date with him came to pass much later.
Depelchin was immediately interesting and engaging. There was none of the bluster usually associated with Congolese politicians. There was, rather, a gentle, persuasive way of talking through all the issues. And it was the same way when I came to have my conversation with Wamba some years later, in a quiet apartment in Killarney, Johannesburg, of all places.
The DRC has recently gone through the second stage of an electoral process that saw the incumbent, Kabila, triumph over his arch rival, billionaire warlord Bemba. The issues are somewhat confusing. Lord alone knows how the general Congolese public, the men-and-women-in-the-street, were able to sort through the issues to decide on which way they should vote.
Kabila had taken on the presidency by default when his papa, Laurent Kabila, was assassinated in an as-yet unclear plot not long after taking power. Kabila Père, as wide as he was bombastic, had marched from exile (well, marched in armoured cars, helicopters and aeroplanes, as far as possible, but marched down on the ground when photo opportunities demanded it) to be the Congolese face of the Rwandan/Ugandan-inspired overthrow of the CIA’s favoured face of the Congo, Joseph Desirée Mobutu, later to re-baptise himself as Mobutu Sese Seko. Anyway, he was the cat who took the front seat in the overthrow of Congo’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who the Western world intensely disliked for his sense of independence, and his apparent partiality to communism and the Soviet way of thinking in those early days of the Cold War.
The recent elections in the Congo have brought many of those old issues bubbling to the surface, but their outcome has not laid any ghosts to rest — neither the murder of Lumumba, the assassination of Kabila Père, the unnatural election of his son to the presidency, nor the dubious outcome of the vote itself, endorsed by South Africa and the international community in general.
Wamba’s commentary on all of this is very revealing. The billionaire warlord Bemba, he says, should rightfully have won the election, if the ballots had been properly accounted for. But maybe, as Wamba is cautiously not saying, this is because votes can be bought. Bemba has behind him a lot of bucks that can buy votes, in a country as vulnerable, as desperate as this.
I ask Wamba where Bemba amassed his wealth. ”He’s a real Kinshasa operator,” is his smiling reply, after some hesitation. ”Kinshasa people get wealth by any and every means, mostly crooked, including fraud.”
Whoever started it (and there is no denying that capitalism is part of African human nature as much as anyone’s, but the international capitalism that played a part in the assassinations of both Lumumba and Kabila, and the neo-Chinese capitalism that we all have to come to terms with now, plays a significant role), Kinshasa is a hive of opportunistic activity. Bemba is merely one of the more successful of these cells of the imagination. You see the White Man and the Chinaman doing it all the time. Why shouldn’t you?
Bemba is, apparently, persona non grata in Belgium, France and even South Africa for these reasons, according to Wamba dia Wamba.
But, according to general perception, endorsed by the Catholic Church back home in the Congo, this billionaire fraudster actually won the election by a substantial margin over the much-propped up Kabila. Money buys votes. Terror buys privilege.
It’s all a game of international politics played for high stakes, as ever, and international money. Kabila, in the short time he has been in power, has, according to Wamba, signed lucrative deals with various international corporate entities. The Congo, as we all know, is rich in many of the world’s most prized resources — especially the stuff that makes cellphones work, and none of us can work without cellphones these days. And there’s the rub.
There are high stakes in the Congo, as there have always been.
We have yet to see what will play out there. In spite of his supposed victory, Bemba has chosen to pull back and become part of an educated opposition. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.
Wamba’s position, gently articulated by his fellow thinker Depelchin, is interesting. ”We have to change the world without necessarily taking power.”
It’s a message for the seething, troubled Congo, and its inevitably skewed elections. We could take it as a message for a South Africa scrambling for a new concept of leadership in the run-up to the next elections, which leaves us all baffled.
We could also take it as a message for the world. Who knows what’s coming next?