Seleka is not looking very good from up close. The lower ranks, the foot soldiers that sent the armed forces loyal to ousted president François Bozizé fleeing into the bush is anything but disciplined.
Despite calls from self-proclaimed President Michel Djotodia for looting and pillaging to stop, wild-eyed, heavily armed soldiers tearing through the city on pickup trucks that look like they were painted by small children continue to terrorise the people of Bangui. Heavy gunfire near the centre of the city on Friday night and Saturday afternoon has left the main shopping district much quieter than usual.
The people of this riverside capital are not strangers to violence. Apart from an almost constantly simmering rebellion usually in more than one part of the country at the same time, Bangui residents have come to expect a military coup virtually every 10 years. Ten years ago Bozizé was the instigator, this year he was the target.
This time around, it's less clear who is in charge. There are far too many uniformed Chadians racing through the streets and manning impromptu roadblocks for this to feel like an internal conflict.
Djotodia a 'native son'
A member of the ousted regime, who lost a prominent position, told the Mail & Guardian that despite the huge numbers of Chadians within the ranks of Seleka, he still thinks of it as a Central African movement; because, he says, Djotodia is a native son.
That may be the case, but for the average person on the ground, the fear of Chadian rebels is never far from the surface. I travelled outside Bangui on Saturday for the first time since arriving here earlier in the week. The intended destination was Mbaiki, an important regional town about 100km from the capital, at a junction in the very limited road network of the CAR. At Mbaiki, the road splits, with a south-western fork heading to the border with Congo-Brazzaville and a north-western fork heading towards Cameroon. Just over half way to Mbaiki is what is left of one of the main residences of former CAR emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, an important place of pilgrimage for many in the country, where nostalgia for the days when Bokassa was in power is growing.
I didn't make it to Mbaiki nor did I make it to the Bokassa shrine. Young, drunken Chadian soldiers stopped me and the two people I was travelling with, a driver and a local United Nations official, at a makeshift roadblock 60km from Bangui. We had already negotiated our way through four roadblocks at this point, all of which were manned by Chadians. How do I know they were Chadians? They spoke Arabic rather than French or Sango and, to make it easier, they also told us that they were Chadian.
The village of Pissa was the end of the road for us – a busy little marketplace with Congolese music blasting out of battery-powered cracked speakers and young men sat drinking warm beer, trying not to catch the eyes of the soldiers who kept watch over them while on the opposite side of the road the women were selling dried manioc, the staple diet in much of Central and West Africa.
'Formalities'
The Chadians weren't just stopping us, they were preventing many locals from continuing their journeys as well. The option of paying what the soldiers call "formalities" certainly exists, but formalities are too much for most people in a country where the average person earns much less than a dollar a day.
If Djotodia wants to earn any respect from the people he now claims to represent, he's going to have to make it very clear, very soon that he is in charge and not the president of the neighbouring country to the north, Chad. Chadian troops form part of the regional peacekeeping force Fomac. It's not a secret that Fomac was too small and too poorly equipped to keep Seleka and the Faca apart prior to the fall of Bangui last month. And so far there have been no serious claims that Fomac took sides in the battle. But the Chadians who are part of Fomac are far from being the only Chadians in the CAR. It is obvious to the M&G that a significant part of the armed forces Seleka claims as its own are not from the Central African Republic, and are indeed from Chad.
There is a widespread belief in the CAR that if a Chadian kills a local, the killer will go unpunished, however if the opposite occurs, locals believe that Chadian President Idriss Déby will intervene to ensure that justice, as he sees fit, is done. This is xenophobia CAR-style. Seleka has a lot of internal housekeeping to sort out if it has any intention of making good governance more than just a slogan.