The DRCs Constitutional Court on Tuesday began hearing an appeal brought by Fayulu challenging the election results. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)
Martin Fayulu is the actual winner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC’s) December presidential election according to an investigation by the Financial Times.
The Financial Times analysed two sets of voting data which indicated that major fraud was at play in the results announced last week.
According to official results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi won the race with a 38.57% win in December’s vote.
CENI further announced that Tshisekedi’s primary rival Fayulu won 34.8% while the candidate backed by outgoing president Joseph Kabila, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, came out third with 23.8% – but the Financial Times’ analysis contradicts these results.
The publication managed to gain access to a large set of data – a spreadsheet containing more than 49 000 records – which represents 86% of the total votes across the DRC.
According to the Financial Times, this leaked data is a true reflection of the electronic results and a source, who has intimate knowledge of the data collection process, has revealed that authorities are attempting to conceal this data.
This data comes from tallies from 62 716 voting machines across the country and was obtained from the electoral commission’s database before Tshisekedi was named as the winner. It shows that Fayulu actually won 59.4% of the vote while Tshisekedi only won 19%.
The Financial Times conducted a separate analysis on voting results collected manually by the Catholic Church’s deployed 40 000 observers. This data represents results from 43% of the turnout from 28 733 voting polls and indicates that Fayulu won 62.8% of this sample.
According to the publication, their analysis of the two tallies “shows a near perfect correlation” of the official results and the church’s partial results, supporting the church’s stance that the results announced last week are not accurate.
The DRC’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday began hearing an appeal brought by Fayulu challenging the election results. Fayulu’s bid is to have the results declared invalid and the votes to be recounted but without the whole vote being declared null and void since this would leave Kabila in power – which he has held since 2001.
Fayulu has described the results as an “electoral coup” and says Tshisekedi’s win is because of a power-sharing dealhe made with Kabila.
The Court has eight days to making a ruling from when Fayulu lodged his appeal on January 11.