GOMA

War has been good to Masumbuko Kakera. The peace is making him richer still but the wily Congolese trader could not have become one of the wealthiest men in Goma without the years of foreign invasion, occupation and rebel governments, besides the help of nature’s occasional assault.

Thirty-nine people are believed to have been killed in a weekend ferry disaster in northern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), local officials said on Tuesday. The boat, overloaded with passengers and goods, sank during a storm on Saturday while crossing the Ubangui River.

Dissident General Laurent Nkunda likes to think of himself as a saviour. This might explain why, as we drive to church on Saturday morning, his security detail includes not only standard issue Kalashnikovs and RPGs, but also a keyboard and eight hymn-singing soldiers.

The party of a renegade Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) general on Wednesday threatened to withdraw its troops from the DRC’s armed forces, sparking fears of renewed violence. Laurent Nkunda’s fighters had started integrating into the army in January following an accord with Kinshasa.

Hutu and Tutsi leaders in the Nord-Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo called on Sunday for an end to fighting between soldiers and rebels that has displaced 50 000 people. The statement called for both sides to ”take into account the terrible suffering of the population which only wants to live in peace”.

At an HIV/Aids treatment centre in Goma, doctor Nino Minani is still haunted by the despairing cry of a dying patient. ”’You’ll drink the ARV [antiretrovirals] yourselves, because I’ll already be dead by the time they arrive’,” Minani recalled of the woman’s remarks. ”She kept telling us,’you’re waiting for us to die to give us treatment’.”

Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general whose troops are blamed for rampant insecurity in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has threatened to forcibly prevent national army troops being deployed in his fiefdom. ”No hostile military force will deploy,” Nkunda said in a statement obtained by the media on Wednesday.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) President Joseph Kabila won over 85% of the vote in his stronghold in the east of the country, the first official results to trickle in from the July 30 landmark elections showed on Tuesday. By Tuesday morning, results had been posted in at least three of the country’s 62 regional election centres.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s 60-million people are unlikely to wake up on Monday to a dramatically changed country after Sunday’s first democratic elections in the Central African giant. They will, in all probability, still be voting in what has become Africa’s most expensive and complex election.

Rebel fighters have seized six towns and villages in the turbulent eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after Congolese troops apparently withdrew, officials in the area said on Friday. Insurgents occupied the municipalities on Thursday and Friday, they said.

Tired of a transition that has dragged on, traders at Virunga market at the foot of the towering Nyiragongo volcano in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo plan to vote ”yes” massively in Sunday’s referendum on the country’s future Constitution.