In an election riddled with fraud, Congo’s president Felix Tshisekedi was just reelected over his main challenger Martin Fayulu, who was probably been the true winner. In 2018, Tshisekedi was declared the winner of the previous presidential election, even though independent observers estimate that Martin Fayulu actually got two-thirds of the vote, compared to Tsishekedi’s one-sixth of the vote. Tshisekedi was installed anyway by the regime of Joseph Kabila, the long-time dictator of the Congo. Kabila held an election because he was pressured by western countries to hold a free election, but he didn’t really want to, and he reached a corrupt bargain with Tshisekedi to install him as president in exchange for Tshisekedi appointing Kabila’s cronies to the most powerful positions in the government.
In this most recent election, Tsishekedi benefited from being the incumbent president, and got more votes than last time, but probably still got less than half the vote. Yet official tallies claimed he got 72% of the vote. Congo’s Catholic bishops’ conference called the election “a catastrophe” and said that “our country is in danger.”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the second largest country in Africa and one of the world’s five most corrupt countries. It is about the size of the eastern United States (the part of America east of the Mississippi River). With 112 million people, Congo is the largest country to have French as its official language.
Tshisekedi took the oath of office in a stadium in Congo’s capital Kinshasa that was packed with supporters, African heads of state and other foreign envoys including from the United States, China, and France.
With armed military police deployed throughout the capital, there was no immediate sign opposition supporters in Kinshasa were heeding a call from two of Tshisekedi’s main opponents to protest against his re-election. But some residents of the capital, Kinshasa, are seething with anger about the fraudulent election.
Supposedly, Tshisekedi and his party won the Dec. 20-24 general election by a landslide, but the vote was plagued by widespread fraud, logistical problems, and disruptions. The fallout threatens to further destabilize Congo, the world’s third-largest copper producer and the number one producer of cobalt, a key component in electric car batteries.
The two opposition leaders, Martin Fayulu and Moise Katumbi, as well as others have called for a re-run – a demand authorities have dismissed. “We are having a protest on Jan. 20 because we will not accept the results, there was fraud everywhere and the elections must be annulled,” said Katumbi in an online press briefing.
“We discovered a considerable number of parallel votes with voting machines found in private homes,” said the Catholic bishop’s conference, CENCO, which ran the largest election observation mission throughout the country.
Security forces dispersed a small protest in Kinshasa on January 16 against the provisional results of the legislative election, which showed Tshisekedi’s UDPS party won 69 seats in parliament, placing it ahead of more than 40 other parties, but with less than a majority in parliament.
