Putting the ‘D’ in ‘DRC’ (by Karen)

It didn’t get much, if any, coverage in the English-language or even, as far as we could tell, the French-language press, but in January of this year, the DRC had an interesting episode. Of course, it was just one of a series, and so hardly worth mentioning, I guess – but we’ll mention it here.

A little context: The current president of the DRC is Joseph Kabila, who came to office in 2001 after his father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, was assassinated. L-D, or Kabila père, had overthrown Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, at which point Kabila fils went from driving a tourist taxi in Tanzania (whence Kabila père  had spent several decades waging  guerrilla war against Mobutu – though Che Guevara came over in 1965 to help the cause and was unimpressed) to being a Very Important Person. L-D was shot in 2001 by one of his own bodyguards, but who was actually behind the plot has not yet been determined, and no one has been brought to justice. In any case, Kabila fils – Joseph Kabila; we can call him JoKa for short – was hastily put into the presidency (according to Tim Butcher in Blood River, with the help of a US mining company). JoKa was only 29 at the time.

In 2006, a new constitution was passed, which stipulated that the president could have only two 5-year terms. Elections were held that year, and JoKa won, though not as handily as he would have liked. He got 45% of the vote in the initial election, and in the run-off, 58%, though there were large regional differences. In 2009, he “set up a commission to determine whether the term of presidential office should not be extended from five years to seven and whether the constitutional limit of two mandates should not be scrapped” (David van Reybrouck in Congo: An Epic History of a People). Those efforts were thwarted. In 2011, JoKa won again, in an election widely criticized as fraudulent.

So, JoKa’s term should be up at the end of 2016 (the first five years he was in power, before the advent of the Third Republic in 2006, don’t enter the official count). Elections are slated for next year. But there are those who still sense a certain reluctance on the part of the head of state to step down as mandated. So, back to January of this year: the government proposed a law that would condition elections on completion of a census.

Now, it’s true that DRC badly needs a census. The last one was in, I believe, 1984, and it’s hard to run a country when you don’t know how many people are in it and how they’re distributed. From a public health standpoint, having an updated census (or, better yet, a functioning civil and vital registration system) would be a huge plus. And, of course, to run elections, it’s helpful to know how many people are living in which political districts. But to conduct a census in a country this big, with infrastructure that’s so poor, could take three or four years, easy. So opposition leaders smelled something fishy and called for a protest in the capital Kinshasa when the law was up for a vote.

Protests began on Monday, January 19^th in Kinshasa and Goma, with confrontations between police and protesters. The opposition was using social media and SMS messaging to show the state’s repressive response and to call on people to join in the protests. Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Tuesday, all internet and SMS across the country was cut off. No email, no Facebook ... no PubMed for my students or online ethics training for my research team. No text messages, no WhatsApp, for anyone, anywhere.

After a few days, the government realized that industry was paralyzed – nothing could get in at the ports, banks couldn’t do any transactions, business couldn’t go on – and that it couldn’t pay its employees their (meager) salaries. Investors were scared off. So internet access was restored on fixed connections – but the vast majority of the small minority of Congolese who use the internet access it on mobile devices, either phones or portable modems, and these remained out of commission for 19 days. Likewise, all SMS communication was suspended for 19 days – only voice calls (which burn more phone credit than text messages) could get through. When internet access was finally restored on mobile devices, social media sites were still blocked for several weeks. Opposition members said their phones were blocked as well.

This response to the protests was strikingly disproportionate.  Government forces killed protesters, with the government putting the death toll at 12, but human rights organizations putting it at 42. The controversial conditioning of elections on completion of a census was removed from the bill before it was passed, but the opposition is still on the lookout for other tricks; the recent debacle in Burundi sets a bad precedent. Some people anticipate more trouble in 2016.

And that, my friends, is how they put the 'D' in 'DRC'!