Campaigning for critical election opens in crisis-wracked DRC

Africa

After 2 years of various drawbacks, broken promises and delays, the Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday effectively opened the starting gates for a crucial election that could influence positively or perhaps worsen the decades-long crisis gripping the vast central African nation.

“May the best person win,” electoral board chief Corneille Nangaa said, pre-empting the official start of campaigning by a day.

Voters are expected to head to the polls on December 23, where they will choose a successor to outgoing President Joseph Kabila, who has constitutionally remained in power as caretaker leader even though his second and final elected term ended about two years ago.

Eastern DR Congo has been ravaged by decades of inter-ethnic bloodshed and militia violence, as well as a deadly Ebola outbreak, testing a large UN peacekeeping mission deployed in the country.

Twenty-one candidates are registered to stand to replace the 47-year-old Kabila, who came into power in January 2001, after his father, president Laurent-Desire Kabila, was assassinated.

Due international pressure against him seeking a third term, Kabila threw his support behind a chosen successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, in August. Shadary is one of 15 Congolese individuals under European Union sanctions, accused of human rights violations when he was interior minister between December 2016 and early 2018.

One of Shadary’s main rivals is Martin Fayulu, a little-known lawmaker who earlier this month was named the joint candidate of several, however, not all opposition parties that form a coalition in the parliament.

Around half of DR Congo’s population of 80 million are eligible to vote. The electoral board is standing by its decision to use 106,000 touchscreen electronic voting machines supplied by South Korea, despite some opposition demands — by Fayulu in particular — for paper ballots.

The government, which has a thorny relationship notably with the United Nations, has rejected all forms of international financial or logistical assistance for the election in a country nearly five times the size of France.

The UN peacekeeping force MONUSCO has proposed using its helicopters and planes to ferry imported voting machines to polling stations nationwide.

AFP

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