Home Sweet Home: Kabila’s troubled relationship with Katanga – By Kris
Berwouts
Posted on
<
http://africanarguments.org/2014/12/18/home-sweet-home-kabilas-troubled-rel
ationship-with-katanga-by-kris-berwouts/> December 18, 2014
Since the beginning of 2014, electoral fever in the DRC has been on the
rise, although presidential elections aren’t scheduled before the end of
2016. Joseph Kabila is in the middle of his second and constitutionally his
last mandate as president of the Third Republic. In January 2001, in the
middle of the war, he succeeded his father who had been assassinated by a
body guard in his own palace.
Kabila remained Head of State during the transition which started in 2003.
He won the elections in 2006 and was sworn in as the first president of the
Third Republic, which Congolese and international observers declared were
free and fair.
In November 2011, he was re-elected. This time, the elections were much more
closely contested and his main challenger, Etienne Tshisekedi, has never
accepted his defeat. In the last few months the political scene in Congo has
become obsessed by Kabila’s plans for 2016. Will he stay or will he go?
Rich
At this moment it looks rather unlikely that Kabila will find a consensus in
his own camp to
<
http://africanarguments.org/2014/06/24/drc-elections-will-kabila-stay-or-go
-and-many-other-questions-on-the-road-to-2016-by-manya-riche-and-kris-berwou
ts/> remain in power. The reticence starts in his home province of Katanga.
Via his father, Kabila is member of the Balubakat community – the Baluba
from North Katanga. Both Kabila regimes (père and fils) are perceived in
Congo as a Swahili-speaking Katanga-based fortress.
Katanga is a complex province, rich in minerals and much more industrialized
than the rest of the country. However, Katanga doesn’t exhibit development
indicators above the national average, largely because there are enormous
discrepancies between its territories and districts.
The north of the province, where the Balubakat come from, has been largely
absent of the growth dynamics observable in the major cities, such as
Lubumbashi, Likasi and Kolwezi. The people there blame their own leaders for
this: Balubakat leaders have been well-positioned since Laurent-Désiré
Kabila took power. They enriched themselves very visibly but there has been
hardly any return for North Katanga.
Most politicians in Congolese history have used their mandate to develop
their region by rehabilitating roads, building schools and hospitals etc.
The population of northern Katanga and especially the Balubakat community
accuses its leaders of neglect their own people.
Self-declared prophet
The fact that Kabila had a problem with his own community was made
dramatically clear just before New Year 2014. On the morning of December
30th, lightly armed people entered the buildings of the RTNC (Radio et
Television Nationale Congolaise) and similar attacks took place elsewhere in
Kinshasa: around the military camp Tshatshi and at Ndjili International
Airport. The police was able to take control of the situation very quickly.
Eventually, the attackers were identified as followers of a religious leader
claiming to be the ‘Prophet of the Eternal’, Paul Joseph Mukungubila – a
former, if rather unsuccessful presidential candidate, (59,228 votes in
2006) who preached a bizarre mix of anti-Kabila and anti-Tutsi
rhetoric.Earlier in 2013, three senior Balubakat leaders had lost national
responsibilities: John Numbi, Jean-Claude Masangu and Daniel Mulunda Ngoy.
The incident happened only two days after the official confirmation of
Charles Bisengimana as Chief of the National Police. Bisengimana, a Tutsi
who was part of the rebellion of Laurent Kabila in 1996-1997, had been
acting Chief since General John Numbi was suspended due to his possible
involvement in the assassination of senior human rights activist Floribert
Chebeya in June 2010. Until Chebeya’s death, Numbi had been one of the
strongmen in Kabila’s inner circle.
In May 2013, Jean-Claude Masangu ended his last mandate as president of the
Congolese Central Bank (Bececo). He was replaced by Deo Gratias Mutombo, a
Bececo technocrat from Katanga, but non-Mulubakat.
In June 2013, Daniel Mulunda Ngoy had to leave the presidency of the CENI
(the Independent National Electoral Commission) because he was held
responsible for the contested elections of November 2011 and the damage done
in terms of loss of legitimacy and stability for the regime. He was replaced
by the catholic priest Apollinaire Malumalu, who previously led the
commission which had organised the historical elections in 2006.
Even today it is very difficult to understand exactly what happened and why.
The government has done its best to reduce the incident and its relevance to
the Prophet’s narrative and present it as an isolated action of religious
zealots. But Congo is a country with an outspoken taste for rumour and
conspiracy theories. Even before the incident was over, it had been called a
coup attempt with much speculation about who exactly within the political or
military elite was behind it.
It is important to see the actions of a Katangan prophet and his followers
in the context of a powerful Katanga worried about losing influence in
Congo. The prophet’s march was not a coup attempt but rather a sign that
Katanga is not reassured that Kabila is serving its interests well.
Bakata Katanga
The most violent manifestation of Balubakat discontentment at grass-roots
level is the existence of an armed group known as ‘Bakata Katanga’ led by
Mai Mai leader Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga. They have been responsible for massive
human rights violations in what is known as the ‘Triangle of Death’, the
area between Pweto, Manono and Mitwaba where they destroyed villages and
symbols of the Congolese state, which resulted in the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of individuals.
The armed group is rooted in the secessionist history of the province. In
fact, Bakata Katanga means ‘Cutters of Katanga’. Congo had its first
implosion less than two weeks after independence, when the Katangan governor
Moïse Tshombe unilaterally declared the independence of his province on July
11th, 1960 – inspired and supported by the western (particularly Belgian)
industrial interest groups. The Congolese government and army were able to
reunite the country three years later with the help of UN troops. Since
then, the secessionist undercurrent remained present in the heart of many
Katangans in all social strata of the province.
The Bakata Katanga are fed from below by the anger and the feeling of
exclusion from rural communities. But, rather than being a spontaneous
outburst of frustration, the movement is believed to be a construction,
initiated by people around Kabila.
There had previously been Mai Mai activities in North Katanga as a form of
popular resistance against the occupation of eastern Congo by Rwandan
troops. Many sources have confirmed that in the period leading up to the
2011 elections, Balubakat in Kabila’s inner circle took the initiative to
reorganize the remaining Mai Mai groups under a new umbrella.
Gédéon, one of the leaders of the first wave of Mai Mai groups in North
Katanga, was placed in prison, sentenced to death for crimes against
humanity during the war. In September 2011, he escaped to take the
leadership of the Bakata Katanga. It is often stated that John Numbi and
Jean-Claude Masangu were the people who created Bakata Katanga as a B plan
to fall back on in the event Kabila lost the elections against Tshisekedi.
The development of the Bakata Katanga is in many aspects comparable to what
happened with other armed groups in Kivu: it can exist because the people in
the villages are frustrated and don’t feel protected by the state;
provincial and national politicians try to structure and steer it but lose
their grip after a while because the armed group very soon starts to
interact within very local dynamics and escapes from all forms of control.
This Includes the control of its own commanders: at this moment, the Bakata
Katanga cannot be considered a coherent organization with clear lines of
command.
On
<
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-26/congo-reassures-copper-miners-ratt
led-by-katanga-militia-attack.html> March 23rd 2013, a group of Bakata
Katanga fighters, many of them women and children armed with machetes and
bows and arrows and covered with charms and amulets, marched up to
Lubumbashi and raised the old flag of independent Katanga in the city’s main
square. After a battle with security forces that killed 35 people, the
militants forced their way into a UN compound where 245 of them surrendered.
After that incident, <
http://www.refworld.org/docid/534f99be4.html> the
military operations of the Congolese army against the Bakata Katanga
intensified and managed to considerably weaken the armed group. This does
not necessarily mean that the security situation improved: the operations
have dispersed the Bakata Katanga in the Triangle of Death, driving them
further south in the direction of Lubumbashi and the Kundelungu and Upemba
national parks. The pressure on Lubumbashi increased and fears of a rebel
attack on the city are running rampant.
Decentralisation and découpage
The traditional tensions between North and South Katanga are related to the
decentralization process and more particularly the découpage. The
constitution of the Third Republic defines Congo as a federal state where
the provinces have political, fiscal and juridical autonomy and important
responsibilities in the organisation of public life. To enable them this,
the Constitution stipulates that the provinces are entitled to use 40% of
the national taxes raised.
The aim of decentralization is to reinforce good governance and
accountability, improve the administrative efficiency and increase the
democratic participation of the citizens. It is difficult to be against
that, especially in a province where people tend to think that most of the
problems are imposed by the capital.
But the Constitution also foresees the splitting of the existing 11
provinces in to 26 smaller ones. This new territorial structure will be
problematic in many places in Congo, because new balances will have to be
sought, not only in terms of identity and ethnicity, but also regarding
economic interests.
The Katanga case will be particularly sensitive. Dissolving Katanga into the
four new provinces of Haut-Katanga, Haut-Lomami, Tanganika and Luluaba will
exacerbate the division between richer and economically unviable parts of
present-day Katanga. The mining history of the province led to complex
patterns within the province and from elsewhere, for instance neighbouring
Kasai. This has caused tensions and waves of violence in the past between
communities on ethnic lines but with socio-economic root causes.
Balubakat in leading positions in Lubumbashi or Kinshasa, in control of
lucrative economic activities (mining, transport, trade…) would be reduced
to foreigners in the south of Katanga and cut off from an important part of
their profits. The découpage of Katanga is potentially explosive and there
is a lot of pressure to avoid its implementation.
Elite
Everywhere in Congo, Kabila’s regime is considered as Katangan, except in
Katanga. For North Katanga, he is the lost son who has forgotten to take
care of his family. For South Katanga, he is the incarnation of problems at
the national level; extracting the wealth of the province without any added
value in return.
Currently the tensions between North and South Katanga remain mostly under
the surface because Moïse Katumbi, governor of Katanga since March 2007, has
managed to mobilise a lot of support. He has introduced a new dynamic in the
provincial capital of Lubumbashi and in other parts of the province, and his
charisma seems to work far beyond the borders of his own community (from his
mother’s side, he is a Bemba from South Katanga) and his region.
The charisma even works beyond Katanga. At a moment where everybody is
obsessed by Kabila’s intentions regarding the elections in 2016, one of the
main questions is: where will change come from in case Kabila decides or is
forced to leave. It is very difficult to imagine that the opposition will
defeat the regime by elections in a country such as Congo. It is much more
likely that the initial drive for change will come from that part of the
establishment which believes that its long term stability and interests are
not served by eternalizing Kabila’s reign. In that case, it is quite
possible that the present schemes of majority and opposition will be broken
up to redraw the political landscape and give way to new alliances.
Many people I spoke with in Katanga and in Kinshasa, within the majority as
well as in the opposition, look at
<
http://africanarguments.org/2014/11/18/congos-leadership-beyond-2016-the-ri
sing-star-of-moise-katumbi-by-kris-berwouts-and-manya-riche/> Katumbi as the
man with the best cards to make such a bid. He has an aura of a successful
businessman and manager, as well as being an excellent organizer. He is
known to be generous and able to bring people together. He also has the
money and the looks to mount a great campaign.
Of course Katumbi has some important disadvantages: there is no doubt that
his white origins (his father was a Sephardic Jew from the island of Rhodes)
will be used against him. There are some dark shades hanging over his
business past and the way he gathered his wealth. And in economic terms, he
is a glutton: he uses his political position to expand his commercial
empire. He lacks a solid intellectual background, although nobody remembers
the last time that would have been a decisive criterion for the presidency…
At this moment, Katumbi is absent: he left Katanga early October for a cure
to detoxify his body from the traces of an earlier attempt to poison him.
Two months later, he still did not return and this again fueled rumours and
speculations. So far, Katumbi has not yet made clear his ambitions for 2016.
A subject of significant speculation is his relationship with the
presidential family. Katumbi leads the PPRD in the province but there has
been a lot of distrust between him and the president in the past. Sources
confirm that there has been a certain rapprochement lately. A move by
Katumbi to the national level at some stage may not be incompatible with the
Kabila clan, since the president’s younger brother Zoe, member of the senate
since 2011, allegedly has ambitions to become governor of Katanga himself.
And let us not forget the grumbling man in the background of course. Congo
got its government of national cohesion earlier this week and in September,
the army top brass were also reshuffled. Both exercises gave Katanga no
reason to complain, but John Numbi is still sidelined. He spends most of his
time in Katanga and is very active in business. He runs his farm, an
enterprise for road construction and a security firm. He doesn’t seem very
influential in the main decision making circuits of the country but he is
definitely on speaking terms with the president. And he wants to be
rehabilitated. He is feared in the province and the country because nobody
really knows how much loyalty he can still count on in the armed forces,
including Kabila’s own
<
http://desc-wondo.org/alerte-desc-la-garde-republicaine-a-menace-de-renvers
er-joseph-kabila/> Garde Républicaine.
Congo seems to need Katanga more than Katanga needs Congo and its leaders
are well represented in the key positions of state.
Kris Berwouts has worked 25 years for different Belgian and international
NGOs focused on building peace, reconciliation, security and democratic
processes. He now works as an independent expert on Central Africa. He is
currently writing a book on the conflicts in eastern Congo to be published
in 2015 by ZED Books. He receives support from the
<
http://www.fondspascaldecroos.org/en> Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative
Journalism for his field research.
Received on Thu Dec 18 2014 - 08:08:46 EST