"Every day we don't have elections in this country someone dies," said US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on her recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And by her words last week, she’s almost certainly ensured these elections with be delayed even further.
Discussing President Joseph Kabila’s reluctance to call long overdue elections in the country, it is reported that banging the table, she insisted: “The elections must be organized in 2018, otherwise the DRC must not count on the support of the United States and the international community.”
Big words. But entirely misjudged ones that will have counterproductive and potentially disastrous consequences. For her demand directly contradicts the Saint Sylvestre accords between Kabila and the opposition, which called for holding votes by the end of this year. What Haley has effectively done is given tacit approval to Kabila in his quest to kick the can even further down the road, at a time when the US should be taking a stand and calling on Kabila – under threat of sanctions – to fulfill his promise to stand down.
By not relinquishing power, he is plunging his country into the abyss, a little more than a decade after the Congo emerged from one of the bloodiest civil wars in recent memory. Indeed, there are few people better placed than Haley to recognize this, given that she herself was moved to tears while visiting a nearly decade-old refugee camp for Congolese people displaced by violence as part of the trip. "No one should live like this," she said. "We can't turn a blind eye to all of this."
Haley may not have turned a blind eye, but she has certainly not applied the forensic scrutiny that the situation requires. Through this recent misjudgment, Haley has given Kabila further authority to cling to power until 2018. Indeed, the US has now even welcomed the fact that December 2018 will be when the next election takes place, two years after Kabila was scheduled to leave office.
Whether this is evidence of the fact that the US just doesn’t care about Africa enough to apply much critical thought to its dealings on the continent, or it is a spectacular example of grossly miscalculated appeasement, one thing is certain: the opposition in DRC is quite rightly outraged.
"This fanciful schedule is one more maneuver by a predatory regime which wants to hold onto power indefinitely," said leading exiled opposition figure Moïse Katumbi, accusing Kabila of "pillaging" the country. Augustin Kabuya, of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) concurred and reiterated the importance of sticking to the revised deadline of December 2017. "What interests us right now is the departure of Kabila by December 31, 2017," he said. Meanwhile, Felix Tshisekedi of the Rassemblement coalition bluntly pointed out, “The calendar presented by the [electoral commission] violates the Constitution, the Dec. 31, 2016 accord and electoral law”.
Violating his country’s constitution, however, is not something that troubles Joseph Kabila – or Haley for that matter. He is settling in for the long haul and coming up with excuses along the way. First, his regime said that there could be no vote before early 2019 because of the difficulty of completing an electoral roll in the country’s troubled Kasai region (no matter that his steadfast grip on power is a main source for the mass graves in the region). Now, it is claimed that the date for the election is simply good economic sense: “a rationalization of the electoral system so as to reduce costs”.
This, of course, is nonsense. Kabila knows it. The opposition knows it. The people know it. And with this uncertainty stoked by Haley, there are fears that more violence – the sort that drives people to the refugee camps she was wringing her hands about earlier this month– will soon erupt.
Last week, a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNHCR) noted that a recent mission to Tanganyika, in the southeast of the DRC, found more than 70,000 people displaced by renewed violence. This year alone, more than 1.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes in the country. As instability fans the flames, the risk of further displacement is high, says UNHCR.
Instead of making counterproductive demands that might make momentarily good sound bites but which actually benefit nobody, Haley should have driven the idea that home that Washington in no way backs Kabila’s agenda. She could, for example, have lent her support to the opposition by guaranteeing protection for Katumbi – who is currently living in exile and is pursued on trumped by charges by Kabila’s regime. Or she could have ramped up the sanctions that could hurt Kabila and his network of cronies in their soft underbellies: their bank accounts.
But she didn’t. And perhaps we shouldn’t find that surprising given that Donald Trump’s administration seems to take no more than a cursory interest in Africa. For all his talk of the continent’s “tremendous business potential”, he has yet to nominate an assistant secretary of state for African affairs and seems to have formulated very little policy in relation to the continent. For example, a decision on whether to lift sanctions on Sudan was delayed because insufficient scrutiny had been carried out.
And now, this lack of rigor on African affairs has caused tangible damage to the political situation in the DRC. And thanks to the US, it has just received carte blanche to do so for even longer.