There is a trait that distinguishes the Congolese Episcopal Conference (CEC): its ability to intervene in the various sectors of society in which it is directly involved. And it does so with competence and determination by a widespread ecclesial presence in the territories.

This does not mean a desire for political interference, but a desire to reaffirm Christian values: respect for human rights, justice, peace… And it is, therefore, a point of reference, even civic, for all Congolese.
It is a well-articulated action that involves the Catholic base. In fact, the Secular Coordination Committee (CLC) was established in 1992 – in the 1990s, the democratic transition which has yet to be completed was outlined – and is one of the strong points of Congolese civil society.
The CLC, starting from the messages of the bishops, who are often critical of governments, provokes the institutions, denounces bad government and organizes peaceful protest demonstrations.

The Catholic Archbishop of Kinshasa, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo. Photo Secam

In this way, lay Catholics have the function of protecting the bishops, who express themselves while maintaining the “neutral” character of their declarations and avoiding being seen as political opponents.It has a “political” commitment carried out through the structures of the Justice and Peace Commissions, present in all the dioceses, which is also very active in civic awareness and the observation of the electoral process. During the national elections last December, twenty-four thousand Catholic and Protestant election observers were trained to follow the voting process until the results were counted. Church observers covered more than two-thirds of the seats in the country, allowing international criteria on electoral transparency to be respected.

The Congolese Catholic Church is one of the most active Churches in Africa. File swm

It is a Catholic Church that acts through various diocesan services, pastoral care, catechesis, liturgy (a specific rite recognized by Rome), Caritas, the Justice and Peace Commission and school and health services. It is thanks to all its social services that the Church offers a very important service to tens of millions of Congolese.
The Congolese Catholic Church is one of the most active Churches in Africa. Catholics, who are continuously increasing, represent around 40% of the population (90% Christian). Church attendance is also high among young people, and the Church enjoys an important flourishing of vocations. There are a total of 4,602 diocesan priests exercising their ministry in almost 1,500 parishes and 48 dioceses. Many Congolese priests and missionaries are working in other countries in Africa, Europe and America. There are also 11,000 religious Congolese men and women involved in pastoral care, education and health services.

No to silence
Relations between the Church and the political world are governed by the principle established by the Constitution, that is, secularism, the pillars of which are freedom of belief, the exercise of worship and the autonomy of the Churches and the State. Christians do not have their own political party and the Church does not support candidates. But everyone knows where and who the Congolese Church looks to. For decades, with its bishops first and foremost, the Church has closely followed the local and national socio-political situation, intervening with messages and statements to denounce the widespread plague of corruption, bad governance and the abuse of authority.

Caritas members in Isiro. Catholic Church acts through various diocesan services, pastoral care, catechesis, liturgy, Caritas, the Justice and Peace Commission, school and health services. File swm

The Congolese Catholic Church remains solidly a reality recognized by the people who count on it in its attempts to channel its human and social development efforts, as well as to mobilize personally and collectively. Today this Church is led by the president of the bishops’ conference, the Archbishop of Kisangani Marcel Utembi Tapa (in communion with the other outspoken prelate who is the Cardinal Archbishop of Kinshasa, Fridolin Ambongo, since 2019) who is not afraid to denounce the wars for the minerals of energy transition, the exploitation of Congolese resources for a supposed global ecologism which in reality causes enormous environmental and human damage to the country. And he is not silent about the exploitation of minerals and rare earths by foreign multinationals with the complicity of local governments: «A very rich country in which a large part of the population lives in poverty – he says. Faced with this situation, we as pastors cannot remain silent.” And he never tires of denouncing the gangrenous insecurity in the east of the country in particular (with hundreds, even thousands of deaths), urging the government to intervene to stop the violence and restore peace. (Open Photo: After Sunday Mass in Isiro Parish. File swm)
Elio Boscaini

On 20 January, President Tshisekedi was sworn in for a second term. But electoral fraud has reached such proportions that the future
looks rather bleak.

Felix Tshisekedi was sworn in as president on 20 January 2024 for a second mandate. On the last 31 December, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) had already declared him the winner of the 20 December 2023 election with 73.4 percent of the votes cast. The incumbent’s victory was confirmed on the last 10 January by the Constitutional Court which is controlled like CENI by Tshisekedi’s appointees. Tshisekedi’s main rival, the former governor of Katanga, Moise Katumbi obtained 18.8 % of the votes. Martin Fayulu, came third with 5.33% while the Peace Nobel 2018, the gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, obtained only 0.27 % of the votes. Yet, such results look surprising since pre-election surveys did not show any of the 20 candidates securing a majority in an election characterized by a low turnout of 43 percent compared to 67 percent in 2018, which can be explained by logistical problems and insecurity which prevented most of the seven million displaced people in the Ituri, Mai Ndombe and North Kivu provinces to cast their votes.

The headquarters of the Congolese Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) in Kinshasa. File swm

The election was marred with incidents. The Mission of Observers set by the Catholic bishops’ Conference (CENCO) and the protestant Church of Christ in Congo (ECC) documented over 3,000 cases of interrupted voting. About 42 percent of its reports mentioned missing voter lists, ballot papers and indelible ink or ineligible voter cards.
The Christian observers documented also 247 cases of vote buying, 49 cases of ballot stuffing, the destruction of 51 ballot stations (namely in the Sankuru and Tanganyika provinces), fighting in 551 ballot stations, over 2,000 cases of electronic vote malfunctioning, and 180 cases of intimidation. In 14% of the cases, the lists of voters were not publicly disclosed. About one-third of the reports mention that witnesses did not sign the election minutes.
Thousands of “pirate” voting machines were identified by opposition sources, including five in the home of the President’s mother, Marthe Tshisekedi. The possible involvement in the fraud of CENI’s chairman Denis Kadima was mentioned on social media after he announced the results of the Upper Katanga province before the compilation of the votes had begun.

The President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, was sworn in for a second term. Photo: The President’s Office.

On 31 December, the main opposition leaders condemned in a joint communiqué what they called “a mock election” and called for “the organization of true elections”. They urged the citizens to demonstrate against the “vote stealers” and save democracy.
The Catholic Archbishop of Kinshasa, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo, called the polls “a gigantic organized disorder” during the Christmas mass. In their report, the Christian observers urged CENI and all Congolese courts to draw all appropriate conclusions before proclaiming the provisional results of the ballots of the presidential, legislative, provincial and local elections. It insisted on the need to take into account all the irregularities to ensure the acceptance of the results by the citizens. The authorities’ response was violent: on 27 December police and security forces broke up a protest in Kinshasa, organized by the supporters of Martin Fayulu who spoke of “CENI’s farfetched results”. Other demonstrations took place in Bunia, Goma and Lubumbashi.

In May 2023, the Catholic bishops called for an independent audit of the voter register to foster public confidence. File swm

This chaos was a foretold story. In May 2023, the Catholic bishops called for an independent audit of the voter register to foster public confidence. But their offer to assist experts was dismissed by CENI despite lots of malpractices including the registration of minors, breakdowns of voting machines and the poor quality of voter cards. By then, the Christian observers stressed the lack of consensus in the appointment of CENI members whose president was handpicked by Tshisekedi. The credibility of the election was also harmed by the DRC government’s decision to refuse to accredit observers from the European Union and the East African Community.
The suspicious death on 24 December of a computer expert of the EU Observers Mission who had remained in Kinshasa raised suspicions since he could have been able to assess the validity of the vote and the mismanagement of computerized data by CENI. According to the official version, this expert committed suicide by jumping out from his room at the Hilton hotel. Shortly before, the news agency ACP raised the possibility of assassination before adopting the version of the suicide after the author of the news report was interrogated by the ANR intelligence officers.

The People’s Palace in Kinshasa, which houses the Congolese Parliament. The DRC ruling Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party of President Felix Tshisekedi won the majority of seats in the December parliamentary elections.
CC BY 2.0/ Antoine Moens de hase.

Despite all the incidents that occurred during the ballot, the Christian Observers mission came up with rather “soft” conclusions at the end of December. Their preliminary statement praised CENI’s and the government’s efforts to carry out the electoral process. It also noted that one candidate was well ahead of the others with more than half of the votes cast, confirming thereby Tshisekedi’s lead. This timid conclusion of the churches of their findings is easily understandable, owing to the intimidations and threats they received.
On 27 December 2023, a violent voice message by a pro-Tshisekedi supporter said: “Dear Congolese compatriots, we are fed up with this so-called roman catholic CENCO and co. If the catholic church reacts in a way that is contrary to the truth of the ballots, I shall call all Congolese, the young, the bravest to attack all the buildings of this so-called church, destroy them, attack the faithful during the mass (…) and to beat them to death”.
Such threats were taken seriously by the bishops who remembered earlier violence against the churches. In August 2021, the archbishopric building in Kinshasa and 12 churches in Kasai were attacked and desecrated by pro-Tshisekedi youth after CENCO and the ECC had voiced their disagreement over the appointment of a pro-Tshisekedi chairman at CENI.
The opposition was also intimidated by the murder on 13 July 2023 of Chérubin Okende, a former Minister of Transports and Moise Katumbi’s spokesperson who was found dead in his jeep in Kinshasa after he was kidnapped by six military intelligence officers. Before, on 30 May, the military intelligence arrested at the international airport of Kinshasa, Katumbi’s main adviser Salomon Kalonda who was charged with illegal possession of a weapon and high treason on behalf of Rwanda and of the M23 rebels and, despite the lack of evidence, he is still in jail.

Villagers going to the local market in Bogoro walk past a Bangladeshi patrol unit of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC).
UN Photo/Martine Perret.

The timid reaction was also encouraged by the attitude of international partners. Before the election, on 19 December, during the debate at the UN Security Council on a resolution renewing the mandate of the UN Mission for the Stabilisation of Congo (MONUSCO), the US ambassador, Robert Wood made this comment, suggesting that the result of elections was not the main issue: “We know that democracy does not end at the ballot box. In fact, it is what comes next that truly matters”, he said.
The impression prevails that the United States’ position is to accept the “fait accompli”, in the hope that Tshisekedi, in contrast with his predecessor Joseph Kabila, will better take into account Western interests suggests the Congolese president’s announcement in May 2023 that huge mining contract with China would be reviewed.
The Belgian government was the first to congratulate Tshisekedi for his alleged victory after the official announcement by the Constitutional Court. The Belgian Foreign Affairs communiqué mentioned logistical and operational failures during the ballot and urged Tshisekedi to continue his efforts in favour of good governance and human rights, despite the assassination and the jailing of opponents and the embezzlement of electoral funds. France also congratulated Tshisekedi in a gesture that meant to avoid a confrontation with the most populated French-speaking country worldwide in a context where its influence in Africa is waning after its troops were ordered out by three Sahel countries.
We also heard that Western diplomates exerted discrete pressures on the bishops to dissuade them from challenging openly the validity of the results. Time will tell if this kind of realpolitik which ignores the will of the Congolese people will bear fruits.
Even if no major trouble has been reported since the proclamation of Tshisekedi’s victory, it is not guaranteed that some of the constitutional reforms proposed by his supporters such as the extension of the presidential mandate from five to seven years or the suppression of the limit of the number of mandates, will be accepted by the Congolese people. (Open Photo: The national flag of the DR. Congo. 123rf)

François Misser

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, 64 years after its independence, has, for many years, embodied the paradox of abundance. It is very rich in natural resources while its population is extremely poor.

It is the paradox of a country whose lands are home to the Congo basin, the second largest rainforest in the world in terms of size (smaller only that of the Amazon River basin), as well as Lake Tanganyika, the deepest in Africa and the second largest in the continent.The mineral riches of the DRC are among the richest and most diversified in the world and include vast deposits of copper, cobalt (essential for the production of lithium-ion batteries), coltan (essential for the electronics industry), diamonds, gold, tin, iron, zinc, uranium and petroleum.

The DRC is the world’s fourth-largest producer of diamonds. File swm

Copper production, for example, stood at 2.2 million tonnes in 2022, making DRC the largest copper producer in Africa, second only to Chile and with the same production as Peru.
The country accounts for about 16% of global diamond production and its oil potential remains largely untapped. It also has enormous agricultural potential: it boasts around 80 million hectares of non-forest arable land, of which only 10% is currently cultivated. If this potential were adequately exploited, the country could move from a net importer to a net exporter of food.

Failed objectives
But the data on the living conditions of the population, combining economic, social and environmental dimensions, are not encouraging. Suffice it to say that it has not achieved any of the Millennium Development Goals, set internationally in 2000 and which were to be achieved by 2015, while significant improvements have been recorded
in other countries.
Today, the sustainable development agenda has set ambitious new goals to be achieved by 2030, but poverty continues to remain pervasive and higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa.

The DRC is among the five poorest nations in the world. 123rf

The DRC is among the five poorest nations in the world and, in 2022, almost 62% of the population lived on less than $2.15 a day, the threshold adopted by the World Bank to define absolute economic poverty. About one in six people living in absolute poverty in sub-Saharan Africa are in that country.
In 2005 the percentage of people below the absolute poverty threshold was 69.3%, so the situation has improved slightly if read in relative terms. However, in the face of a significant demographic increase, the slight reduction in the percentage has translated into an increase in the absolute number of poor: it has gone from 39.2 million in 2005 (with a population of 56.5 million inhabitants) to 61.4 million in 2022 (with a population of 99 million).

Riches and opportunities wasted
This the story of a country of extraordinary potential riches dotted with missed opportunities, because the high demographic growth (currently 3.23% per year) also means that it is a very young country, with an average age of 15.6 years, that is, with extraordinary energies projected towards the future and an overall population that will double in the space of twenty years.

DR Congo. Group of children. The quality of education is extremely poor. 123rf

Absolute economic poverty is widespread but also very low levels of human development according to the indicators used by the United Nations Development Programme, which uses the Human Development Index (HDI) integrating three fundamental dimensions: health, education and standard of living. Even today, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, life expectancy at birth does not reach 60 years and the infant mortality rate (i.e. the percentage of children who die before they are one year old) is 5%, a very high percentage, which rises to 7.5% considering children who die before reaching the age of 5.

The vicious circle of poverty
The poverty trap is a perverse mechanism that feeds on itself and reinforces itself with poor health, the lack of education, decent working conditions and a living wage – the inability to participate actively in decision-making processes or count for something – and access to resources.However, this is the sort of poverty that does not affect everyone without distinction. Poverty in the DR Congo is not distributed evenly between the regions and the situation worsens where there are conflicts and where employment in the mining sector, especially in artisanal and small-scale mining, has greatly decreased over the years. Then there are particularly vulnerable groups, especially children, people with disabilities, displaced populations, women (especially widows and heads of families), the elderly and indigenous populations.

The DRC is home to a diverse array of indigenous peoples (IPs) who have faced a range of challenges, including forced displacement from their ancestral lands, discrimination, and lack of access to basic services such as healthcare and education. File swm

The poverty trap is a vicious cycle in which poverty itself makes it difficult to escape from poverty because the poor who have limited access to basic rights and resources are more likely to be exposed to violence and conflict. The Indian economist Amartya Sen has repeated it many times: poverty is the deprivation of skills and opportunities that makes people incapable of leading the kind of life they value. And it is this deprivation that takes away spaces of freedom and constitutes the true tragedy of being poor. What is certain is that the future will have to go beyond paying attention to estimates to change things. According to forecasts from the African Development Bank, the economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo should grow – mainly driven by the extractive sector – by 7.2% in 2024. (Open Photo: Mauro Burzio)

Marco Zupi