Lumumba's Iconography in the Arts,Borders Versus

Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof

Patrice Emery Lumumba’s career as Congo’s first post-independence prime minister lasted only three months before he was arrested and executed five months later. Yet he lives on as idea, meme, symbol, icon, model, logo, metonym, specter, image, figure, and projection.

For four years I edited a book, Lumumba in the Arts, that examines Lumumba’s iconography. That book is now available.

Although Lumumba has won a place equal to other political icons like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Nelson Mandela, and although an equally rich or even richer imagery has developed around him, his iconography has remained underexposed and unannotated.

In fact, it is a rich iconography. It includes a whole range of renderings and portrayals, spans the whole range of media, and encompasses a variety of representations. It is no coincidence that a historical figure such as Patrice Lumumba has taken on an imaginary afterlife in the arts. After all, his project remained unfinished and his corpse was never buried.

Lumumba’s diverse iconography already started with the different names he received such as Élias Okit’Asombo (heir of the cursed), Nyumba Hatshikala l’Okanga (the one who is always implicated), Osungu (white), Lumumba (a crowd in motion), Okanda Doka (the sorcerer’s wisdom), or Omote l’Eneheka (the big head who detects the curse), starting from his childhood. His iconography was furthered during his lifetime, especially through songs and by the press, but most expressions, however, arose after his death.

Since his murder, Lumumba has been appropriated through painting (e.g. Chéri Samba, William Kentridge), photography (e.g. Sammy Baloji, Robert Lebeck), poetry (e.g. Henri Lopez, Ousmane Sembene), music (e.g. Pitcho, Miriam Makeba), film (e.g. Raoul Peck, Zurlini), theater (e.g. Aimé Césaire), and literature (e.g. Barbara Kingsolver) as well as in public spaces, stamps, and cartoons. No single form of art seems to escape Lumumba. While at first sight his iconography seems to oscillate between demonization and beatification, it is the gap between these two opposites that has proven to be fruitful for a very polymorphic iconography, one which, amongst many things, observes the memory and the undigested suffering that inscribed itself upon Lumumba’s body and upon the history of the Congo.

Karel Teissig, Czech poster of Valerio Zurlini’s 1968 Black Jesus, 1970. Courtesy of Judy and Jozef Mrofka.

Notable exceptions such as Patrice Lumumba entre Dieu et Diable. Un héros africain dans ses images, edited by Pierre Halen and János Riesz, and A Congo Chronicle. Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, edited by Bogumil Jewsiewicki, are foundational and seminal to my work on Lumumba’s iconography in regards to mostly literature and poetry in the first case, and to painting in the second one. Two questions guided our work: What iconography arose around Lumumba and why is that iconography so diverse? One of the most striking paintings about Lumumba is Les pères de la démocratie et de l’indépendance by Sam-Ilus (2018). The painting demonstrates both the beatification of Lumumba and the political recuperation of his figure. It critically shows that artistic creations of Lumumba’s figure and the scenes in which he is reconfigured provide anything but a window on historical veracity; rather, they often reinvent him for political reasons. In this example, Patrice Lumumba is aligned with the anti-Lumumbist Etienne Tshisekedi, who followed Albert Kalonji on his secessionist adventure in Kasai against the central government of Lumumba, and who is the father of the current president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi. In contrast to the more realistically depicted Etienne Tshisekedi (who died in 2017), Lumumba—who died almost sixty years earlier—is more abstracted and iconized. In the image, Lumumba is the reference: the model to aspire to. Tshisekedi tries to pose like him and identify with him, looking for political legitimation and atonement from sin. But whereas Lumumba has both arms up, Tshisekedi is still trying to find the right balance and is not very confident of receiving expiation. Lumumba does not seem to be very happy being cast in this reunion with his foe. His upper body, which is slightly averted from his companion, betrays some discomfort. Not only does Lumumba “seem distrustful because Tshisekedi is probably complicit in his death,” as the artist Sam-Ilus explained to me in a personal interview, but—I would add—also because his figure is being appropriated and dragged into a misplacement. Apart from the beatification, political recuperation, and the contrast with history, Sam-Ilus’s painting also illustrates that the meanings ascribed to Lumumba depend on the interplay of differences and oppositions within the construct. Moreover, these meanings are not fixed but deferred along l’hors cadre: those people below Lumumba holding their protest signs, that is, and also the other artworks in the book, as well as those not reproduced in the book, and those yet to come. The cover thus functions as a possible portal to other fictions that defy to a greater or lesser extent what Alexie Tcheuyap calls the triple censorship inflicted on Lumumba: censorship against his person (his murder), against his discourses, and against all attempts to constitute an alternative discourse on his existence.

The answer to the first question—as to what iconography arose around him—depends on the different art forms, which the book discusses in relation to historiography in the first part, and which the book divides into different chapters in the second part (cinema, theater, photography, poetry, comics, music, painting, and public space). Throughout the different art forms, we can distinguish an iconography that has been grafted onto a Judeo-Christian tradition (as both diabolization or beatification) from a more profane trend. Remarkably, the Janus-faced figure of the scapegoat/martyr—the most recurrent figure among all the different and even contradictory things that Lumumba stood for—are to be found in both. The answer to the second question—why such a diverse iconography – will be answered from as many angles as there are authors. However, four interrelated realms keep recurring: the spectral, the postcolonial, the martyr, and the political.

By discussing the rich iconographic heritage bequeathed to us by Lumumba and by reflecting on the different ways in which he is being remembered, we do not only answer the two questions that guided our work, but hope equally to contribute to this imagery by making his absence more present, though without laying his legacy to rest.

This post is from a new partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof

The borders between Uganda, Congo and Rwanda were drawn in the early 1900s. This was not an African decision. A joint team made up of officials representing the German, Belgium and British empires surveyed the hills of the region and made a decision. It was not a simple matter. At one point, they were attacked by a party of rebels led in 1911 by the anti-colonial Nyabinghi warrior Muhumuza, who ambushed a joint Anglo-Belgian-Germany Boundary Commission. It was to be her last operation. She was injured, captured and imprisoned by the British in Buganda for the rest of her life. Forty of her fighters were killed.

But that is the story for Part III of this series.

For now, the story is this: Those white man’s borders still eat African lives. On 27th March this year, a Rwandan national named Elizabeth Mukagarukwiza collapsed and died on the Ugandan side of the closed border while running from Rwanda security officials trying to take her back to Rwanda. She was reportedly in search of medication related to her pregnancy.

On May 24th, two men, one Ugandan, one Rwandan, were shot dead after being intercepted on a goods run into Rwanda. Like many others, they were not carrying anything ordinarily illegal.

First, as usual, it will be the peasants. The rest of us, all things remaining constant, will be caught up with later.

Read Also: Borders versus People – Part I: The Tribe Conundrum

Both incidents were immediate victims of the increasingly absurd bouts of megaphone diplomacy between the two countries. At one point, in a bid to deny their border incursion, some Rwandan officials even found themselves claiming that the smugglers – one Ugandan and one Rwandan – had been shot dead inside Rwanda, despite their bodies being found on the Ugandan side.

Overall, the crisis has enabled us to more clearly discern two things previously held tight by the now unsettled inner circles.

First, the people of Rwanda, for all their country’s reported developmental progress, remain seriously poor. Many will continue living outside their country, or seek to do so, for economic reasons, rather than political ones.

Second, President Yoweri Museveni’s support to the 1993 Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel invasion of Rwanda, and the eventual overthrow of the regime in Rwanda was much more extensive and explicit than many thought at the time.

Third, that the enmity between these two hitherto sister regimes is rooted in their joint sojourn in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Having been repeatedly assured that Eastern Africa’s future lies only in ever-greater regional integration, the sight of the principal proponent of this view, and the principal product of its attempted implementation standing now at loggerheads, will be most confounding to those genuine Pan-Africanists in support of that great expression of their ideals – the East African Federation.

Let me put it this way: Who holds the legitimate voice of the various peoples of East Africa? That question is critical to the future of the idea of a regional integration.

First, who exactly is in conflict with whom, in this instance? Clearly, it would not be correct to call this a conflict between Uganda and Rwanda for the simple reason that despite grand claims to the contrary, neither government can prove they actually represent the will and aspirations of their citizens. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda came to power through armed might, relying on narrow ethnic-favouring armies, and have been energetically stage-managing presidential elections – not to mention constitutional controls on their tenures – ever since.

On the other hand, neither can we call this a conflict between two men. Clearly there are interests broader than the personal views of the two principals involved, not to mention the hundreds of minions that have been scurrying about in their name, arresting, deporting, vilifying, abducting, counter-deporting and spaying on each other.

This is a clash of regimes, and the corpus of the respective crony interests that have built up around them over the decades.

Ironically, it is also unavoidable, given that both leaders chaperone exactly the same competing global ambitions and interests in the Great Lakes region, which is exactly what led to the great falling out between their respective armies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Until then, it did not seem possible to imagine any kind of disagreement ever-emerging between them or their leaders, certainly not in the Pan-African mind.

Congo: Heart of dark foreign forces

But Congo is not the “heart of darkness” of Kurtz’s rendering. Congo is the beating heart of Africa, long excised from her body by a series of venal occupiers: first King Leopold of Belgium, then his state, then Marshal Mobutu as the nyapara for Western corporations there. Finally, our liberators moved in, and the real story of the Uganda-Rwanda border is actually the story of whether they ever actually left.

In that sense, Congo is the heart of light, in that it illuminates all the dark places of a person’s soul, and lays bare their true character, as Joseph Conrad’s Congo did with Kurtz. Ugandan and Rwandan armies entered the DRC as liberating heroes. Today, they are rightly seen as the villains who brought the place to final ruin.

It is this centrality to the continent, bordering nine other countries that led Frantz Fanon to call Congo the “trigger” for the coming African revolution. The whole bounty of Africa’s riches seems to lie within her reach.

Along with its current membership of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Congo, if it so wished, could be a member state of the East African Community (EAC) and technically even of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Its size seems to match only its sheer known mineral wealth, upon which this historical procession of predators feast.

If there is one population on the entire continent least deserving of further depredations, robberies and violence, it is the people of the DRC.

Before even Leopold, so much of its population was fed into the ships of the transatlantic slave trade for centuries that there is even a location called “Congo Square” in what is now the American city of New Orleans, in which the building blocks of American jazz were shaped by enslaved Africans on their occasional days off.

There followed a slavery-in-place, as Belgium’s Leopold organised the extraction of rubber and cocoa through forced labour camps.

William Lever, the British industrialist, was so impressed by the economic efficiencies of the slave labour system that he went into partnership with Leopold for the steady supply of the palm oil he needed to massively expand his soap manufacturing business.

This classic African tragedy, however, did not stop the two great Pan-African armies from clashing there three times, and in the process, basically laying waste the eastern city of Kisangani. Some truly epic levels of energy were expended in the stealing of minerals, lumber and other valuables from the DRC. This progressed from the mere looting of mining company stores to the taking over or establishment of artisanal mines, and even the importation of slave labour made up of “idle” ghetto youth swept off the ghetto streets from as far away as Kampala.

The International Court of Justice’s 2005 ruling against Uganda, as well as a United Nations report on Rwanda, carries the outlines of the criminality, despite furious denials from the culprits. The 10- billion-dollar penalty against Uganda remains unpaid, but the wider crime is to have created the conditions that have led to the deaths of an estimated six million Congolese people.

It would be a mistake to see any of these crimes as events that happened a long time ago, and far away. Lever’s company lives on today as Unilever. Find a moment to go and check how many of the manufactured items on your kitchen and bathroom shelves are made by this company. Congo’s long misery put Unilever in a position to be able to put them there.

The International Court of Justice’s 2005 ruling against Uganda, as well as a United Nations report on Rwanda, carries the outlines of the criminality, despite furious denials from the culprits. The 10-billion-dollar penalty against Uganda remains unpaid, but the wider crime is to have created the conditions that have led to the deaths of an estimated six million Congolese people.

And by taking the role of Mobutu, these two friends’ occupying armies and proxy militias have enabled other Western corporations to hold Congo in that position ever since. The quarrel is about which of these twins will be the principal instrument in the facilitation of this plunder, with more than a little benefit to itself.

Either this Pan-African idea does not really exist, or these leaders have never believed in it.

This is simply the story. Now we need the story behind the story, which I will explore in Part III of this series. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof

On Thursday, January 24, Felix Tshisekedi became the fifth president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Like many others in the region’s recent history, his was a contested victory, its legitimacy marred by suspicion regarding a range of issues throughout the electoral cycle, as well as by damning evidence that his main competitor, Martin Fayulu, another opposition candidate, was the true victor.

Tshisekedi’s inauguration, delayed for three days as controversy over the legitimacy of the results raged, was notable for significant gaps in attendance. The powerful Catholic Church, whose observers disputed the legitimacy of Tshisekedi’s victory, was absent. Representatives of Fayulu’s coalition also declined to be present. The European Union merely “noted” the result, and the African Union, usually reluctant to express any serious disagreement with members’ official results, also declined to congratulate Tshisekedi.

There was one foreign dignitary there, though: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. His lone presence was striking, a vivid reminder of the contention that has marked all four of the elections in which he has participated. Indeed, from his vantage point in the audience, President Kenyatta may have experienced a case of déjà vu. It is, after all, difficult to look past the multiple similarities that marred both of the most recent Congolese and Kenyan election cycles.

In addition to a slew of irregularities in the lead-up to election day, civil society and opposition candidates in both countries provided hard evidence of important variations between official announced outcomes and what had been shown to the public. In both cases, electoral victories did not correspond to election results.

It is now possible to “win” elections without garnering the most votes; democratic elections have given way to electoral coups.

Hope deferred

The most recent Congolese and Kenyan electoral cycles began in a charged atmosphere, alive with hope and anticipation of change. In the DRC, the 2018 election was a long-awaited milestone: it marked the end of Joseph Kabila’s 18-year rule and was a first chance for the transfer of political power through democratic means. Despite ongoing violence and instability in some parts of the country, as well as Kabila’s moves to ensure his continued influence the country’s politics, citizens were highly engaged. In fact, the Catholic Church (CENCO) mobilised and deployed more than 40,000 observers around the country in a rigorous observation exercise.

Vibrant campaigns were also inspiring, and two of the three leading candidates were opposition figures. Two days before the election, one of them – Martin Fayulu – was polling with 47 per cent of voters’ support, almost double that of the next most popular candidate, opposition candidate Felix Tshisekedi. New York University’s Congo Research Group described the results as indicative of an electorate “eager for change.”

In 2017, Kenya’s citizens were similarly hopeful. Months of street protests, civil society advocacy campaigns, court battles and a joint parliamentary review of electoral administration had reformed significant parts of the electoral process. In fact, hard-won, new leadership at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), more fully integrated biometric voter registration and identification kits, rules requiring the IEBC to honour polling station-level results, and the creation of an online portal promising to show results forms in real time had renewed public faith in the credibility of the electoral process.

In both contexts, though, hope quickly eroded as it became clear that key parts of the electoral cycle had been taken over by power-hungry elites who used the trappings of elections to engineer their own “victories”. State violence

Although a broad array of technical irregularities contributed to low electoral integrity in the DRC and Kenya, it is critical to remember that the state’s use of violence to intimidate, threaten and silence the public’s questioning and criticism exerted an insidious influence over the entirety of both processes.

In Kenya, the violent repression of peaceful protesters began as early as 2016, when security forces descended on anti-IEBC demonstrators. In 2017, the electoral cycle was bloodily punctuated by incidents that included the murder of infants and violent house-to-house operations in opposition areas.

In the DRC, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concern over reports of the state’s use of excessive force, including live bullets, against opposition rallies. Human Rights Watch also reported the state’s use of arbitrary detention of opposition party activists, the firing of teargas and live ammunition to break up largely peaceful opposition rallies, and the closing of an international border to prevent a presidential aspirant from filing candidacy papers. Six months before election day, ongoing repression prompted the Catholic Church to write to the African Union. Its letter described “a crisis of confidence” in the electoral process.

The use of state-sanctioned violence indicated the authorities’ complete unwillingness to engage with the people; it was clear that elections would not be fair.

Voter registration

It was clear from early on in the process that something was amiss. In fact, registration processes in both countries revealed how deeply problematic political and logistical contexts – both of which presented significant challenges to inclusive processes – cast an early pall on the legitimacy of elections. In the DRC, rebel groups attacked DRC electoral commission (CENI) officials and attempted to prevent certain groups from registering. CENI itself was accused of incompetence, discriminating against certain ethnic groups, and accepting bribes in return for illegal registrations. In Kenya, certain minorities described their struggles to obtain the national identity cards that are necessary for voter registration, a process which has taken some individuals upwards of five years. Research revealed that “special vetting procedures,” which essentially ensured that IDs would not be processed, are discriminatorily applied to ethnic minorities. Registration was also marred by the continued use of the much-maligned “green book” and an audit that used sub-standard methodology and that failed to make its full report publicly accessible.

When the final voters’ rolls were released, there were more problems. In the DRC, an audit of the voter register revealed that the records of more than 6.5 million voters (16.6 per cent) lacked all ten fingerprints. It was reminiscent of the 2013 Kenyan election, when a “special list” of approximately 36,000 registered voters, also lacking fingerprints, appeared during the Supreme Court trial challenging the integrity of the election. In both cases, the election commission had failed to be forthright about the existence of such lists. In the DRC, five political parties demanded that voters lacking fingerprints be removed from the rolls altogether; protesters agreed. In 2017, the Kenyan voter register was similarly contentious, marked by the presence of, for example, more than a million records of deceased voters, thousands of incorrect records, and tens of thousands of duplicate records.

The courts

The Congolese and Kenyan processes both concluded with court cases challenging election results, and in both cases there was suspicion of serious executive interference. In the DRC, the Constitutional Court, made up of Kabila’s close allies, dismissed Fayulu’s petition as “unfounded” and claimed that it had failed to prove any inaccuracies in the results. The Court’s ruling was made in spite of widely reported evidence that Fayulu had won 60 per cent of the vote.

When the final voters’ roll was released, there were problems. In the DRC, an audit of the voter register revealed that the records of more than 6.5 million voters (16.6 per cent) lacked all ten fingerprints. It was reminiscent of the 2013 Kenyan election, when a “special list” of approximately 36,000 registered voters, also lacking fingerprints, appeared during the Supreme Court trial challenging the integrity of the election.

In Kenya, the Supreme Court boldly nullified the results of the August election. Its decision hinged on evidence of fraudulent forms and the IEBC’s refusal to comply with court orders that it open its servers for inspection. Although the petitioners in the October repeat election case also demonstrated evidence of irregular forms and differences between the IEBC’s “official” results and what the Commission had posted on the public portal, the Supreme Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence.

This ruling came after President Kenyatta made his intentions with regard to the Court clear. In fact, in the aftermath of the nullification, he publicly referred to the judges as “crooks” and promised to “revisit” the judiciary. Insecurity heightened days before the fresh election in October, when Deputy Chief Justice Mwilu’s driver was shot and seriously wounded. One day before the election, Chief Justice David Maraga announced that the Court, which had failed to achieve quorum, would be unable to hear a case that sought to postpone the elections.

By exerting influence over the judiciary, the state not only protected certain elites’ victories, it also controlled the narrative, establishing a certain amount of legitimacy around what would otherwise be a questionable result at best.

Equipment

The use of electoral technology also tainted both elections. In the case of Kenya, post-election investigations have made it clear that technology was little more than a tool for elites’ personal enrichment. Procurement scandals tainted the reliability of the equipment as well as its immunity to external hacking and interference. The reliability of digital systems became even more doubtful when, days before the August election, the IEBC’s head of IT was found murdered; his case has yet to be solved. Indeed, it was unsurprising when the electronic results transmission failed – just as it had in 2013 – and the IEBC once again turned to the manual collection of more than 40,000 paper forms from around the country.

In the DRC, voters were also suspicious of technology. In fact, public protests called for authorities to abort the idea. Days before the election, a fire destroyed 70 per cent of the machines slated to be used in Kinshasa; authorities suspected arson. CENI’s decision to use such technology, especially in light of poor infrastructure to support it, was questionable. In Kenya, the IEBC even attempted (unsuccessfully) to justify its abandonment of the results transmission system by claiming that the lack of 3G connectivity in some locations made it impossible for the system to work.

What has become apparent is that technology, while claiming to increase the credibility of elections, actually does more to build a wall between electoral processes and the voters. In fact, the complexity of digital systems makes them inherently inaccessible to the average voter. It is thus easier for manipulation to occur and go undetected. Voting and results

Kenya and the DRC also restricted voting altogether for some citizens. In the DRC, roughly 1.2 million voters in three opposition strongholds were barred from casting their ballots because of health risks and security threats. In Kenya, voting in the October presidential election was first postponed and then cancelled altogether in 27 constituencies; nine per cent of registered voters were thus disenfranchised.

The last straw in both cases, however, was the state of the results. In the DRC, the powerful Catholic Church deployed more than 40,000 observers to polling stations across the country and found that election day was marred by the delayed opening of polling stations, the establishing of stations in prohibited areas, and problems with voting machines. It also scrutinised results forms, finding that Fayulu won 60 per cent of the vote, making him the clear victor. The African Union and the European Union both “noted” Tshisekedi’s apparent victory, pointedly choosing to withhold any congratulations.

Kenya’s domestic observers also found multiple problems on the day of the election—in August and in October — including delayed opening of polling stations, insufficient materials in the stations, violence, malfunctioning voter identification kits, and problems with reliability of the voter register. These issues were compounded by evidence of highly questionably polling station forms, which were rife with errors. Forms featured mathematical inconsistencies, missing information, altered figures, the lack of IEBC signatures, and irregular printing. In fact, petitioners’ scrutiny of October results forms revealed that the IEBC’s “official” forms differed from forms that had been posted on the public portal and submitted to petitions as part of the Supreme Court case. Although these problems were sufficient for the Court to nullify the August elections, the Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to annul the October polls.

Clearly, results have little value anymore.

Reclaiming elections

It is time for citizens to reclaim elections and the democratic power that comes through the polls. For far too long, the state has been in control of a process that is, at its heart, about the people.

First, it is critical for voters to demand some basic minimum standards of election administration. This begins with a clear and verifiable record of results. In Kenya, the IEBC has failed to publish polling station-level results for any of the elections it has overseen, leaving the public without the means to analyse, understand, and validate their own votes. In the DRC, CENI has to yet to publish polling station-level results.

Election results go hand in hand with voter registration details. In the aftermath of the August election, Kenya’s IEBC announced voter registration totals that differed from the officially gazetted totals; civil society questions about the differences remain unanswered. In the aftermath of the October repeat election, a summation of the county-level numbers of registered voters again showed differences. Public demands for greater transparency should start here; resulting questions and clarification will reveal the way forward in terms of urgent reforms. Second, a re-engaged citizenry should think deeply about what elections mean and how to modify laws and practice to shape polls into participatory, meaningful exercises. This kind of evaluation begins with and is based upon the premise that elections are not a privilege; they are universal rights and it is the state’s duty to facilitate voters’ access to and participation in them.

If voters understand elections as public services, as part of what governments owe their citizens, they may understand the importance of rethinking the status quo. This means questioning the very nature of political interaction. Elections do not have to be divisive, dangerous affairs that include “zoning,” hate speech and highly unequal playing fields. In fact, a shift away from the first-past-the post could incentivise and encourage politicians to broaden their support bases and adopt more moderate political platforms. In the long term, such a system could help bring voters on extreme ends of political divides closer together.

Third, citizens should demand more from their elected representatives. In an age of advanced digital technology and increasingly diverse ways of being in touch, the public may be able to interact with representatives on a more regular basis, questioning decisions and tracking things like parliamentary voting patterns. Such tools could enhance accountability and arm voters with better information for their future voting decisions. Widespread use of such tools could also result in more policy-oriented parties.

Finally, citizens can and should be proactive about claiming their space throughout the electoral process. This may involve watching and questioning things like boundary delimitation, voter registration and decisions about the use of technology. The more questions people raise over time, the greater the chances that electoral processes will become easier to understand and more transparent.

Votes matter; it’s time to make sure that results do, too.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Matthias De Groof

The normalization of electoral pilferage in Africa is baffling. Election management bodies, long the political tools of incumbents, can’t stop outdoing each other in their mediocrity. And ready to legitimise these atrocities, are African presidents who compete to be the first to convey congratulatory messages. Not to be outdone, international and regional organizations continue to provide technical support for these sham processes, releasing bland observation reports that rubber- stamp electoral fraud. And the diplomats, who while investigations are launched on sabotage of elections in their own countries, undermine electoral justice in their host countries.

The recent charade in the Democratic Republic of Congo is only the latest in the disturbing trend. Similar processes in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, in the past year or so, confirm this. In these four situations, the incumbent retained power, despite detention of political opponents, massive irregularities, blatant theft, intimidation of voters and in some cases, brutal murders by security operatives. With elections scheduled in more than 20 countries this year including Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa and Malawi, we should expect this trend to continue unabated.

Turning to the Democratic Republic of Congo: it has the world’s most complex and longest running humanitarian crisis. It is estimated that since 1996, violence has claimed over six million lives (without including the period between its independence from Belgium in 1960 to 1995). Historically, the country has never had a bloodless transfer of power. Former President, Joseph Kabila, who inherited the seat from his assassinated father, Laurent Kabila in 2001, managed to cling to power for 18 years. He could have probably postponed elections again, if the Congolese, led by the Catholic Church, did not keep the pressure on him finally to conduct them.

The recent charade in the Democratic Republic of Congo is only the latest in a disturbing trend. Similar processes in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, in the past year or so, confirm this. With elections scheduled in more than 20 countries this year including Nigeria, Ethiopia, South Africa and Malawi, we should expect this trend to continue unabated.

With this background, most people would agree that the people of Congo need some semblance of stability (the strict meaning of which usually excludes the violence prosecuted by countries and multinationals pillaging Congo’s rich minerals and timber). But must electoral justice and political stability be mutually exclusive? Several colleagues, working in support of the Congolese election management body, CENI, have expressed their shock and disbelief at the swapping of the presidential results and the manipulation of the legislative vote. These are colleagues who are hardened electoral experts – they have seen it all, from Cambodia to Afghanistan and everything in between.

Most people would agree that the people of Congo need stability (the strict meaning of which usually excludes the violence prosecuted by countries and multinationals pillaging Congo’s rich minerals and timber). But must electoral justice and political stability be mutually exclusive?

In our conversations, I have sought to understand why the Congolese case gets them more perturbed than say, Kenya or Zimbabwe – places in which they recently worked. It is clear that it is because the game played by Kabila deviated from the usual script. These international organizations, complicit in aiding theft in favour of incumbents or their anointed successors, cannot relate to a situation where an incumbent does this in favour of an opposition candidate.

As one of my colleagues said to me, “The difference is that in Kenya, it was not as blatant, there was no paper trail.” I should have been shocked to hear this, that the Kenyans were more adept at creating a farce of an electoral process than the Congolese. What many of these colleagues of mine do not understand is that the end game is the same. In both cases, the will of the people was subverted. For the diplomats and international organizations, their private outrage was that the Congolese were too obvious in their deceit. Perhaps even more outrageous was that Kabila had excluded them from his game plan. They were checkmated with the rest of us. They were not among the usual plotters of the game plan. They were prepared to make a case for how the ruling party had won, because of the power of incumbency, the divisions among the opposition and the sheer constructed tyranny of numbers. They were not prepared for what author and journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo dubbed the ‘Kabila Method’. It partly explains why contradictory statements were issued by the African Union, SADC and some European capitals, in support of the legitimate winner of the race, Martin Fayulu, before capitulating and vowing to work with President Felix Tshisekedi.

I have sought to understand why the Congolese case gets my colleagues more perturbed than say, Kenya or Zimbabwe…It is because the game played by Kabila deviated from the usual script.

If elections are indeed ritual processes to confirm the incumbents or their chosen successors, then why should we invest our hopes, blood, emotions and resources in them? Would we not be best served by monarchs such as those in Morocco and Saudi Arabia? According to several sources, and data collected by ACE African countries rank among the highest in spending on organizing elections. (This does not include campaign financing, for which the United States is off the charts.) Curiously, the higher the amount of money handed over to the ‘independent’ election management body, the lower the country ranks in the Democracy-Index maintained by The Economist.

It is estimated that in 2017 Kenya spent $ 25.4 per registered voter (not including the repeat 26 October 2017 presidential election, petitions and by-elections) and ranks 98 out of 167 states in the Democracy-Index. Botswana ranks 28th in the Index and spends an average of $2.07 per voter, although this may increase in 2019 if the country proceeds with the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs).

[International observers] were prepared to make a case for how the ruling party had won, because of the power of incumbency, the divisions among the opposition and the sheer constructed tyranny of numbers. They were not prepared for what author and journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo dubbed the ‘Kabila Method’.

African leaders are getting more emboldened in methods of securing legitimacy, even amidst blatant electoral theft. They know that they can rely on the African Union and other regional organizations such as IGAD and SADC to issue observation reports lauding their illegitimate electoral processes. Prime Ministers, Presidents (sometimes sprinkling onto their official delegations, erstwhile opposition leaders, recent victims of electoral theft now co-opted by the incumbent) will troop to their inauguration ceremonies. They can count on the United Nations to issue statements congratulating the people “for voting peacefully” (as if voters were ever the problem) and taking note of the decisions of the ‘constitutionally established institutions’, even when their own staff have concrete evidence of the foul play and state capture of these institutions.

These leaders are aware that they can use excessive violence and repression to silence their opponents with impunity. And if this does not work out, they will buy off the opposition with the proverbial thirty pieces of silver and repeat the charade in the next electoral cycle. Or they will promise their victims that, in joining government, the same system that rigged them out could well rig them in, next time. Which begs the question of why we spend billions on elections. Why do we put ourselves through the emotional wringer to end up with leaders we did not choose? Why participate in a charade that ends up keeping the political barons, as former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga calls them, in power?

Electoral disillusionment is not unique to Africa. One could argue that there exists today a global democracy deficit as acute in Europe and North America as it is in Africa. Political scientist Larry Diamond has produced many publications on the subject of ‘democratic recession’. Many more researchers have studied in detail whether democracy is in retreat or not. It is however safe to say that what we have recently seen in Latin America, the US, and Europe is a backlash against leftist policies that pushed the middle class to the edge, with leaders, perceived as unrepresentative and out of touch, playing xenophobic dog-whistle politics with immigrants. Many of these countries have ended up electing populist, nationalist and right-wing leaders, who as expected have not provided solutions to their woes but rather introduced divisive and polarizing politics and policies.

Electoral disillusionment is not unique to Africa. One could argue that there exists today a global democracy deficit as acute in Europe and North America as it is in Africa.

While one could question the quality of the electoral processes in these countries, these leaders are not in power because election results were swapped blatantly, either electronically, as was in Kenya, or manually as in the DRC. It is also evident that, as was the case in the mid-term elections in the US, voters are still determined to organize and repudiate values that they deem not representative of their views. The fact that a 70-year tradition of habitually low voter turn-outs was broken – turn- out was a record 60 percent, yielding the most diverse (youth, women, Muslims) US Congress ever – holds hope for electoral democracy elsewhere. Social movements are growing in Slovakia, Romania and even in Poland to push back against these populist tendencies.

There are examples galore in Africa of what happens when people lose hope in electoral democracy— a system – a strict definition is worth restating in these strange times – in which citizens, through universal suffrage, choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections. This stands true even in cases where there is a façade of democracy created by the autocrats, such as Kenya. From Algeria to Zimbabwe, political changes have taken place, mostly peacefully through social and political movements. Whether in Burkina Faso or The Gambia, citizens have proven their will and capacity to alter their political fate.

Electoral democracy requires patience and hard work, both of which are acutely deficient, especially as we fall victim of the establishment’s distractions. For now in Kenya, the ‘Ruto Bogeyman’ has been created. Instead of spending time nurturing alternative leadership, the public has consented to being used as State House’s battering ram against him. It’s worth recalling that between 2013 and 2017, we were subjected to the ‘Raila Bogeyman’ regime campaign. We have long forgotten about demanding a public inquiry into the 2017 electoral fiasco – or the 2013 debacle. Those who managed the 2017 electoral thuggery continue to receive public funding and tour the world in the name of exporting “lessons learned” from their experience of managing two presidential elections in less than a year! We are collectively distracted by the smoke and mirrors ‘fight’ against graft. We have even signed on to blaming the judiciary for its handling of poorly prosecuted corruption cases designed to fail. Our social media platforms still have messages appealing for unity against terrorists, without questioning why Al-Shabaab successfully targets Kenyan towns and cities, and fails to do so against Addis Ababa whose troops have been in Somalia longer than us. We even get to spend time celebrating or bemoaning (depending on your political stripe) that Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i is now empowered to coordinate the achievement of the government’s agenda while all along his official title reads exactly that (CS, Interior and Coordination of National Government).

It is tempting to write off electoral democracy in Kenya, especially now. However, there may be still room to begin laying the foundations for overturning the ‘faux democracy’ of the past 50 years. It might be tempting to focus only on de-registering ourselves from the IEBC’s voters roll, which anyway by law needs to be discarded and a new voter registration process to be initiated before the 2022 election.

We owe it to our children to do more than this. To play our role in shaking the current system that has been controlled by the dynasties and elite political ‘barons’ for the past five decades. It requires organizing around a movement that advocates for a different type of leadership – a Third Liberation, if you will. But even as we chart this path, we must remember to hold the leaders of these movements accountable to the people. Most of today’s autocrats in Africa were yesterday’s defenders of democracy. Yoweri Museveni of Uganda toppled the Tito Okello military dictatorship 33 years ago; today, he ranks among Africa’s longest serving despots. In Guinea, President Alpha Condé, a long- time opposition leader, became the first democratically elected president in 2011 and appears to be preparing to remove term limits in addition to his ongoing repressive tendencies against his opponents. In Cote d’Ivoire, the hope that Alassane Dramane Ouattara embodied has long been replaced by the very same tactics of his predecessor Laurent Gbagbo. Closer home, one of the prominent leaders of the ‘second liberation’ Rt. Hon. Raila Odinga and the ‘Young Turks’ have joined forces with the ruling Jubilee Party to undermine the same values and aspirations they allegedly fought to protect.

The journey to real change, to electoral democracy, must advance by the dismantling of the entrenched structures that enable the rise of populism, divisive politics, corruption and impunity. It is a journey that we as a nation have really not yet begun. The jury is still out on how far we shall proceed before we are enjoined in the distractions set up by the political ‘barons’ and the dynasties. Until then, electoral democracy is a mirage. And ours will remain selection, not election processes. Just with more pomp, more pillaging and unfortunately, more deaths.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof Albert Karaziwan is a multi-millionaire who in 1992 founded Semlex, a privately traded company owned primarily by him and his family. Semlex supplies passports and identification cards. In 2008, Karaziwan claimed that his businesses had a combined value of 100 million euros.

Karaziwan has had close ties with the governments of at least 18 African countries spanning the whole of the continent, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Libya, Mozambique, and the Ivory Coast. The most prominent among these, as far as his connections go, is the Comoros Islands, from where he holds three diplomatic passports. He has also twice attended the United Nations General Assembly as a part of the Comoros delegation. He was made a roving ambassador of the Comoros and at least eight of his staff were nominated for Comoros honorary consulships between 2010 and 2012. Another big partner of his is the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was seen at the United Nations General Assembly with the Congolese delegation early in 2017.

Despite these surprisingly powerful connections, Karaziwan is neither a citizen of Comoros, DRC or of any other African nation with which he has been able to secure incredible financial footholds and political appointments. He is a Syria-born Belgian citizen who for close to two decades has used Semlex and its various partners, as well as political clout and connections on the continent, to secure multiple hundred-million-dollar deals to provide passports and other identification documents to African countries at exorbitant prices and sometimes without going through open tender processes.

In the Comoros, presidential decrees and various documents have revealed that Semlex-supplied Comoros passports have been bought by foreigners. A parliamentary investigation into the sale of passports to foreigners found that more than 2,800 Comoros diplomatic passports have been issued since 2008 – in a country with a population of about 800,000. At least 184 of these passports were issued to non-Comorians.

Karaziwan became involved in a Comoros programme to raise cash by selling citizenships. The plan was aimed mainly at the Bidoon people of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates who do not possess citizenship of any country. It offered Gulf governments a means of identifying these people without giving them local citizenship. It also provided the Comoros with much-needed revenue. The Comoros government received just over $4,500 for each citizenship issued, according to government documents from 2012. The Emirati government estimated that the number of Bidoon within the country ranged from 20,000 to 100,000. Currently at least 40,000 of these people carry Comorian passports.

However, the citizenships and passports were also being sold to non-Bidoon people, sometimes at much higher prices, according to Comoros investigators. Comoros passports are of value because they offer citizenship with no tax obligations, allow the opening of bank accounts In Gulf States and facilitate visa-free travel through the Gulf and to many major business hubs globally, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as to tax haven countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Mauritius, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Panama, according to U.S officials in the State Department who specialise in the region.

The Comoros government allowed some of these sales to be facilitated by a Dubai-based firm called Lica International Consulting, according to an agreement between the two entities reviewed by Reuters. Three sources, one with direct knowledge of Semlex operations, said Lica is controlled by Karaziwan while two of these sources claim that Lica is run on behalf of Karaziwan by a business associate named Cedric Fevre, a name that appears many times during this saga. Lica was supposed to vet the candidates for citizenship and pay the Comoros government $10,000 per document issued, according to the agreement between the company and the government.

The Iranian connection

A presidential decree revealed a list of 21 foreigners who had been proposed by Lica for Comorian citizenship, which had then been granted by the president, while a former Comoros government official said he knew of at least 23 other passports sold through Lica to non-Comorians. Two sources with knowledge of Karaziwan’s activities claimed that Lica asked for at least 100,000 euros for supplying a Comoros passport. A series of presidential decrees have revealed that some of the Comoros passports were sold to people who had been accused by the United States of breaking sanctions with Iran.

A decree from July of 2015 revealed that a man named Hamid Reza Malakotipour was granted Comoros citizenship. He had been sanctioned in 2014 by the United States government, which alleged that he was in possession of an Iranian passport and had used his Comorian citizenship to circumvent the sanctions placed on Iran by the United States and to supply the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria.

Also revealed in the same decree was that a man called Mohammed Zarrab of Turkish- Iranian origin was issued with Comorian citizenship. He was accused by U.S prosecutors in 2016 of violating the U.S sanctions on Iran by using the U.S financial system to undertake hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions on behalf of Iran. His brother Reza Zarrab was also indicted on claims that he had transacted on behalf of the Iran-based Mahan Air, which had been sanctioned for airlifting weapons to Iran’s Quds Forces and Hezbollah. A Reuters investigation was unable to glean how the two individuals received their passports, and the extent to which Semlex and Lica were involved

In January 2018, the Comoros government cancelled a batch of passports that had been issued to foreigners, saying they had been improperly issued. A confidential list of the passport recipients reviewed by Reuters discovered that more than 100 of the 155 passports that had been cancelled belonged to Iranians, among whom were senior executives of companies in sectors that had been targeted by U.S sanctions. The government of Iran does not officially permit its citizens to hold more than one passport, but a source familiar with the process stated that Iranian military intelligence had given the green light for some of these senior officials so that business transactions and travel could be carried out with ease. According to details contained in a database of Comoros passports issued between 2008 (when the government programme to sell citizenships began) and 2017, more than 1,000 people whose place of birth was Iran bought Comoros passports. Some of the names on this list include names such as:

Mojtaba Arabmoheghi, one of the top managers of the Iranian oil industry, who obtained a Comoros passport in 2014 while he was the chairman of Sepeher Gostar Hamoun. He was also a commercial consultant for a firm called Silk Road Petroleum in the UAE whose financial director, a man named Naser Masoomian, also acquired a Comoros passport on the same day. Mohammed Sadegh Kaveh, who heads Kaveh Port and Marine Services, obtained a Comoros passport in 2015. Kaveh and his family are among the main operators of Iran’s Shahid Rajaee port that handles most of Iran’s container traffic Hossein Mokhtari Zanjani, an influential figure in Iran’s energy sector and a lawyer who handles domestic and international disputes, acquired a Comoros passport in 2013.

On its website, Lica listed a Dubai-based company called Bayat Group as a partner, which, according to the latter’s website, specialises in providing citizenships of places such as Comoros, Malta and St. Kitts and Nevis. Bayat Group is headed by Sam Bayat Makou, an Iranian who acquired a Comoros passport in July of 2013, though this was among the passports that were cancelled by the Comoros government. Makou said that Iranians acquired Comoros passports because “Comorians have better visa-free access than Iranians” to many Far East countries. Bayat Group, according to Makou, had done work with Lica, which he claimed was licenced by the government of Comoros to market the passports outside the Bidoon programme.

The incumbent President at the time was called Ahmed Abdallah Sambi, and throughout his 2006-2011 tenure, he began to forge strong ties with Iran. Sambi had been educated in the Iranian holy city of Qom, and when he ascended to power, he visited Tehran in 2008. The then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was looking to cultivate relations with African and Latin American states as the West took increasing measures to distance itself from Iran. Following Sambi’s visit to Tehran, Ahmadinejad visited Comoros in 2009. In addition, Sambi is said to have had Iranians within his personal guard and was referred to as “The Ayatollah of Comoros” by some islanders.

Though Sambi left power in 2011, he declined to comment on the sale of the said passports to non- Comorians. The sale of these passports continued under his successor, Ikililou Dhoinine, who was in office from 2011-2016. Though Dhoinine has no obvious links to Iran, he declined Reuters’ requests to comment on the situation.

His successor Azali Assoumani came to power in 2016 and changed tack completely, severing ties with Iran and aligning with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Nations at odds with Iran. He set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry to investigate the programme that sold citizenship to the Bidoon. The commission found that as early as 2013, the UAE informed the Comoros government that hundreds of passports had been sold to foreigners outside the programme. This was after UAE officials noticed people who were neither Comorian nor Bidoon travelling through the country on Comoro passports. A Comoros security source said that the Comorian intelligence services had received reports of people with Comoros passports being killed on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Somalia, a demonstration of how widespread the sale of Comoros passports had become. As a result, the United States has begun to perform more thorough background checks on people travelling with Comoros passports.

According to a parliamentary report, at least $100 million in revenue from the sale of these passports was never received by the government of Comoros and had gone missing, though the government has not released a statement explaining where they think the money could have gone.

The deal in the DRC

The investigation in the Comoros followed a report published by Reuters in April of 2017 that revealed that Semlex was the same company responsible for issuing biometric passports in the impoverished Democratic Republic of Congo for the exorbitant price of $185 per passport, making the DRC passport among the most expensive passports in the world. This in a country where the average national income is $394.25 a year.

Between October 2014 and June 2015, Karaziwan corresponded with Congolese authorities on the passport deal. Initially, in an October 2014 correspondence, he told Joseph Kabila, the incumbent president of the DRC, that Semlex would be able to provide the biometric passports at a cost of between 20 and 40 euros each as Semlex had its own printing facilities. Five days later, Karaziwan invited two members from Kabila’s inner circle, Moise Ekana Lushyma and Emmanuel Adrupiako, to Dubai to discuss a possible contact. By 13 November 2014, the price for the passports had risen to $120.

In the Comoros, presidential decrees and various documents have revealed that Semlex- supplied Comoros passports have been bought by foreigners. A parliamentary investigation into the sale of passports to foreigners found that more than 2,800 Comoros diplomatic passports have been issued since 2008 – in a country with a population of about 800,000. At least 184 of these passports were issued to non- Comorians.

Fiinally, in March 2015, Karaziwan was invited to Congo to finalise the proposal for the passport programme. In June of the same year, the final contract was signed by Karaziwan, the Congolese Finance Minister Henry Yay Mulang and the Congolese Foreign Minister Raymond Tshibanda. Semlex had agreed to invest $222 million into the project and the Congoloese government ageed to raise the price of the passport, charging its citizens $185 for every passport issued. (The steep rise is doubly shocking considering a rival proposal from another Belgian company called Zetes. Zetes outlined a plan and confirmed making an offer in 2014 to supply Congo with biometric passports that would cost $28.50 each.) From the revenue made from the passports, only $65 dollars would go to the Congolese government. The remaining $120 would be given to a group of companies that include, Semlex Europe in Brussels, Semlex World in the UAE, Semlex’s Lithuanian printer and a UAE entity called LRPS.

In a second agreement in June of the same year, the $120 was further divided up, with $12 from every passport sale going to Mantenga Contacto, a Kinshasa-based firm that would handle the projects “human resources issues, including supplying staff”. The three Semlex firms from the previous agreement were allotted $48 per passport issued, leaving out $60 of the money allotted to the consortium of companies going to LRPS, who would in return help with administration, logistics and relationship with the government.

Though LRPS was represented in the government talks by Karaziwan, it is currently owned by Makie Makolo Wangoi, according to a source familiar with the passport deal. A Bloomberg investigation into the business interests of the Congolese president and his family revealed that Wangoi was Joseph Kabila’s sister. Corporate records confirmed that she was a shareholder in several companies with other Kabila family members.

A Reuters investigation was unable to verify the status of LRPS, but its certificate of incorporation from Ras al Khaimah in the UAE revealed that it was established on 14 January 2015 just as Semlex was negotiating the passport deal with Kabila’s representatives. The certificate of incorporation does not reveal who owned the company when it was established, but a second document from that same year revealed that in late 2015, LRPS was owned by Cedric Fevre, a business associate of Karaziwan based in Dubai, who also ran Lica International Consulting, one of the firms implicated in the sale of Comoros passports to non-Comorians.

Though the computer-created document that revealed this information is unsigned, the metadata embedded in it shows that it was created in the UAE in 2015 and printed on 25 June of the same year. On that same day, Fevre transferred all 10,000 shares in LRPS to Wangoi, according to a source with direct knowledge of the deal. The only signed copies of the share transfer agreement are in the possession of Fevre and Wangoi, both of whom declined to respond to questioning from Reuters investigators.

A few weeks after the deal was signed, bank documents and emails revealed that two UAE-based companies made deposits of $700,000 to the private bank accounts of Emmanuel Addrupiako, one of the advisors that Kabila sent to the UAE to meet with Karaziwan during the initial talks for the passport deal. One of the companies that made the payments was called Berea International and the other was called Cedovane. The incumbency certificate for Berea revealed that the Semlex CEO, Karaziwan, was the director, secretary and sole shareholder of Berea. Another director of Berea was none other than Cedric Fevre, who is also a director of Cedovane.

The payments were made through United Arab Bank (UAB). UAB documents show that on 29 July 2015, Cedovane paid $300,000 to a Royal Bank of Canada account held by Adrupiako in Quebec. The documents cite a “loan agreement.” Then, on 25 August, Berea International paid $400,000 to Adrupiako’s account with Jyske Bank in Denmark. According to bank emails and contact with Berea, Adrupiako told Jyske Bank that the money was to pay for a four-storey building that Berea was renting from him in Kinshasa. The transaction triggered concern in Copenhagen. Reuters visited the site of this four-storey building and found that it was still under construction and Berea had no visible presence there.

The passport contract in Congo runs for five years and does not specify how many passports will be produced, but in recent years DRC has issued nearly 2.5 million passports annually. Sources with direct knowledge of the Semlex-Congo deal said that on one occasion Semlex had claimed that it had produced 145,000 passports by the end of January 2017, earning LRPS nearly $9 million. A Reuters reviewed document then revealed that Semlex said it would be able to supply DRC with 2 million passports per year once everything was fully operational, a deal that would make LRPS $120 million a year. Kabila was due to step down from DRC’s presidency in December 2016, but elections were postponed, and he retains power as tension, violence and calls for him to step down increase. Dozens were killed in violent clashes between protestors and police, and his domestic opponents assert that his authority has run out – though even if Kabila does step down, LRPS will continue to make money as Article 14 of the contract for the deal states that the agreement remains valid even if “institutional changes” occur within the country.

Other dodgy contracts

Karaziwan’s and Semlex’s exploits in Africa do not end with the Congo or Comoros. Early in 2017, the government of Mozambique terminated a 10-year contract with Semlex worth several hundreds of millions of dollars that had been awarded in 2009 by the previous government. According to sources close to Semlex, the deal was struck without an open tender, and the new government claims that only a fraction of the $100 million that Semlex had promised to spend on training, electronic scanners and other types of infrastructure was invested. The passports were going to cost citizens of Mozambique $80 each in a nation whose average income per capita was under $500 per year. Officials from the Mozambique Centre for Public Integrity (CIP) published a review of the contract in 2015 revealing that the state only collected 8% of the revenues from the ID documents produced between 2011 and 2014

In Guinea Bissau, Helder Tavares Proenca was listed as a Semlex agent in the country, according to Semlex documents reviewed by Reuters. In November 2005, Proenca became the defence minister and in early 2006 Semlex won contracts to supply the country with passports, visas, ID cards and foreign resident cards. Semlex documents revealed that Proenca was paid at least 80,000 euros between 2004 and 2009.

Proenca was assassinated in 2009, but in 2010, Semlex employees, including Karaziwan, discussed what percentage of revenue they would have to pay former and current Guinea Bissau officials to secure a further contract to provide the country with passports and identification cards for foreigners. A proposal was made to pay a commission of 20% of the price of a passport and 15% of the revenue that Semlex received for residence permits issued to foreigners. Karaziwan was asked to sign off on the offer on 24 January 2011 and the next day he replied, “You can confirm it.”

However, the Guinea Bissau government says that Semlex did not win a further contract but other Semlex emails show staff describing certain payments as bribes. In November of 2010, Michele Bauters, the Semlex finance manager, requested an employee to detail how he had spent close to $80,000 euros provided for operations in Africa, to which he plainly replied that it had gone towards rent and utility bills while 10,000 euros had gone towards “pot de vin” (the French term for bribes). When asked about what had happened to half of the $10,000, he responded that it had gone to pay “a bribe that Albert Karaziwan made me pay recently”.

In Madagascar, there is evidence of Semlex benefitting disproportionately in comparison to the state in a deal that the two entities signed. Semlex extended an existing contract to provide passports to Madagascar in 2013, and more than doubled the amount charged. In the deal, citizens would pay 36.25 euros for a passport. Of this amount, 33.75 euros would go to Semlex, leaving the Madagascan state with only 2.5 euros for every passport issued. Previously, Semlex only received 15.50 euros for every passport issued. And not that producing these passports is restrictively expensive. An invoice from Imprimerie National, a French printing firm that provided Semlex with blank passports prior to Semlex setting up their own printing facilities in Lithuania, showed that Semlex paid between 1.75 and 2 euros per document for projects in Madagascar, Gabon and Comoros between 2007 and 2008.

Semlex appears again in Gambia in a much bigger way than the two instances mentioned above. While the country was ruled by the now deposed dictator Yahya Jammeh, an opaque deal was signed with Semlex to manage the provision of identity documents to Gambia. Gambia’s new president, Adama Barrow, seems to be pursuing widespread reformative policies, such as removing restrictions on free speech. However, leaked data, including contracts, emails and international correspondence from company and government insiders, have revealed that the new government is seeking to renew the contract with Semlex to provide identity documents to the country. The former interior minister under Jammeh, Ousman Sonko, had signed a 5-year contract with Semlex in June 2015 to provide biometric ID cards and border control systems for Gambia. Semlex would retain 70% of the profits from this deal with the rest going to the government. Overall the company was estimated to make $67 million over the course of the 5 years.

The deal was met with protests from several civil society organisations that believed that the contract would allow Semlex to gain control over the identities of Gambia’s citizens. According to critics of the said contract, its flaws touch a wide range of areas. For instance, a signed version of the contract obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) does not mention any form of government oversight. The contract prohibits government interference with any third parties that Semlex or its partners select to carry out the work and allows the firm to repatriate profits anywhere without limits on the timeframe or the amount. The contract further places no restrictions on Semlex’s role in collecting, storing, using or safeguarding citizens’ private data. It also does not spell out who is responsible for oversight or handling of identity cards and passports. It is not clear on who is considered a non-citizen or alien. Finally, the contract also stipulates that the deal will not be affected by any institutional changes: “The validity and continuity of this contact shall not be affected by any institutional change within Gambia.” This is almost like the contract signed by Semlex and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As a response to this backlash, the national assembly launched an inquiry into the arrangement, while the government issued a press release stating that while the Semlex contract would remain in place, it was under review.

Since the contract was signed in 2016, it has remained largely unimplemented. A local company called Pristine had been provided, without bids, two contracts from 2009 to 2020 to produce identification documents for the country and has continued to provide the documents. The owners of Pristine have told reporters that if they lose the contract to the more politically connected Semlex, they would be in a lot of debt, as the family that owns it has invested $4.3 million for the work required for the provision of the documents.

Jammeh, Gambia’s former ruler, confused matters further when he gave the firms Zetex (another Belgain company) and its local partner Africard the same deal that he had given Semlex. There has been no evidence that any work has been undertaken by these two companies.

In January 2017, Semlex was also granted a contract to provide voter cards to Gambia. This was again carried out with no apparent government oversight and critics of the contract fear that it might use its power over the voter cards to influence elections, as the company is dependent on the success of the regime for its own personal success. The original Semlex deal in Gambia was orchestrated by Laurent Lamothe, the former Prime Minister of Haiti and the director of Global Voice Group, a US-based communications company. Lamothe began working with Semlex in early 2007. The two companies drafted contracts and agreed to create a local venture known as Semlex Gambia and a company named Biometric International Group to be run by Lamothe. According to one version of the contract, Biometric International would earn 20% of the joint venture revenues, which would be paid out as bonuses, though who the benefactor/s of these bonuses are remains unclear. In July of 2007, they sent an email with a formal submission to the Gambian government, though it is unclear whether Biometric International was involved at the time. In addition, no deal seems to have been finalised at the time.

In 2016, Jammeh’s office instructed that the deal with Semlex be cancelled in favour of a contract with Zetex and Africard. This led to conflicting claims over which company had the rights to the contract. It then emerged that none of the three companies – Semlex, Pristine or Zetex – had ever been subjected to Gambia’s public procurement process. The office of the president in Gambia is allowed to “exempt any procuring organisation from requiring the approval of the Authority with respect to any procurement in whole or part”. Such exemptions are legally required to be published in the official Gazette. The government, however, seems to be siding with Semlex. As mentioned above, it maintains that Semlex’s contract is valid though its terms require re-evaluation. Critics fear the re-evaluation of the contract will not be effective as the national assembly is only allocated 10 days to investigate and review the contract.

How do Semlex, Karaziwan and his consortium of associates manage to secure these deals up and down the African continent? An important player in helping them secure these connections is Zina Wazouna Ahmed Idriss (referred to as “Madame Idriss” in Semlex emails). She is an ex-wife or President Idriss Deby of Chad. An email written by the Semlex finance manager, as well as sources with knowledge of Semlex’s operations, described her role as acting as an intermediary to help Semlex win new business in Africa.

In 2007 and 2008, Semlex secured two deals worth $21 million euros to produce passports, visas and ID cards for Gabon. From 2008 to 2010, Madame Idriss received payments totalling 1.6 million euros from Semlex, according to a Semlex spreadsheet of costs related to her. The invoices described the payments as commissions for helping land business in Gabon. The payments were made in various forms, including money for hotels, ski lessons, dresses, flights, credit card payments and cash, according to a Semlex spreadsheet from 2011. Payments totaling 565,561 euros went towards a house that Madame Idriss became the owner of in the upmarket district of Waterloo in Brussels. The payment was listed as “Maison Waterloo”. An additional 9,000 euros went towards rent for an apartment in Monaco. Madame Idriss was nominated by the Comoros foreign ministry as an honorary consul of the Comoros to Monaco in July 2010, according to Comoros foreign ministry documents.

*** In May 2018, Comoros officials in Brussels raided the headquarters of Semlex following the Reuters report on the company’ dealings in the DRC. Francis Koning, a lawyer who represents Karaziwan and Semlex, claimed that unidentified third parties were manipulating Reuters with the aim of damaging the reputation of Karaziwan and his company. He said, “Semlex Europe has no role in the decision to issue passports. This is the sole prerogative of the Comoros authorities who are the only authorised representatives to do so.” He then added that Semlex “is neither responsible nor to blame for the actions or acts” that are alleged in the Comoros parliamentary report on the sale of passports, “supposing they even took place”.

This report has been compiled from a series of investigations carried out and published by Reuters.

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Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof This year the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Congolese gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, a doctor who is known for his amazing skills in repairing through reconstructive surgery the terrifying damage inflicted on women who have been raped.

Although official data from the government states that sexual violence has declined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the so-called “rape capital of the world” still remains hell on earth for countless women. Congo is a country where sexual violence has been (and probably still is) used as a weapon of war, mirroring the traumatic colonial experience it went through. But weaponised sexual violence does not occur only in this country; it is a very well-known and widespread practice in almost every theatre of war across the globe.

Doctor Miracle’s crusade

Dr. Denis Mukwege, the so-called “Doctor Miracle,” is not the first black African to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The first recipient was Albert Luthuli, who was awarded the prize in 1960 for his non-violent activism against apartheid. Since then, many African personalities, such as Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, and Leymah Gbowee, have won the Nobel Prize for their relentless non- violent struggle for the safety of African men and women whose civil rights are routinely violated. Every time a Peace Nobel is awarded, we can’t but celebrate the impressive efforts that these men and women did to make Africa (and the entire world) a better place. Yet, it is sad to think that in 2018, we still need people like them to fight for human rights that we should have for granted across the entire globe. The world would really be a better place when there is no need to award a Nobel Peace Prize anymore. Dr Denis Mukwege. Photograph by Torleif Svensson/EPA

Denis Mukwege is one of the few Africans who were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to train and graduate in gynaecology in France. However, he did not choose to pursue a better, high- paying career in Europe. Rather, he came back to the Congo to help those who needed him most. He studied medicine because he wanted to assist women in his own country where pregnant women were dying unnecessarily during childbirth due to complications.

Dr. Mukwege’s life’s mission changed in 1999 when he encountered a woman whose genitals had been horrifically mutilated after soldiers raped her with a gun, which they then fired. “Her whole pelvis was destroyed. I thought it was the work of a madman, but the same year I treated 45 similar cases,” he explained. The same year, he founded the General Referral Hospital of Panzi in Bukavu, DRC, and spent the next 20 years advocating for women’s rights internationally. Since then, he and his team of specialists have changed the lives of more than 40,000 victims of rape. The gynaecologist is now recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on repairing injuries caused by sexual violence.

Dr. Mukwege never stopped spreading the message about the atrocities perpetrated not just in the Congo, but in every other country where rape is used as a weapon of war – a weapon that is more devastating than bullets and bombs. Doctor Miracle lobbied to raise awareness about a heinous crime that destroys entire families through social stigma, that devastates human bodies through mutilation, that spreads diseases, and that leaves behind a trail of unwanted children that serve as a living reminder of the injustices of war.

In September 2012, Dr. Mukwege had the courage to address the United Nations where he criticised the Congolese government and neighbouring countries for their lack of commitment to stopping “an unjust war that has used violence against women and rape as a strategy of war“. A month later, a group of four men took his daughters hostage and killed his guard during an assassination attempt. After he narrowly escaped death, he was forced into exile in Europe for a few months. He came back to Bukavu on January 14, 2013 after his patients raised funds to pay for his return ticket by selling pineapples and onions.

Named African of the Year in 2009, the 63-year-old doctor has been the recipient of numerous other prizes and accolades, including the UN Human Rights Prize. And it’s not a coincidence that Dr. Mukwege keeps receiving awards to this very day even the war in the DRC officially ended in 2003. In the DRC and in other parts of Africa, rape is still used very frequently as a tactic to brutalise entire communities and to control the continent’s immense wealth. Nonetheless, is one of the most underreported war crimes that often occurs with the complicity of the deafening silence of the international community.

Colonial legacy

Under the Belgian King Leopold II’s brutal regime, the population of Congo was halved from 20 million to 10 million due to deaths by disease, starvation, and torture. The levels of savagery and cruelty reached by the Belgian colonialists and their minion army have rarely been witnessed throughout human history. Countless women were kidnapped and raped and children were forced into labour camps where they were routinely whipped and abused. The hands of labourers who didn’t meet their daily quota of rubber were brutally chopped off. In 1886, a German journalist counted that the puppet soldiers of Leopold’s army severed over 1,300 hands in one day, including those of many children.

These heinous crimes were committed by the Belgians with the silent consent of the Americans and the Europeans, who had a voracious hunger for rubber and ivory. Raw materials were in high demand, as they were needed to drive the industrialisation process that brought motorised transport and many other commodities in Western countries. It didn’t matter if they came at the expense of millions of Congolese lives lost – the Belgians’ thirst for blood was as unquenchable as their King’s lust for new riches. By exploiting the Congo, Belgium became a wealthy nation that was even admired for its philanthropic efforts in civilising the “savages” who inhabited the country. As an African proverb says, “Until the lions have their historians, the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.”

The levels of savagery and cruelty reached by the Belgian colonialists and their minion army have rarely been witnessed throughout human history. Countless women were kidnapped and raped and children were forced into labour camps where they were routinely whipped and abused. The hands of labourers who didn’t meet their daily quota of rubber were brutally chopped off.

Eventually, independence came in 1960, but the country’s nightmare was not over. After the first democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in 1961, Belgium and the United States supported the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, a corrupt leader who kept Congo on a short, West-friendly leash for another 30 years.

Even after Mobutu was finally overthrown in 1997, a new war consumed the country, leaving at least 4 million people dead and countless victims of rape, torture, violence, and human exploitation in its wake. Today, it’s hard to tell whether the vicious cycle of brutality that continues to ravage the Democratic Republic of Congo is the legacy of one century of colonialism.

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The Western press has every interest in reinforcing the stereotypical idea of African countries being doomed to failure and tribalism after their white paternalistic guides left them on their own. Nonetheless, it’s undoubtedly true that those who are exploiting the human and natural resources of Congo through violence are black Africans who learned their lessons from their colonial forefathers. But while Western interference never stopped being present in the country, those who govern Congo today must be held fully accountable for every crime they keep committing.

Rape as a weapon of personal destruction

Rape is always an atrocity, but what happened in Congo in the last few decades is well beyond horror. Women of all ages were dragged into forests by militia, tied to a tree and raped for months. The internal walls of their genitalia got torn as a result of repeated forced intercourse. Objects, such as guns, were also frequently brutally shoved into their vaginas. The rapists did not consider the age of their victims. As Cecile Mulolo, the psychologist at the Panzi Hospital, explained in an interview a decade ago, the oldest victim she came across was in her 80s and the youngest was just 16 months old.

When the walls of the uterus and bladder are perforated, a fistula forms, which prevents the woman from being able to control her bowels. Urine comes out involuntarily, and chronic pain becomes a constant companion. This mutilation becomes her mark, as she is ostracised by her husband and villagers treat her like a leper. The violence thus never stops after the atrocity.

Sometimes the aggressors are so angry, drunk, or just mad that they even fire their guns while they’re inside the women. The consequences are beyond devastating. Those who are lucky (or unlucky, depending on the point of view) to survive must bear the consequences of this horrific act of violence for the rest of their lives. The repulsive moments they endured are forever lodged in their minds and the physical and psychological after-effects of the rape stay with them forever.

Rape is an abhorrent practice that knows no gender either. Males are raped almost as frequently as females, and possibly even more. A survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in Eastern Congo 22% of men reported that they had been raped during the war, compared to 30% of women. But since fewer than 1 in 10 male rapes are reported because of the heavy social stigma associated with it, it’s easy to understand how these numbers can be much higher.

Rape is an unacceptable act of violence that dehumanises those who experience it. Even the few who are not excluded from their own community must live with the shame of what happened to them. Women are victimised twice as they must bear the burden of rape in the form of unwanted children who will grow up as estranged human beings marred by a crime they didn’t commit. Sexual crimes in war must be dealt with zero tolerance, and not any differently from how the international community views chemical and biological warfare.

The indifference and guilt of the international community

Sexual violence has been used as a terror tactic during wartime for centuries. Rape is used to humiliate and dominate the enemy, and when the conflict originates from ethnic reasons, it can also be used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is a known example of this, as evidence suggests that military leaders actively endorsed this practice. Muammar Gaddafi went as far as purchasing a large number of Viagra-like drugs to “encourage” his troops during the Libyan civil war. This is not a problem that affects just Africa; war rape happens, again and again, every time a conflict erupts between two different religious, ethnic, or cultural groups. It happened in the Darfur region in Sudan, during the Bosnian wars, and to oppress the Tamil minority in the Sri Lankan conflict.

But what did the international community do to stem this plague? Well, for the most part they talked a lot about it and did a lot of “condemning”. But in practice they did not do much. When the Bosnian rape camp where the Serbian troops kept Muslim and Croatian women captive in order to impregnate them were found in 1993, rape was finally recognised as a crime against humanity by the Geneva Convention. But in the aftermath, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found a total of just five men guilty of crimes against humanity in the form of rape and sexual enslavement. Despite the many (rather weak) actions taken by the UN to prevent wartime sexual violence from occurring, including the famous resolution 1820 that defined this practice as a war crime, mass rapes are perpetrated over and over again everywhere. Condemning is not enough, it never was enough.

But what did the international community do to stem this plague? Well, for the most part they talked a lot about it and did a lot of “condemning”. But in practice they did not do much.

But why take action after a rape has been committed when common sense would suggest that the best way to stop a crime is to prevent it from happening in the first place? On several occasions, the UN’s peacekeeping forces have failed the local population, leaving local militia and rebels free to wreak havoc on civilians. Ten years ago, the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide fled to Congo, and together with the Congolese Mai-Mai militia, they began a spree of sacking and gang-raping 20 miles from a UN base. Why did the “keepers of the peace” ignore the warnings of the local community leaders?

The truth is actually worse than one can imagine. When over 95% of peacekeeping soldiers are males who carry out their operations in a hyper-masculine cultural environment, that’s nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen. Abuse and sexual exploitation of women and minors have a long- standing history, and all of the major contingents of the UN peacekeeping forces eventually appear to be implicated. During the 1993 Bosnian genocide, for example, UN soldiers took advantage of brothels in Sarajevo run by Serbian slavers who forced local women into prostitution. In Sudan, when the civilians took shelter in their headquarters, the Egyptian peacekeeping army raped at least six women who were they were supposed to be protecting. The Uruguayan peacekeeping contingent had to be withdrawn from Haiti because of protests sparked by the rape of a 14-year-old boy. In Congo, senior officials were even accused of bribing witnesses in an attempt to cover up several sexual scandals. The sexual exploitation and abuse of children by UN peacekeepers have also been reported in other strife-torn countries, including Liberia and Sierra Leone.

As a weapon, rape is much more devastating than bullets. To quote the words of Jeanna Mukuninwa, a 28-year-old victim of rape from Shabunda, Congo: “At least with a bullet, you die. But if you have been raped, you appear to the community like someone who is cursed. After rape, no one will talk to you; no man will see you. It’s a living death.”

African women don’t need another hospital in Bukavu to treat the devastating consequences of rape and brutalisation on their bodies. African women don’t need another heroic man like Dr. Mukwege who devotes his entire life to reconstructive surgery to patch up the damage inflicted by a handful of cruel beasts. African women and men need (and deserve) to live in a world where they are respected as human beings, where their bodies are never violated, and where rape is a barbarity of the past rather than a present threat. A world where the dark cloud of colonialism has finally lifted.

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Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts By Matthias De Groof

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Lumumba’s Iconography in the Arts

By Matthias De Groof

In the sort-of beginning, there were just two hegemons. Both white, both male and both nuclear- tipped. Now everybody, it seems, can try to be the ultimate tough guy.

Though this may not be a wholly new thing in our region, there is certainly a new flavour to it. The clear trend is towards macho posturing as a form of governance performance. Nobody is old enough to retire or considered expired. The use of harsh language, backed up by extra-judicial physical methods, is both a result and proof of this claim to virility and relevance.

In our region there are no meaningful democratic – or at the very least, pro-people – political processes taking place. 2017 may be the year this paralysis peaked.

In Sudan, where a home-grown national bourgeois class seems to have been in crisis and fighting retreat mode for decades, the current president has emerged from one type of siege (the recently relaxed economic sanctions driven largely by the United States), only to remain stuck in another (the indictment at the International Criminal Court). Meanwhile, economic and military difficulties remain entrenched, in particular, the government’s ongoing war against its own citizens in the Darfur region, as well as the (to put it bluntly) ethnic cleansing in the Nuba mountains.

In our region there are no meaningful democratic – or at the very least, pro-people – political processes taking place. 2017 may be the year this paralysis peaked.

In South Sudan, fratricidal war shows no sign of abating, grimly echoing the poet Okot p’Bitek‘s berating of post-Independence African leaders:

“….while the pythons of sickness swallow the children/and the buffaloes of poverty knock the people down/and ignorance just stands there like an elephant/the war-leaders are locked in bloody feuds/eating each other’s liver…”

Kenyan politics functions in the manner of cut-throat corporate enterprise, which comes naturally to this one-time beacon of successful African capitalism. Speaking to me in private, a senior and well- informed Kenyan public servant framed the entire NASA vs. Jubilee epic wrangle as the political expression of competition between two groups of cartels for dominance in key sectors in the economy, hence its intractability. True or not, it is clear that elections cannot be reasonably organised in such a toxic environment, and yet the “traditional” alternatives” – somewhere between mass civic action and armed struggle – are not viable either.

Uganda, stuck with one president for over three decades, has finally reached that moment one experiences while watching a rickety Nigerian movie and realising that all along the director believes that all the viewers are all fools, and is probably surprised that they stayed watching for that long. And then you cannot locate the “off” button on the player.

Kenyan politics functions in the manner of cut-throat corporate enterprise, which comes naturally to this one-time beacon of successful African capitalism.

Burundi’s presidency, in seeking one massive term extension, is basically trying to become Uganda’s all at once.

In Rwanda the citizens are the culprits; they simply will not let their president step down, no matter what the obstacles, be they constitutional or electoral. Apparently, they hold him a near prisoner in State House, and he has decided it’s perhaps best not to argue with them.

The occupant of State House in the Democratic Republic of Congo has simply decided that it’s probably best not to bother with elections at all, and has carried on for a whole year beyond their supposed scheduled date.

Tanzania’s electorate – or perhaps just the political intelligentsia – seems to be caught up in a bout of buyer’s remorse now that their recently-elected president has settled in. But behind the scenes, intense resource-fuelled contestations are taking place, fomenting mounting authoritarianism across the board.

A way must be found to help us understand this unfolding situation: Is this the future, or is it the past? We have to consider the possibility that we are on the threshold of a whole new political praxis. In his Christmas address, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, criticised “tyrannical and populist” world leaders: “In 2017, we have seen around the world tyrannical leaders that enslave their peoples, populist leaders that deceive them, corrupt leaders that rob them, even simply democratic, well-intentioned leaders of many parties and countries who are normal, fallible human beings.”

In Rwanda the citizens are the culprits; they simply will not let their president step down, no matter what the obstacles, be they constitutional or electoral.

Since the demise of the Soviet/Russian side of the two-part global hegemony, there has been a slow return to naked political overreach by many potentates as they realise that there is nobody for their domestic opponent to seek support from in attempts to overthrow them. That game ended, and new language and thinking about what opposition means, and how to enforce it, has struggled to emerge. In most of countries in the East and Central African region, this gave rise to new dispensations regarding what the playing field would look like going forward. Some developments, like broader, more accommodating constitutional and electoral arrangements, or at the very least peace treaties between warring factions, were put in place. That was roughly two decades ago, we need to remind ourselves. A lot has happened since.

A way must be found to help us understand this unfolding situation: Is this the future, or is it the past?

Just under a decade ago, progressive writers living in the heart of the great big imperial machine, such as Paul Mason and Larry Elliot, finally began announcing the death of the capitalist system, confirming what radical African thinkers like Professor Dan Nabudere had been saying since its first modern crash in 1987. It took the drama of the 2008 crash, and the arrival of real “donor- conditioned” economic policies on their own shores, for Western thinkers to also recognise this. But contrary to what they believe, austerity measures are not a policy choice for the West; they are a survival strategy for the economic masters who are struggling to find a way to turn their global profit-making machine back on. This is where we come back in.

Our “leaders” have realised this, and have worked out that as long as they do not stand in the way, or better still, if they are willing to put themselves at the service of this mission, not much else will matter. Their emerging new praxis can be summed up as: seize ground, corral the resources therein, and then talk to the big US, Chinese or European Union corporations gunning for oil, coltan or fertile land, and through them, their equivalents of the Pentagon.

“Ground” can mean anything from some mineral-rich real estate (not necessarily located within your own borders) to a whole state, and even to somebody else’s state that you have managed to take over.

Capitalism’s zombie corpse now reverts to its original form: straightforward plunder of any natural resource that is either in the commons – like the oceans – or weakly defended by native peoples. There now always seems to be a causus belli in the eastern DRC, requiring armed neighbourly intervention. However, analysts of the region argue that these have historically been largely excuses for foreign powers to muscle in on the King Leopold-founded tradition of looting the riches there, as happened in the mid-1990s, and is happening again.

Once the Pentagon – or its equivalent among the other big powers – decides that this is a good thing, then their foreign policy will miraculously adapt to support this, or suddenly become incapable of seeing what is going on.

Democracy can now be finally safely jettisoned. Through the current stage-managed faux-democratic processes, we are transitioning away from what little we gained from the post-Cold War “good governance” aspirations towards a new and lethal state of affairs where anything goes, including the dissolution of the very state structures we live in.

Through the current stage-managed faux-democratic processes, we are transitioning away from what little we gained from the post-Cold War “good governance” aspirations towards a new and lethal state of affairs where anything goes, including the dissolution of the very state structures we live in.

This will still require skills, but of a different type: in order to be able to make themselves look big in the eyes of those over whom they seek to wield power, these “leaders” will have to hide their smallness in the eyes of those on whose behalf they wield it.

The ability to speak the language of global conflict entrepreneurs, as well as qualifications in Advanced Warlordism, will also be essential.

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