The Philip DeFranco Show - MS 1.24 The Congo's Crazy Election Fallout Explained, Why It Matters, & How it Could Affect You

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

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Hello, hello, welcome to your Extra Morning News Show. My name is Philip DeFranco, and today we're gonna be talking about the recent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And this is a story that doesn't just affect the people there, the region there. I mean, this has international implications that might even touch you and I.

Now, for those that don't know, the DRC is the largest nation in Sub-Saharan Africa and is home to more than 85 million people. And over the last few weeks, the country has gone through a major political change, with world powers watching developments on the ground very closely. In fact, President Trump even sent 80 troops

to nearby Gabon to potentially be deployed in the capital city of the DRC, with the official reason being to support the security of United States citizens, personnel, and diplomatic facilities in Kinshasa if post-election violence spiraled out of control. But in addition to security concerns, countries from the United States to China

are well aware that the nation sits on an estimated $24 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits. This including more than 60% of the world's cobalt. And that's massively important because while cobalt is probably not something that comes up in your everyday conversations, it is something in your everyday life.

It's the primary component of lithium ion batteries which are used in everything from our laptops and cell phones to jet turbines and electric cars. So whoever controls the cobalt in the country has enormous influence over the global economy. Now, in order to understand the uncertainty surrounding the country's current volatile political situation, we have to actually take a step back and look at how we got here. The DRC is actually a former Belgian colony that has experienced extreme violence and economic exploitation by foreign and domestic powers for decades.

In fact, during the reign of Belgian King Leopold II, it's estimated that the population was cut in half. As many as 8 million Congolese lost their lives due to everything from being worked to death, harvesting valuable rubber for the Belgian Empire, to artificial famines created by Leopold's army who hoarded food and crops for their own uses. And so after years of living under the boot of the Belgian Empire, Congo finally achieved independence in 1960. And that's where we saw a young leader named Patrice Lumumba become prime minister. But Lumumba never actually got a chance to carry out reform in the country. Instead, he was removed from power

less than three months into his term and assassinated just four months later with the complicity of the Belgian government and CIA who believed he had grown too close to the Soviet Union. And in the years after Lumumba's death, Army Chief Mobutu Sese Seko took power in 1965, crushing internal rebellions and renaming the country Zaire.

And for more than 30 years, Mobutu ran the country like his own personal bank account, looting vast sums from the treasury and paying himself a salary of $100 million a year back in 1989. And while it was generally thought that it just couldn't get any worse in Zaire as a result of Mobutu's rule,

the 90s brought even greater pain to the country. In 1994, the fallout from the genocide in neighboring Rwanda spilled over the border. And as many as two million Hutus, some of whom actually helped carry out a genocidal campaign against the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda, they fled into the Congo fearing retaliation after Tutsi rebels overthrew the Hutu-led government.

And what we saw there was Hutu militiamen allied themselves with Mobutu, and they carried out attacks against Tutsis in both Congo and Rwanda. And by 1996, the now Tutsi-led Rwandan government responded to the attacks by supporting rival militias to fight both the Hutus and the Congolese central government. With militias eventually marching into the country's

capital of Kinshasa and overthrowing Mobutu's government. Then Rwanda installed a new leader named Laurent Kabila to take his place, but ultimately Kabila's presidency lasted less than four years. Rwanda saw him as too independent for its liking and they quickly turned against the leader that they had helped install sending in new forces to remove him from power. This move quickly spiraled out of control drawing in multiple regional players like Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola supporting the DRC and Uganda supporting Rwanda. And a just stunning and horrifying five million people are thought to have died in Congo over the course of this conflict,

largely from starvation and disease. And as far as Laurent Kabila, he was assassinated in 2001 by one of his own child bodyguards, which then actually paved the way for his son, Joseph Kabila, to undemocratically take over the country with new elections not being held until 2006. Now, while Joseph Kabila oversaw a peace agreement

that officially ended the war in Congo, spouts of mass violence have continued in Eastern Congo to this day, and his presidency has been marred by allegations of enormous corruption. And because we wanted to get even closer to this part of the story, we spoke with Michael Kavanaugh, a former Bloomberg journalist who investigated Kabila's finances for nearly two years.

And what he found was that Kabila and his family members owned more than 80 businesses touching virtually every part of the Congolese economy, from diamond mines to real estate. So as the president, president Kibula can't involve himself in any formal business activity. It says that explicitly in the constitution. It also says that he needs to avoid conflicts of interest.

And obviously there are lots of conflicts of interest when you're president, you're the one signing the mining permit decrees. You're signing the oil decrees. You have obviously access to a lot of the contracting that any government around the world does. And so the fact that a lot of his businesses or his family's businesses have government contracts, his brother, for example, who's also in parliament, he had the contract to print the driver's licenses for everyone in Congo. This is millions of dollars of one of the most important government contracts. And there's also a video of when Kabila has actually been confronted with these corruption

allegations in the past, where he said this. There is another investigation looking into your family and according to this investigation your family has 120 permits to dig for gold diamond cobalt copper do they is that is that true well i i probably believe that people who write those reports live in in uh in on planet, which is not this planet. Feel free to give me the names of those family members and those permits. They don't exist." Now despite Kabila's denials, the last two years have really shown that he is willing to go to the extremes to stay in power and protect his business interests. For example, elections were supposed to be held in November 2016 as the constitution says the president can only serve two consecutive five year terms. But in 2015, as the end of Kabila's term grew closer,

he passed a bill through parliament that required the country to conduct a census before any election could take place. And so in a country the size of Western Europe with limited infrastructure, a census could take years, giving Kabila the legal authority to extend his term. But before the bill could actually pass the Senate, young Congolese protesters took to the streets of Kinshasa and virtually shut down this city of 12 million people.

And to get an idea of how these protests actually played out, we spoke with Kambale Musavuli, who's a Congolese activist and spokesperson for the advocacy organization Friends of the Congo. As they shut down the city, the response of the Congolese government was to send the police, to send the military against the civilians. Yet the Congolese youth continued to mobilize and organize, and they were able to force the Congolese Senate not to pass that law. They actually did not pass the census law that would have extended the stay for Kabila. But the youth paid a huge price. As they deployed the military and the police,

they were shooting at Congolese youth with live bullets. Scores were killed. But that just also showed the courage of the youth to challenge the regime. Now, with all that said, Kabila was still able to hold off new elections for another two years by claiming that the Electoral Commission, which is charged with running elections in the country, couldn't arrange all the necessary measures in time. But the protests really had left their mark. Combined with outside pressure from other regional African countries,

Kabila really had no choice but to agree to step down from power in August of last year. Which brings us to December 30th, 2018. The election was finally held. It was the first opportunity to have a peaceful transition of power in the country since 1960. And here we had three major candidates running for the presidency. You had Kabila's hand-picked successor and his former interior minister, Emmanuel Shadari. You also had Martin Fayoulu, who was a former Exxon Mobil executive and member of parliament, who was the most widely supported opposition candidate. And finally, you had Felix Chisiketi, the son of a legendary opposition leader in Congolese politics.

And he was a breakaway opposition candidate who actually at first backed Fayoulu, but just 24 hours later decided to run himself. So the stage was set, elections were taking place, and while millions of Congolese went to the polls, not all were actually able to vote. And in fact, this is what William Claus, a freelance journalist based in Kinshasa, told us what he observed on election day.

There was quite a lot of anger in some parts of the city, bits of the city which are sort of opposition bastions, which didn't actually open till about three or four o'clock in the afternoon because the voter rolls had got lost. But for the most part, the polling stations stayed open later to let as many people vote as possible. But even then, in most of the polling stations I saw, there were still disappointed people who were turned away when the doors closed without being able to vote.

But even more significant than what was happening with the polling stations was the government's decision to ban 1.2 million citizens in the country's North Kivu province from voting at all. With the government claiming that their reason was that they were concerned about Ebola in the area. Now despite this ban, the irregularities, the election moved forward.

But almost immediately afterwards, concerning signs started to emerge. Internet service in the country was shut down the very next day, with the government claiming that the people were spreading fictitious results on social media. And in fact, when we interviewed Claus last week, he said the internet was still down more than two weeks later. So, this isn't a new move for the Congolese government. Since I've lived in Congo, they've probably shut down the internet, and in particular, what they're going after is social media, WhatsApp, Twitter, and that sort of stuff. This is, I don't know, third or fourth time it's happened since I've been here, but this

is certainly the longest. Now, reports have emerged since we talked to Claus saying that the internet is back up, and for days, the Electoral Commission refused to announce the outcome, leading many to speculate that Kabila's camp was working behind the scenes to manipulate results so that his chosen candidate, Shidari, would win. But then finally, in the early morning hours of January 2nd, the Commission shocked the country by announcing that Chisikedi had actually won the election with 38% of the vote.

And while Chisikedi's supporters were ecstatic that they won, the results immediately began to look suspicious. First, the Catholic Church's organization of bishops called SENCO, which had deployed 40,000 of its own observers to polls all over the country, announced that these results didn't match theirs. And in fact, outside polling before the election

showed that Fayyulu had a 23-point lead on Chisakedi and a 28-point lead on Shidari. Then, days later, the Financial Times published leaked data, allegedly from the Electoral Commission's central database of electronic voting records. And those reportedly showed that Fayyulu had actually won with more than 59% of the vote to Chisakeri's 19. And then finally, you had legislative elections

being held at the same time, and Kabila's party confusingly won the vast majority of seats in the legislature. So what they want the world to believe is that the communist people went to the poll, on one hand they voted for the opposition, on the other they voted for the Kabila regime, which is preposterous.

I mean, it does not make sense that this type of result can actually be published. And so, of course, that brings us to the question of, OK, if the results were indeed fixed by Kabila, why wouldn't he just rig it for his handpicked successor? And so that's what we tried to find out from Pierre Engelbert, an expert in Congolese politics and a professor of international relations at Pomona College. And in Congo, you have all sorts of conspiracy scenarios. But I think the most likely is that Shadary did so poorly. He campaigned poorly, and there's such a rejection

of this regime by a majority of the Congolese that it was just impossible, given the fairly low participation rate, it looks like about 47% of the Congolese voted. Given the low participation rate. It looks like about 47% of the Congolese voted. Given the low participation rate, there was not enough wiggle room to bring Shadari up to the level he needed to win. It was easier to tinker with Fayulu and Chisekedi, bring Fayulu down a little bit and Chisekedi up a little bit. Chisekedi was a more potentially complacent ally, and that's my understanding that

they went ahead with that. It was not their plan A, it was a plan B, but it was definitely more manageable than having Fayulu in power. Fayulu is much less likely to be willing to compromise. And while there's been no hard evidence of a backroom deal between Shiseikeri and Kabila at this point, we have seen Shiseikeri's rhetoric towards Kabila change dramatically from the campaign, which many have noted as very suspicious. He and his party, the UDPS, have long been fierce critics of Kabila, calling him an imposter and saying that he is unfit to rule the country. But then, just so happened to be right before the election results were revealed, his tone took a massive turn and continued even after the announcement. I'd like to sincerely pay tribute to Joseph Kabila, President of the Republic.

Today, we should no longer consider him as an adversary, but more as a partner in the democratic change in power in our country." And with this whole situation, we've also seen Faula doing everything in his power to challenge the results, even petitioning Congo's Constitutional Court to order a recount. But because the court, like most institutions, is controlled by Kabila's appointees, it certified the election results over the weekend. And just today, unless something else happens, we finished these the night before,

Chisiketi was sworn in as the new president of the DRC. It was something that was supposed to happen on Tuesday, but it was delayed for unspecified reasons. We've also seen Fayulu claiming that he is the sole legitimate president-elect of the DRC and that the Congolese people should not recognize Chisiketi as president. And this turmoil is starting to turn deadly.

The UN Human Rights Office said on Sunday that 34 people had already been killed, 59 wounded, and 241 had been arbitrarily arrested. And unfortunately, activists like Moussa Voulie, who has been able to return to the country in 20 years because of safety concerns, say that while there may be a new man officially leading the country, Kabila's influence is far from over. Let's be clear, with this election and the result that came out with the country, Kabila's influence is far from over. Let's be clear, with this election and the result that came out with the election, Kabila is not gone.

The Kabila regime, the Kabila system is still intact, from the Secret Service to the military to the government. And ultimately, that's the situation we're looking at right now, and it will be very interesting to see what happens next. And of course, with stories like this, I love opinions from everyone,

but also I'm always really hungry for opinions of people on the ground there. You know, do you believe that there's a chance that even with these flawed election results, the DRC is undergoing positive reform? A reform where the Congolese people can actually benefit from the country's mineral wealth, rather than just the political leadership

in multinational corporations? Or are we merely watching a puppet show, the continuing of the status quo and the exploitation of a country that will continue long into the future? Any and all thoughts, always appreciated. With that said, of course, I'm gonna close this video out like I always do.

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