Come next year, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be reapportioned from its current number of 10 provinces to 26 provinces, primarily in a move for greater governmental responsiveness to local issues and affairs. Plus, these new provinces will be given legislatures and the power to elect and impeach their governors (a power that is already given to the current 10 provinces since 2006), an unprecedented political concession in the country’s history.
However, this is not the first time that the DRC (also known as Congo-Kinshasa, to separate it linguistically from the Republic of the Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville, to the west of the eponymous river) has had a federalist approach to regional/local governance; rather, the central government in Kinshasa practiced a similar devolution during the days of the Congo Crisis from 1960-1967.
In this first devolution, the country was apportioned into a maximum of 21 provinces in a period from 1962 to 1966, when the majority of the provinces were remerged into 12, then 8 provinces and placed under unitary authority. Initially, this was meant as an appeasement plan in order to turn back any further regional secessions similar to what happened in Katanga in 1960-1963. However, after less than a year of shaky peace following the crushing of the Katanga rebellion, the “Simba” rebellion of Pierre Mulele was initiated and spread following the dissolution of Parliament by Cyrille Adoula in September 1963; it threatened to destroy the Kinshasa government’s authority over the eastern portions of the country, at which point, the government replaced Adoula with the leader of the former Katangan state, who then requested and received US and Belgian support to rescue nearly 2000 European and US civilian hostages in what is now Kisangani. They were rescued, the rebellion was put down, Mobutu overthrew both the president and prime minister and became the dictator of the country (which, from 1971-1997, was known as the Republic of Zaire), and Mobutu remerged most of the provinces into 8 provinces by 1966 (then reapportioned to the current 10 in 1988). Until 1997, the country would be a unitary republic under Mobutu’s rule.
After Mobutu, weakened by a short civil war that swept the country from the east, was overthrown by Laurent Kabila, a seasoned anti-Mobutu rebel who once counted Che Guevara among his comrades, the country soon descended into a second civil war, one that reached amazing levels of depravity and anti-humanity over a period of five years. This war, which also began in the eastern provinces because of a citizenship dispute involving a local Tutsi minority, and which received the discreet support of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, nearly succeeded in driving out the Kabila regime from Kinshasa; however, this trend was reversed after some 8 African countries sent their military operatives to support Kabila’s army.
During this period, some former provinces in the eastern DRC were restored under rebel control, namely Ituri Province (then known as Kibali-Ituri). This immediately led to the Ituri conflict involving at least two rival ethnic groups in Ituri, even after the province (which, currently and officially, is a district of Equateur Province) was retaken by government forces.
So now that the DRC has had its first national elections since its independence in 1960, this being under its most recent constitution, the country plans to return to the old federal model that was first used during the country’s first few years of independence, and for the exact same reasons and intentions as those which were used back in 1962.
But will this second fling with federalism work out, eventually, to the common intentions of all the country’s citizens – everyone from Joseph Kabila (the son of the rebel-turned-president) and Gizenga (an 81-year-old living legend who once served as head of a rebel government during the Congo Crisis and is the 23rd and current prime minister of the DRC) to the lowliest peasants and former rebels in Ituri? Will it succeed in bringing a greater equal distribution of the country’s immense wealth and potential to all parts of the country and all ethnicities and social minorities?
One could answer “No” emphatically, considering that federalism in other countries on the continent (Sudan and Nigeria) does not hold a good track record of working to the common interests of their populations, or at least were held back by the advancements of other institutions, including the militaries of those countries (and of others, as the military has played a long, and often detrimental, role in the political histories of most African countries).
So maybe the better question to ask would be “Is Congo presently ready to move away from a militaristic, violent, predatory, human-eat-human history to a civil, non-violent, dialogue-dependent, pro-human future?”
Maybe federalism – the type that is being envisioned by Kinshasa and the UN – is simply a feature that could accompany the latter, and not necessarily a stop-gap asset that is meant to prevent the former, as was intended for the first fling with federalism.
Soon, 2009 will be the present. It is up to those who are willing to serve as civil servants at the provincial and national level if they are willing to move toward the above future, rather than continue in the above past.
