DR Congo votes after two-year delay
KINSHASA, DR Congo (AFP) — Presidential elections that will shape the future of one of Africa’s biggest and most unstable countries were underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo yesterday after a two-year delay.
Queues formed at polling stations, where observers reported early hitches, including with electronic voting machines whose introduction has stoked tension.
The vote gives the DRC the chance of its first peaceful transfer of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.
But the threat of violence is great, given organisational problems and suspicion of President Joseph Kabila, who refused to quit in 2016 after his two-term limit expired.
The election’s credibility has been strained by repeated delays, risk of problems on polling day and accusations that the voting machines will yield a rigged result.
On election eve, talks aimed at averting violence after the vote broke down.
Opposition frontrunners Martin Fayulu and Felix Tshisekedi refused to sign a proposed code of conduct with Kabila’s preferred successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary. They accused officials with the Independent National Election Commission (CENI) of thwarting changes to the text.
The UN, US and Europe have appealed for the elections to be free, fair and peaceful — a call echoed by the presidents of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and the neighbouring Republic of Congo.
Kabila voted in the capital along with his family, shortly before Shadary and Fayulu.
“It’s a great day for me, it’s a great day for Congo,” Fayulu said. “It’s the end of dictatorship.”
“I feel liberated, freed,” said Victor Balibwa, a 53-year-old civil servant and one of the first voters to cast his ballot in Lubumbashi, the country’s mining capital in the southeast.
“I’m excited to vote, to be able to choose at last. It’s my first election,” an 18-year-old student named Rachel told AFP in the eastern city of Goma, an opposition stronghold.
An on-the-ground team of 41,000 election monitors set up by the powerful Catholic Church said that 830 polling stations failed to open on schedule, in some cases because of “malfunctions” by voting machines.
In Lubumbashi, an observer for one of the candidates said, “there are five or six polling stations where the machines aren’t working. You have to wait for a technician.”
In Kinshasa, an elderly lady said she had trouble with the touch-screen voting.
“It’s very complicated. I pressed the button without really knowing whom I voted for — I didn’t see my candidate’s number or face,” she complained.