Following Felix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo being declared “winner” of the DR Congo elections – if one can call that hyper-violent charade an election – the Great Lakes Region can be certain of one thing. We are in for five more years of the Tshisekedi regime as the preeminent source of insecurity and instability in the region. ALSO READ: A chaotic DR Congo is much a danger to Congolese as it is to the region Expect more of the Congo as the biggest exporter of refugees to neighboring countries, and of Tshilombo as the cause of one migraine after another. Also, we are in for another extended period of Kinshasa sparking one extended crisis to another, and we are in for Tshisekedi and his minions targeting Rwanda with more infantile name calling, more coarse, unmeasured words, and just endless malarkey. If there is a thing, we’ve learnt in the past five years about Tshisekedi, it is that he is an agent of chaos nonpareil. In the twenty-first century, when African states should be pooling their efforts in a race to develop; to try to make up lost ground with the rest of the world, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo dreams only of violence. His agenda, one that he loudly articulates, is war against Rwanda – including threats “to kill the President of Rwanda.” What kind of head of state makes utterances like that? You can draw your own conclusions. At a time when Africa should long have put to bed the most harmful aspects of its past, Tshisekedi is determined to be the holdout that traps his people in a time warp, like the sixties, seventies, or eighties never ended. He is the tyrant that thinks nothing of wholesale massacres of sections of his population if that’s what he calculates to be what keeps him in power. ALSO READ: New DR Congo rebel alliance condemns bombings of populated areas He is a betrayer, of the best African ideals, with acts like the importation of mercenaries – some from as far afield as eastern Europe – to bolster his campaign of ethnic cleansing against sections of his country’s population. These (mercenaries) are in addition to genocidal forces, principally the FDLR – the offspring of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe militias that escaped to Congo in 94, and that have been perpetrating bloodbaths of indigenous Congolese Tutsis since. These are truly deplorable aspect of Tshisekedi’s behavior that should be condemned by all Africans who want a better future for their continent. The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, in its post-independence history has rarely known respite from conflict and upheaval. Even then none of its rulers; at least not the tragic Lumumba, and neither Mobutu who dominated the country for decades, was in the habit of organizing, encouraging, and inciting the genocide of entire ethnicities of their country. Tshisekedi, in his untrammeled greed for power, has crossed that Rubicon, and shows he won’t stop. ALSO READ: Ruto to DR Congo: I cannot arrest people for making a statement In his determination to cling onto power, even in the face of ferocious opposition to his rule, he concocted the fiction that the Congo’s Tutsi herder communities are “foreigners” – a cynical ploy with one aim: to deflect attention from his failures. He supplemented this fabrication with the claim that those Tutsi communities – people indigenous to the east of the DRC – in fact are “Rwandan”. All this obviously was, and is in service to the lie that it is Rwanda that’s “causing the Congo’s problems of insecurity.” From there it was only a matter of time before Kinshasa was dragging the Rwanda into its mud, turning the Rwandan government into a scapegoat for the Tshisekedi regime’s mountain of failures. Tshilombo has been in power for five years during which he has presided over worse insecurity than any of his predecessors; more corruption, more nepotism (with his tribe-mates or lackeys in charge of every institution), and every other type of abuse of office taken to levels never known before. Such methods of governance not only plunged his country into further instability, he in no time sunk it into unprecedented poverty, with the DRC ignominiously ending up fifth poorest country in the world. Quickly, the “Matonge” guys had to find others to scapegoat! The herder and pastoralist communities were the easiest victims. But when they took up arms, under the banner of the M23 movement, to defend themselves against their government’s genocidal designs, it was only for Tshisekedi and his henchmen to begin their never-ending cacophony of accusations against Rwanda – which they never back with a shred of evidence by the way. We have seen Tshisekedi stymie all efforts by regional governments to broker peace, with the man most notably expelling the East African Community Regional Force whose mandate was to oversee a ceasefire between Congolese government forces and the M23, and to protect civilians in ceasefire zones. Tshisekedi went berserk against the force the moment it became obvious to him those troops weren’t in the Congo exclusively to do his bidding, which was to actively participate in combat operations against M23. The Kinshasa regime military, FARDC, was in the habit of violating ceasefires, going against the spirit of the Nairobi and Luanda agreements, while incessantly badmouthing the regional force for not partaking in its illegal activities. Tshisekedi only was happy with the Burundians who, it turns out, were the only party willing to turn themselves into active belligerents in Congolese conflicts. Now Kinshasa has invited the Southern African bloc of governments – SADC – to send in forces, with South Africa obliging. Now South African troops have already set up camp in eastern DRC. Are the South Africans aware what Tshisekedi wants of them? Do they know the M23 fights for a community facing the specter of genocide, and not only that, but it represents a people that fights for something as fundamental as a right to a homeland? I guess the world will find out soon enough. But the South Africans ought to know one thing: Tshisekedi only will be happy with you if you are willing to partner him in criminal acts, especially crimes against humanity.
