President Felix Tshisekedi is a man in a quandary. But he has called it upon himself, so it’s hard to sympathise with him. When you are lucky to be placed in the position of Head of State, the first thing you seek is the endorsement of your people; all, without exception. Then you set out to study their needs and the territory they inhabit and see what it offers. You study and understand your journey from the beginning so as to enable you to work together and chart out a future befitting you all. You iron out the least discord among your people. Second among the basic necessary tasks is to work with your people to render your borders secure, with the added value of safeguarding their person and property. Consolidate your territory and rid your territory of any likely hostile foreign elements. With this security assured, they will work hard to advance themselves and, with the government’s hard work, their welfare will be uplifted. Third, you introduce something that King Leopold II’s Congo Free (Hah!) State, Belgian Congo after, then Zaïre and now the Democratic (Hah!) Republic of the Congo has never been seen, for instance. You surprise them with the miracle of a government devoid of all forms of malpractice: bribery, nepotism, patronage, influence trading, electoral fraud (soon!), embezzlement, parochialism. That will give you the confidence to collaborate with other countries on equal terms, for mutual gain. Boasts of minerals aplenty and vast size will never afford your people the comfort they need. Unfortunately, Tshisekedi has kicked all these necessities in the face to put his people in the same quandary. He prefers to kowtow to foreign influences, whatever their stealthy agenda, and for all else, he has promoted all of the negative tendencies in the book. Now he is kicking around at everything in confusion, like a kid seeing phantoms in the dark. The result is a country that’s sans direction. A reason it has become home to sundry superpower “kites”. The scramble we thought was history in Africa is in fine fettle in the DR Congo of this age! So far, kicking a storm about Rwanda being to blame for his country’s woes has been serving him well, as superpowers in their droves have backed him to the kilt. None of them would like to see Rwanda’s stubborn streak wear off onto his or any other African country. So, when the sons and daughters of Congolese refugees confined into exile for ages just for being Kinyarwanda-speaking launch an effort to see their problem addressed, these Western countries take on his refrain of “Rwanda’s backing!”. When he incites Congolese to burn, slaughter, cannibalise and carry out a genocide against these Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese, calling them Rwandans and trying to send the survivors there, Western powers are twiddling their fingers! Twiddling fingers and sending off “experts that act like kites”, which see no bad situation when it’s in plain view. Or are they seeing the bad situation but actually are in on keeping it that way? Because, if the grapevine is to be believed, a number of their companies are maintaining garrisoned private mining fields that not even the DR Congo president is allowed to set foot on. No situation is more ideal than a scapegoat to blame for the bad situation to keep prying eyes away.
