Opposition candidate Felix Tshisekedi has secured a surprise win in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidential election, according to the country’s electoral commission.
The election had always been a three-horse race. The other two contenders were former interior minister Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the preferred successor of President Joseph Kabila, and businessman Martin Fayulu.
His comments were echoed by French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who said that the election results did not match what was witnessed during the vote count.
Either way, the stage now seems set for the exit of Kabila, who has ruled the resource-rich Central African country with an iron fist since 2001.
This election had been deemed a pivotal moment for the Congo, determining whether the beleaguered country could transition into a true democracy.
But the vote came at a difficult time for the nation. The eastern Congo is battling the country’s worst outbreak of Ebola, and violent protests erupted after the country’s Independent National Election Commission announced that voters in the Ebola-stricken cities of Beni, Butembo and Yumbi — opposition strongholds — would not cast their ballots until March for security reasons. It is unclear now how those late votes will affect the result.
Furthermore, before the election Kabila, 47, was criticized for implementing electronic voting machines in a country with sparse access to power. A fire in the capital of Kinshasa weeks before the election destroyed 80% of the city’s electronic voting machines, doing nothing to assuage concerns around voting methods.
After the vote, as Congo’s population of 80 million people awaited the highly anticipated outcome, on January 1, the internet and text messaging services were shut down. President Kabila told Reuters this was done to preserve public order after “fictitious results” were circulated on social media.
This week, riot police were deployed in Kinshasa in anticipation of mass violence from citizens. The US State Department Wednesday advised all American citizens in the country to leave.
Tshisekedi, 55, was not expected to win the election.
In the run-up to the landmark vote, speculation had mounted that Kabila would install Shadary as a placeholder president, while he ruled from the shadows until 2023 when he could rerun for the presidency.
Under the DRC’s constitution, a president can only serve for two terms. Kabila’s second term expired in 2016, meaning this election was long overdue.
Congo is blessed with huge deposits of precious minerals such as diamonds, gold, and tantalum, and while in power Kabila accumulated vast wealth. From 1999 to 2002 alone, the Kabila regime transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the state-mining sector to private companies under its control, according to the United Nations.
Now Kabila’s status in the country, which produces about two-thirds of the world’s cobalt, looks unsure. But Congo’s political past is full of unexpected outcomes.
The country’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba was executed by firing squad in 1961, as military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko came to power in a coup.
After three decades of iron-fist rule, Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 by rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who was assassinated a few years later. Joseph Kabila inherited the presidency from his father and has since presided over the decline of the nation.