zimfinalpush
1 Dec, 2006.
Congratulations to President Kabila and the Congolese people!
On Monday 27 November the Supreme Court of the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC) announced that having examined the eight objections lodged with the Court by the losing presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba and his party, the MLC, alleging election irregularities, it found the objections to be without substance.
It therefore confirmed the results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission on 15 November, following the 29 October Presidential second-round elections, which reflected that Joseph Kabila had won 58.05% of the votes, and Jean-Pierre Bemba, 41.95%. Accordingly, it declared that Joseph Kabila, was duly and democratically elected as Head of State of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Two days after the Supreme Court announced its decision, the losing candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba, having met with his MLC colleagues, expressed dissatisfaction with this decision, charging that the Court was biased.
However, and of great importance, he explained that he and his party would exercise their right as the republican opposition, acting within the institutions born of the Congolese democratic process, to use peaceful and constitutional means to promote their perspective for the reconstruction and development of the DRC.
On 29 October, the Congolese electorate also voted to elect the provincial legislatures. Preparations are therefore being made to convene the elected members of these important institutions of the new DRC, formally to constitute the provincial legislatures. Once they are convened, the legislatures will then elect the representatives who will serve as members of the second chamber of the National Parliament, the Senate.
This process, which hopefully will be concluded during the month of December, will mark the last step in terms of constituting the elected national bodies prescribed by the Constitution of the DRC. As of today, the DRC now has an elected President and an elected National Assembly.
We expect that President Kabila will be sworn in as President on 6 December.
This will open the way for him to appoint a Prime Minister from among the Members of Parliament, who will then proceed to compose the new Government of the DRC. December 2006 should therefore stand out as the month when the DRC will inaugurate its new, elected President, its new, elected Government and its new, elected Senate, and convene the critical first sessions of the National Assembly.
The month of December should therefore conclude a very important phase in the Congolese transition such that the Congolese people can, at last, and after many decades, say that they have put in place both legislatures and an executive born of their will, and not imposed on them by those with access to and capable of the use of force against the people.
In due course the historic importance of these developments in the DRC will become clear to all of us as Africans. We will come to appreciate the enormous effort and the extraordinary will to succeed that made it possible for the leaders and the people of the DRC to take their country to where it is today, when it has recaptured from the clutches of a disastrous past the right of the great Congolese masses to determine their destiny in conditions of democracy, national unity, peace and stability.
Once more we extend our congratulations to President Joseph Kabila on his election as the first popularly mandated Head of State of the DRC after many decades. We salute him for the contribution he and his colleagues have made to the success of the challenging mission to bring into being the new DRC.
We also congratulate Jean-Pierre Bemba for his acceptance of the historical outcome that has given him and his colleagues the possibility to consolidate and strengthen the Congolese democratic order, and expand the possibility of the Congolese people to define their future, by playing their role as a loyal republican opposition to those mandated by the people to rule.
Similarly, we salute him for the contribution he and his colleagues have made to the success of the challenging mission to bring into being the new DRC.
We also salute the various formations and the leaders who guided the DRC through its transition, weathering many storms, including continuing armed violence, to the point the country has now reached, when it can proudly and justly claim its place as one of the largest democracies on our continent.
We must also salute the United Nations which has played and continues to play a critical role in the various processes that have enabled the Congolese people to make history, standing tall today as a messenger of hope, communicating the message that Africa is firmly on its way towards its rebirth.
What the people of the DRC have done communicates a message of a bright future for all their neighbours, and the imperative to seize the moment, to build a new neighbourhood of friendship and shared prosperity for the peoples of the DRC on the one hand, and those of the Republic of Congo and Angola, Zambia and Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan and the Central African Republic, on the other.
Our warmest congratulations go to the Congolese masses. Despite the painful disappointments of many decades, these great masses did not lose confidence in the capacity of their nation to pull itself out of the abyss.
That confidence and the determination to succeed were amply demonstrated when millions voted in a referendum to approve the Constitution, and returned to the polls to elect the President, the National Assembly and the Provincial Legislatures. In their millions, the Congolese people have made the unequivocal statement that:
* they love and yearn for peace;
* they are thirsty for liberty and democracy;
* they look forward to national unity and reconciliation;
* they are confident that they will regain their dignity as a nation;
* they foresee a future of development and freedom from poverty;
* they want to see their country at peace with its neighbours, cooperating with them for mutual benefit;
* they visualise their country standing in the front ranks of the forces that are striving to achieve Africa's Renaissance.
Over the years we have, as South Africans, grown close to the Congolese people and developed a strong feeling of sisterhood, brotherhood and comradeship with them. Today there are few in our country, who are not conscious of the reality that our future is intimately related to the future of the Congolese people.
We have done what we could to travel the hard road to democracy and peace together with, and side-by-side with the Congolese people, refusing to give up because of difficulties along the way. For many years now, we have been inspired by the confidence that any people, in this case the Congolese, who could produce an African titan such as Patrice Lumumba, could not but harbour within themselves the innate strength to emerge as a winning African nation, whatever the difficulties.
Speaking at a conference in Chantilly, Virginia in the United States in April 1997, nine years ago, we said: "We are privileged to be witness to a gripping and epoch making contest which assumes many forms and involves many and all layers among the people of Zaire, to give a new birth to their country.
"As Africans, we have a vision, a hope, a prayer about what will come in the end. We see a new Zaire, perhaps with a new name, a Zaire which shall be democratic, peaceful, prosperous, a defender of human rights, an exemplar of what the new Africa should be, occupying the geographic space that it does, at the heart of our Africa.
"Much is now written about Zaire. Daily events assume proportions of permanence. The confounding ebbs and flows of social conflict are seen as defining moments. And yet, as Africans, we would like to believe that we know that, at the end, what all of us will see, thanks to the wisdom of the people of Zaire themselves, is not the heart of darkness, but the light of a new African star.
"Once more, out of Africa, out of these towns which have joined the vocabulary of places that are part of our common knowledge, Goma, Kisangani, Lubumbashi and Kinshasa, a new miracle slouches towards its birth."
Speaking in Johannesburg in September 1998 at the African Renaissance Conference, we said: "The end of a decades-old neo-colonial regime in the then Zaire had raised hopes that this equally important African country would itself seize the possibility created by this historic change to position itself as a leading fighter for the renewal of our Continent, with important positive results for the whole of Africa.
"Most regrettably, we now seem immersed in a situation of conflict which, among other things, has brought back to the national agenda of that country the enemy to progressive change represented by ethnic divisions and antagonisms. It is however clear that in the same way that we cannot avoid it, neither can the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo do without that process of fundamental transformation in the interests of the people, which constitutes the core of the vision of an African Renaissance."
Addressing the joint session of the Transitional Parliament of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Kinshasa in January 2004, I said:
"I am confident that ahead of us is a period of hope. I have seen it in the streets of Kinshasa, since we arrived yesterday. I have seen people lining the streets, waving with smiles on their faces, as we drive by. And I think they do so because they think that the only reason we could have met is not to plan war, not to perpetuate corruption, but to find ways and means by which we ensure that their lives change for the better.
"That is an expectation we cannot disappoint. It is an expectation, I am certain, we will not disappoint. We have to act with regard to one another as brothers and sisters. We have to act in relationship to one another as peers. It must therefore be possible for the people of the Congo to say to the people of South Africa, that we believe that you are doing wrong things, without any fear that the South Africans would turn around and say: These are internal matters. It must be possible for the people of South Africa to say to the people of the Congo: brothers and sisters: you are doing wrong things, without that being read as interference in internal affairs."
On 13 August 1998, we spoke at an event in Midrand, South Africa, hosted by our public broadcaster, the SABC, to promote the African Renaissance. On that occasion we said:
"The call for Africa's renewal, for an African Renaissance is a call to rebellion. We must rebel against the tyrants and the dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people. We must rebel against the ordinary criminals who murder, rape and rob, and conduct war against poverty, ignorance and the backwardness of the children of Africa.
"Surely, there must be politicians and business people, youth and women activists, trade unionists, religious leaders, artists and professionals from the Cape to Cairo, from Madagascar to Cape Verde, who are sufficiently enraged by Africa's condition in the world to want to join the mass crusade for Africa's renewal. It is to these that we say, without equivocation, that to be a true African is to be a rebel in the cause of the African Renaissance, whose success in the new century and millennium is one of the great historic challenges of our time.
"Let the voice of the Senegalese, Sheik Anta Diop, be heard:
" 'The African who has understood us is the one who, after reading of our works, would have felt a birth in himself, of another person, impelled by an historical conscience, a true creator, a Promethean carrier of a new civilisation and perfectly aware of what the whole earth owes to his ancestral genius in all the domains of science, culture and religion.
" 'Today each group of people, armed with its rediscovered or reinforced cultural identity, has arrived at the threshold of the post industrial era.
An atavistic, but vigilant, African optimism inclines us to wish that all nations would join hands in order to build a planetary civilisation instead of sinking down to barbarism.'"
What has happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo must give each Congolese, and indeed each African, a feeling of a birth in himself or herself, of another person, impelled by an historical conscience, a true creator, a Promethean carrier of a new civilisation.
Because of what they have done, the Congolese people have created the possibility for their country, and enhanced the capacity of our continent, to help build a planetary civilisation, instead of allowing humanity to sink into the shameless barbarism that every month claims the lives of thousands of innocent people in the streets of Baghdad and other Iraqi localities.
Because they dared to rebel against the tyrants and the dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people, the great masses of the Democratic Republic of Congo have served as a powerful propellant that will accelerate Africa's advance towards her renaissance.
Thabo Mbeki
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