presser in Kinshasa, June 4, 2013)
***
The designation earlier last week by the "religious groups" component
of the DRC civil society of Monsieur l'Abbé Apollinaire Malumalu as
chairman of the revamped Independent National Electoral Commisson
(CENI) was confirmed Friday, June 7, by the National Assembly.
(I couldn't think of or find a satisfactory English equivalent for
"Monsieur l'Abbé," as a Catholic priest without an affiliation to a
specific priestly order is deferentially called in Francophone
countries. Neither "Abbot" nor "Don" would do--by the way, a VOA
report last weekend on this story kept referring wrongly to Malumalu
as "Don Malumalu"!)
Paradoxically, though Abbé Malumalu is a Catholic priest, his
appointment as CENI chairman is a major blow to the Congolese Catholic
Church, especially to Kinshasa Laurent Cardinal Monsengwo. (Find out
why below.)
Malumalu's rise from the ashes is also a worrisome unanticipated
development for the opposition.
Abbé Malumalu, who turrns 52 on July 22, is a member of the powerful
ethnic Nande group of North Kivu Province.
Up to his confirmation as CENI chair, he was acting as the DRC
government expert at the Kampala negotiations with M23.
In a previous incarnation, Malumalu was the chairman of the
Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) that oversaw the 2006 general
elections.
At the time, the opposition accused him of rigging the presidential
election on behalf of the incumbent Joseph Kabila, in the often
violent and bloody contest that pitted the latter against Jean-Pierre
Bemba--with more than 600 deads in Kinshasa.
Fast forwad to... now... and those accusations are the very same
accusations leveled at Malumalu's successor at the helm of the
electoral commission, Reverend Daniel Ngoy Mulunda.
In the post-November 2011 general elections deleterious period, with
the remake of the post-2006 frenzied clamor growing both domestically
and incoming from abroad for amending the electoral law and reshaping
the electoral commission in order to avoid rigging and to reflect the
actual forces of current political stakeholders, the stage was set for
yet another electoral bill.
A bill lobbied and amended to death by international donors and the opposition.
Coming full circle, if that, in a vicious circle of sorts. Either
pardon the tautology or think of the "back to the future" franchise.
As usual, after a long-drawn-out cycle of nasty mutual mudslinging
between the opposition and the ruling Presidential Majority (acronymed
"MP") both on the floor of the National Assembly and on TV political
shows, parliament finally voted the bill.
The new electoral law was finally signed by President Kabila on
Saturday, April 27, after languishing for a while on his desk.
As it is well-known that the devil is in the details, and as all
Congolese opposition legiskators are self-proclaimed born-again
Chistian to a man or woman, they had delved into those details in
order to deal the rigging devil, and hence the majority, one
collective fatal blow!
So much so that this new electoral law is quite specific about
anything under the Sun: about the provincial and gender balance as
well as the precise make-up of the 6-member strong executive committee
and the other 7 menbers who'd be sitting in the plenum.
The legislators went even all the way fractal into those specific
details: of the 13 members of CENI: 6 members have to be members of
the ruling Presidential Majority (2 of whom have to be women); 4
members from the opposition (one of whom has to be a woman); and the 3
remaining members have to issue from civil society--a major
requirement lobbied by international donors.
To avoid any political interference in the designation of these
members at the level of the Natuonal Assembly, each entity had to
choose its own designee after an internal vote--the National Assembly
having only the simple role of rubber-stamping those choices already
made by the caucuses of those various groups.
What's more, the new electoral law also unambigupusly requires that
the chaitman of the electoral commision be a member of the subgroup
"religious groups" of the civil society group!
To further balance things out, during the drafting of the bill, the
opposition was banking on the 3 members of the civil society in the
electoral commussion to be empathetic to the interests of the
opposition.
It is abundantly clear that since the time of the late Frédéric
Cardinal Etsau, who had signed on his deathbed a letter claiming that
Bemba had won the 2006 presidential election, Kinshasa Catholic Church
is the bastion of the opposition.
The political outrage of Cardinsl Etsau was nearly duplicated by
Cardinal Monsengwo when he said in the wake of the 2011 presidential
election that the CENI results didn't reflect the "justice" of the
ballot box!
Despite its importance, however, the Catholic Church was just only one
element among 7 other major religious groups of the country making up
that sub-category of civil society. The other 7 majors being the
Protestants, the Orthodox, the Muslims, etc.
And, by mid-May, the Catholic Church and the opposition started to
stridently sound desperate when it was emerging that the 7 other
religious were putting out feelers about the need of recalling
Malumalu as chair of the electoral commission.
He was a polymath, these leaders claimed, holding a doctoral degree in
political science from the University of.Grenoble-II and a host of
otber advanced degrees from the University of Lyon. He was highly
esteemed in France where he was decorated by the government for the
electoral work he'd done in the Congo in 2006!
That's when Cardinal Monsengwo chose to strike, via the proxy of one
his creatures, Monsieur l'Abbé Félicien Mwanama, one of the
secretaries of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops of the
Congo (CENCO), who, on May 13, told told baffled jpurnos at a
poorly-prepared and hastily-convened that Catholic priests and members
of religious who'd join CENI would be infringing Canonical law and
would therefore be sanctioned accordingly.
The bafflement of journalists was all the more profound as Cardinal
Monsengwo has been dabbling in politics since 1990, when he chaired
for two years the transitional Sovereign National Conference, before
that body was dissolved by Mobutu.
Besides, pressed by journalists to tell which ecclesiastical
authority--between CENCO and the hierarchical authority--would be
sanctioning the offending priest, Abbé Mwanama meekly conceded that it
was the latter.
No luck there for Cardinal Malula, for Malumalu falls under the
juridiction of the Archdiocese of Beni-Lubero in North Kivu headed by
the maverick Mgr Melchisedek Sikuli, who will never sanction the new
CENI chairman in this lifetime.
To make a long story short, Malumalu didn't stoop to answer to the
taunting shrills of Cardinal Monsengwo.
Not then and not after his appointment as CENI chairman, when the
indefatigable Monsengwo had a letter penned by him read at mass this
past Sunday in all Kinshasa parishes in which he's lashing out at
priests dabbling in politics!
Incredible!
***
PHOTO CREDITS: John Bompengo via radiookapi.net
