Congo Watch: This Is Unacceptable

The horrendous deaths of the 24 Pakistani United Nations’ peacekeepers in war-torn Somalia, in 1993, had long escaped me, until I read about today’s massacre of some 14 Tanzanian peacekeeping troops in the grossly and absurdly named Democratic Republic of The Congo (See “Bodies of 14 UN Peacekeepers Flown to Tanzania” Modernghana.com 12/11/17). This tragic act of barbarism threatens to rip my heart and soul apart because it also eerily recalls the apocalyptic era of the early 1960s’s Congo-Zaire-Congo.At least two of yours truly’s maternal uncles saw action during the infamous Kinshasa Crisis that culminated in the brutal assassination of then-Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, in what was then widely speculated to have been orchestrated by agents of “Western Imperialism.” At least those were the watchwords while I was growing up in that decade of my birth.

In reality, the Congo Crisis never ended. Rather, it was uneasily stabilized by the Western-backed intervention of that country’s military, led by Col. Joseph-Desiré Mobutu for some three decades, culminating in another broad-fronted bout of civil war in the late 1990s that neatly swept the Mobutu dictatorship off the scene. This is where the leadership skills of the executive operatives of the African Union (AU) ought to be focused, together with the material resources available to this continent-wide equivalent of the United Nations Organization (presently abbreviated as the UN). Of course, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) would also morph into the AU, a supposedly more cohesive and effective prelude to thetotal and organic unification of the second-largest landmass in the world. What we really see on the ground, as it were, however, is something else altogether.

Instead, what we see these days are pointless and vacuous quibbling over whether the recent military intervention in Zimbabwe that culminated in the auspicious removal of 93-year-old President Robert Gabriel Mugabe was a coup d’état or not. For some time now, the democratic political culture of the Congo (formerly Zaire) – which is reckoned to be about the size of the entirety of Western Europe – has literally come to a standstill, as the 46-year-old President Joseph Kabila, who inherited his presidency from his assassinated father, Laurent-Desiré Kabila, refuses to go into the proverbial political sunset quietly. Presently, an election that was supposed to have ushered in a new leadership appears to be in danger, as the country’s European Union donors have sternly warned the outgoing Mr. Kabila against the harassment and around-the-clock persecution of his party’s political opponents.

What is clear to any critical observer of the Congolese political scene, is the dire need for this vast country with a lot of natural and human-power resources but abjectly poor leadership to be organically downsized along ethnic and cultural lines into several autonomous polities in order to make it more governable, stable and prosperous. Indeed, I was more than a bit flabbergasted to discover that the Democratic Republic of The Congo, with a population size of 80 million, nearly three times that of Ghana’s population of some 30 million, and war-wracked for some three decades now, has a literacy rate that is slightly higher than that of the first African nation to be granted its sovereignty from Western colonial rule south of the Sahara. Of course, while it has not lapsed into a warring situation, the caliber of Ghanaian leadership does not seem to have registered any significant advantage over that of the DRC.

In economic terms, however, Ghana, with a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) a little upwards of $1,500 (USD), for 2016, is more than three times the size of the DRC, which has a per capita GDP of approximately $450 (USD). The difference here, obviously, is the abject lack of a purposeful and progressive leadership, which has meant that the level of corruption at the highest echelons of governance may yet be without compare. And, well, as it is to be expected, it is the resource-rich eastern provinces of that country, and the most politically unstable, that are also the most impoverished. It is these bread-basket regions that may also be in prompt need of either fiscal and administrative autonomy or complete separation from the rest of King Leopold’s corporatist conception of a colonial polity.

Very likely, the leaders and citizens of the less well-endowed provinces of the country may logically and naturally be averse to the all-too-practically-savvy redefinition of the geopolitical contours of the Congo because even as one of my colleagues, a specialist of Maghrebian and Mediterranean history, recently pointed out, these colonial boundaries have a curious, if also a bizarre, way of becoming so deeply encoded into the psyche of the erstwhile subject of European colonialism as to seem to be a natural or organic part of the identity of the newly “liberated” African. I suppose what Richard D. Goodman meant is that so acculturated to the colonial-era demarcated boundaries has the postcolonial African become that any politically constructive attempt to alter these purely Euro-convenient colonial-era boundaries may very well result in the former subject of European imperialism’s lapsing into a form of geopolitical identity crisis, decidedly a symptom of what may be psychological characterized as PTSD or post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Whatever the outcome of next year’s election in this humongous tract of mineral-rich landed property wouldn’t matter much, if the AU bwanas in Addis Ababa do not purposefully haunch down to do some serious thinking about the future shape of the DRC and other equally and similarly troubled spots on the continent. I don’t quite recall the remarkable difference that the tragic and brutal deaths of the 24 Pakistani peacekeepers made in the political fortunes of the people of Somalia. Very likely not much. Or maybe a little or much that is worthwhile. It is not my judgment call to make. But, of course, by the end of the day, some way or avenue must be found to stanch this barbaric and incessant bloodletting and allow our people in that part of the continent lead more meaning and noble lives.

In the same vein, we hope that the brutal massacre of the 14 Tanzanian peacekeepers, allegedly by some Ugandan Muslim rebels, would ultimately redound to the good fortune of the largely defenseless citizens of the Kivu region of the Congo, whom these “dead heroes” were assigned to protect. I don’t want to hold my breath in vain.

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