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Are the private business interests of people close to the ruling party driving South Africa’s foreign policy in the DRC?
Does this explain Pretoria’s apparent reluctance to persuade President Joseph Kabila that after serving his constitutionally-limited two terms in office it’s now time to go?
Kabila has been stalling for many months, trying to find a plausible excuse not to vacate office.
His latest ruse has been to claim that the voters’ roll is out of date and has to be updated before elections can be held. That would take many months. Meanwhile he would stay in power.
This sparked street protests, climaxing on 19 September, the day Kabila was supposed to proclaim the elections, when over 50 people were killed in Kinshasa.
A month later an alarmed African Union (AU) brokered a deal between Kabila and the more pliable – and probably buyable – opposition parties and civil society groups, to postpone the elections until April 2018. In the meantime a transitional government of national unity, led by Kabila, would govern.
But the main opposition leaders and parties – including the veteran Etienne Tshisikedi, the rising political star Moise Katumbi and the Rassemblement movement – rejected the deal. So did the influential Catholic bishops.
They all said the deal left Kabila in office too long and did not oblige him not to run for president again in April 2018. They also want a level political playing field, including the lifting of spurious legal charges laid against Katumbi, the removal of restrictions on media and ensuring the electoral authority is properly independent.
Regional governments nonetheless endorsed the postponement deal.
Western powers have been more ambivalent. Tom Perriello, the US special envoy to the Great Lakes, told finweek that it was “a positive step” but also that “there was still work to be done in making it more inclusive”.
It’s clear that will require, at the very least, Kabila publicly declaring he will not run for president again.
Perriello said it was a “very positive step” that Kabila had recently asked the moderate Catholic bishops to continue with the dialogue.
Every effort had to be made to reach an urgent, broad consensus among key stakeholders over the next few weeks to avoid the “possibility of serious clashes on the street when Kabila’s mandate ended on the 19th of December”, he said.
Is South Africa throwing its full weight behind these efforts? Apparently not, despite the DRC being Pretoria’s largest foreign policy investment to date. It has poured billions of rand and man-hours into diplomacy, peacekeeping and development aid in the country over the past 20 years in an effort to stabilise it.
Yet the DRC’s neighbours are engaging Kabila more actively than SA seems to be doing.
Stephanie Wolters, a DRC expert at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria, is greatly encouraged that the DRC’s influential southern neighbour Angola – despite officially endorsing the October deal – is actively trying to avert a crisis by quietly trying to persuade Kabila to make further concessions.
Luanda is doing this not out of a great love of democracy but to ensure stability in the neighbourhood and avoid a situation that would see refugees pouring across the common border.
Western diplomats say that regional countries are either turning a blind eye to the crisis, leaving Kabila to make no concessions and forcefully put down the inevitable protests, or they are trying to persuade Kabila to “bully or buy off” the opposition, or they are backing a sustainable deal where he makes real concessions and allows fully democratic elections.
And they believe “South Africa is in the first camp”, i.e. is happy to leave Kabila to do what he feels he must to stay in power.
Why? Some Western governments suspect this is because people close to the presidency have personal business interests in the DRC that only Kabila can protect, so they need him to stay in power indefinitely.
What they have in mind, among others, are reports that emerged from the leak of the Panama Papers and follow-up news reports earlier this year that Kabila had given President Jacob Zuma’s nephew Khulubuse Zuma a stake in two oil fields in eastern DRC, estimated to be worth billions.
As a result, the Presidency is at odds with the wider South African business community, which backs a longer-term solution to the DRC problem, with Kabila stepping down to allow a peaceful, orderly and fully democratic transfer of power.
That should create a transparent and conducive business environment in which all businesses has an equal shot at prosperity.
Sound familiar? Do we detect a whiff of “state capture” of foreign policy too?
Peter Fabricius was foreign editor of the Independent Newspaper group for 20 years, writing on African and global issues. He has been writing weekly columns for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) since 2013.
This article originally appeared in the 24 November edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.
