News and vignettes
Watching the results come in… There was little prior announcement, but word got around and people tuned in their television sets and radios.
As the results came out, a group of men crowded into a hairdressers in pro-Tshesekedi district of Katuba in Lubumbashi. Breath was drawn in over gritted teeth when Kabila won a province. Smiles broke out when Tshesekedi came through.
When Tshesekedi was announced to have won only 7.07% of Katanga’s vote, I was told “impossible”.
Police deployed in central Lubumbashi. The results have been postponed a second time.
The provisional results of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidential elections were due today. In the centre of Lubumbashi, the main square was quiet. Usually abuzz with people after work, fear of unrest caused people to stay away. The rain didn’t help.
The giant screen outside the main post-office was showing advertisements. The guys in charge said they would not be showing the results here. The cinema opposite was closing early.
Driving to a bar usually bustling with the after-work crowd, a few danced indoors, but tonight the bar-tenders would not be busy. The streets outside were quiet.
And then came the announcement that the results would be postponed.
Results from around Lubumbashi had been arriving at the CENI for several days, and the laborious task of collating results, verifying them and compiling them for Kinshasa was one I did not envy.
The centre was ill-prepared for the volume of material it would receive, not aided by the two burned out shells of the pick-ups attacked on voting day that sat in the courtyard for the first couple of days.
Sacks of ballots were stacked outside, under the cover of tarpaulin as rain soaked the ground. Days later, there would still be papers hanging out to dry.
Election observers from the European Union and the Carter Centre had complained of not being free to question election officials on their work, something they said was vital to their monitoring. As they voiced their complaints, access was increased. I was certainly never prevented from doing my work.
Driving past the offices of the Union pour la Democratie et le Progrès Sociale (UDPS - Union for Democracy and Social Progress), people were outside celebrating.
A blackboard outside the provincial party headquarters proclaimed victory for the presidential candidate, Etienne Tshesekedi, based on partial results.
Except that no partial results had been released, and indeed publication of such results was illegal under Congolese law.
Tshesekedi had already declared himself president before the elections began, but did offer the strongest challenge to incumbent president, Joseph Kabila.
His supporters outside the headquarters were clutching print-outs downloaded from the internet, which appeared to be tallies of voting centre results compiled by observer groups. None could prove the veracity of these results, but everyone I spoke to agreed that they were sure that these indicated that he would win the elections.
