AU intervention holds hope for DRC

The African Union has, in a rare decision, demanded that the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s government suspend the announcement of final results of the deeply disputed and controversial presidential election.
We welcome this decision, from the onset, as an important step in ensuring electoral justice on the continent. Free and fair elections in Africa are a rare commodity. In many cases, elections have resulted in violence with many people losing their lives but have also been used to entrench a culture of impunity and bad governance.

While most African countries are run on aspirations and proclamations of democracy, it is very rare to see a peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to another and in a free and fair electoral process. A handful have achieved this feat, including Ghana and South Africa.
That the African Union that has been largely called a “club of dictators” is making such a move is in itself a milestone. We think this represents a shift, however small, that the big men of the continent are willing to ask the hard questions of one of their own.
While the DRC election was won by an opposition candidate, emerging information suggests that the announcement was triggered by the outgoing government of embattled president Joseph Kabila to retain some control after it became apparent that his preferred candidate had badly lost the polls.

Martin Fayulu, an opposition candidate tipped to have won the polls, accuses Mr Kabila’s government of falsifying the results to declare Mr Félix Tshisekedi the winner. Figures compiled by the influential Catholic Church’s election observers found that Fayulu won 61 per cent of the vote.
Also, two sets of leaked data show that Fayulu won the election by a landslide, according to an investigation published by Radio France International, Britain’s Financial Times, and TV5 Monde working with the Congo Research Group.

In the set of data, attributed to DRC’s electoral commission and representing 86 per cent of the votes, Fayulu won 59.4 per cent while Tshisekedi received 19 per cent.
We hope that pressure from African Union members, the rest of the international community and the Congolese people will have an impact and deliver a credible process to select the next leader as Mr Kabila leaves power.
The Congolese people have made their wishes known and it is about time the African continent and the rest of the world supported their aspiration.