Zaire: From the National Conference to the Federal Republic of the Congo?
Author(s)
Wamba-dia-Wamba, Ernest
Abstract
The paper addresses one of the most important and most debated issues in African development during the 1990s: how to build a democracy that is genuinely participatory, in the real sense of the word, and the preconditions for this process. The author gives a detailed insider’s account of the work of Zaire’s Sovereign National Conference, which ran intermittently from July 1991 to December 1992, and analyzes the intricate political game taking place behind the scene; a game which the protagonists advocating broad-based democratic solutions almost always lost to the ‘political class’, which first and foremost was interested in maintaining its privileges. The author also shows how the political class mostly discussed borrowed discourses, modeled along the ideological lines of the liberal and Christian Democratic parties of the West, which had very little relevance for the masses; how the so-called independent press, whose journalists were in fact “bought”, prevented political clarity from emerging; and how many democratically-minded politicians and policy-makers believed that placing good people in important positions in the State would promote democracy more successfully than building up a popular movement for democracy. Reflecting on this latter fundamental problem, the author poses the question: would the imperialist solution, based on forced removal of Mobutu, and Mobutu’s solution, based on the removal of Tshisekedi [his main competitor], be fundamentally different from the perspective of the people’s interests?
