03 01 14 Aljazeera – Joseph Kabila: Losing his grip on power?

The Kinshasa attacks, which began on Monday when a group of youths
armed with sticks and machetes interrupted a live broadcast on national
television during a popular breakfast chat show, also targeted the miltary
headquarters of the elite Republican Guard and the international airport at
N'Djili.
Colonel Shema, speaking from the miltary headquarters, Camp Tshatsi,
said attackers entered the army camp and burnt a car before being countered by
commandos.
Further attacks on an airport in Maniema province and in the
mining city of Lubumbashi – the capital of Katanga – led to a goverment
crackdown that resulted in more than 100 dead, including eight soldiers, and
prompted President Kabila to interrupt his Katanga vacation and return to
Kinshasa, where he called on the nation to "exercise vigilance" during a
televised speech.
The Congolese rumour mill – known locally as radio
trottoire, or street radio – accelerated into a turbo-charged mass of conspiracy
theories and speculation, with some suggesting a power struggle was underway
after a change of leadership in the security services.
Others saw the attack
as futile. Michael Sakombi, a Congolese diplomat who is currently in Katanga,
said the young men who attacked the TV station were unprepared. "They even
lacked phone credit to call the guy who was coordinating them. So for me, it was
like a desperate act, not a very professional act," Sakombi said.
Politicised
revivalist pastors are a common phenomenon in a nation where power is fragmented
and people feel increasingly disenfranchised. Militias are a force to reckon
with in Congolese politics, and the religious dimension appears to have given
the attackers an almost kamikaze-like sense of daring.
The Katangan
dimension
Mukungubila comes from the same village in Katanga as President
Kabila, and while the pastor's support-base is small, some analysts believe he
has links to wider unrest in the province, which has traditionally been a key
stronghold for the president.
Katanga is the economic powerhouse of Congo,
producing about 70 percent of the central government's tax revenue. But since
independence from Belgium in 1960, the region has been prone to unrest and
secession attempts. Politics in Katanga are often based on ethnic identity,
pitting its poorer northern part against the province's resource-rich southern
section.
Laurent Kabila, the father of the current president, promoted
"mayi-mayi" militias, local armed groups, in northern Katanga as a buffer
against Rwanda. In recent years some of these militias have been revived, and a
secessionist group called Kata Katanga ("Cut Katanga") briefly achieved
notoriety in March 2013 when 400 fighters armed with little more than magical
amulets and machetes marched into the provincial capital, Lubumbashi, waving
Katangan independence flags.
Kata Katanga is led by Gedeon Kyungu Mutanga,
who escaped from prison in 2011 and is allegedly receiving weapons and funding
from high-ranking military contacts as well as from Congolese living abroad.
Civil society groups in Katanga have alleged that support for the secessionists
even comes from some within Kabila's government.
These armed groups have been
responsible for the dispacement of hundreds of thousands of people. According to
a report by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
"Mayi-Mayi fighters are accused of killings, abductions, sexual violence, and
forced recruitments, notably of children, and pillaging and destruction of
property". Yet the UN only has around 500 troops in Katanga, a region almost the
size of France.
Katanga's governor has also defied the central government: In
a show of strength, Moise Katumbi recently defied a demand from the central
government to ban the export of copper and cobalt concentrates. Katumbi claimed
that he had not been consulted about the ban and told Reuters news agency that
any attempts to enforce it "would have serious consequences".
A tenuous hold
on power
All of this demonstrates Joseph Kabila's increasingly tenuous hold
on power. The International Crisis Group has suggested that Kabila relies on
"governance by substitution" – security supplied by outside forces, social
services supplied by civil groups and infrastructure provided by China and
private enterprise.
The central government's power will be further weakened
if Kabila moves ahead with plans for decentralisation, in which a degree of
economic and political power would be devolved to the provinces. Katanga is set
to be the guinea-pig for the decentralisation experiment, which has already
caused fractures in the province and within Kabila's political
party.
Decentralisation has strong support from Congo's international
backers, but not everyone sees it as a panacea for the nation's problems, with
some warning that it could strengthen the hold of regional strongmen.
While
expressing surprise at the group's ability to organise the attacks, Alex Ntung,
a Congolese political analyst, said Mukungubila's group has links to another
militant religious congregation headed by the South Africa-based "Bishop
Elysee", and to political networks in the European diaspora and Lubumbashi, all
of which share the same anti-Rwandan, anti-Kabila ideology.
As sporadic
gunfire continues in Lubumbashi, Comfort Ero – the Africa Programme Director at
the International Crisis Group – suggests that Joseph Kabila's support has
become even weaker in Katanga. "If we are going to see any real attempt to
launch a political attack against Kabila, it is going to come from there," she
said.