MOISE KATUMBI, a cowboy-hat-wearing, football-club-owning, multimillionaire governor, is probably the second most powerful man in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the president, Joseph Kabila. Mr Katumbi has stood by the president’s side since he was first elected in 2006, delivering votes and support from Congo’s richest copper-producing region, Katanga.
That all changed last week when Mr Katumbi announced he was leaving the ruling party, accusing it of trying to twist the country’s constitution so that Mr Kabila could remain in power beyond his second and supposedly final five-year term, which ends in December 2016.
“I had to leave to save our young democracy,” Mr Katumbi says. If that sounds grandiose, Congolese democracy is indeed in need of saving. Congo’s democratic experiment is in danger of collapse, despite the presence of a United Nations peacekeeping force, and despite the tens of billions of dollars spent by the international community to prop up Mr Kabila and his enormous, rickety country since the end in 2003 of the savage wars that triggered and followed the downfall of the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
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Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1MWudHW
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