Congolese democracy, Congolese swag

We returned to Bukavu on January 19 after a month away to find SMS and internet blocked by the government in response to widespread protests. What had happened was: in early January the lower chamber of parliament (analgous to the U.S. House of Representatives) passed a new electoral law requiring a census prior to the next elections, scheduled for 2016. There hasn’t been a census in DRC since 1984, so it’s not a bad idea. However, most experts agreed that a census in DRC could easily take up to five (!) years (!), so many Congolese saw the law as an attempt by President Kabila to delay the elections and give himself a third term (the constitution states that two terms are the maximum allowed). By January 23, the upper chamber (analogous to the U.S. Senate) had to decide whether to confirm the law. Hence the protests, which were tweeted under #telema (a call to “arise” or “stand up” in Lingala).
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/21/-sp-congo-telema-protest-twitter

In Bukavu, students laid tires across one of the main roads and set them on fire. On a couple occasions civil society declared ville morte, no work, no school, a sort of general strike to mark their disapproval. Across the country, over 40 people were killed when police and other state security forces responded to protests.
Now here’s what’s incredible: it worked. The upper chamber did not confirm the law. The people’s voice, it would seem, was heard.
When I say this to Congolese friends, they say, yeah, sure, it worked this time, but there will be many more attempts by Kabila for a troisième mandat.
The next attempt, some say, was to schedule local elections (at the sub-province level) ahead of the national (including presidential) elections. Local elections have *never* been held in DRC. They could involve up to 7,275 electoral districts, compared to 266 during the last provincial elections in 2006. That ain’t gonna be easy, to say the least. And if they are delayed due to logistical or financial constraints, then Kabila stays in power.
And now, just last Sunday, security forces arrested a U.S. diplomat along with pro-democracy activists, journalists and musicians following a news conference in the capital Kinshasa. “The arrested activists included Fadel Barro, a member of the Senegalese collective of hip-hop artists "Y en a Marre", which helped organize protests against former President Abdoulaye Wade's bid for a third term in 2012. A member of the grassroots political group "Balai Citoyen", which played a leading role protests that toppled longtime Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore last year, was also detained.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/15/us-congodemocratic-arrests-idUSKBN0MB10120150315
More to come, I’m sure. Where does Kabila get these ideas? Here’s what Mark Twain wrote in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” in 1905:

They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the Powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign -- sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire -- sovereign absolute, irresponsible, above all law; trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter under foot; barring out all foreign traders but myself; restricting commerce to myself, through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates; seizing and holding the State as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private "swag" -- mine, solely mine -- claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves; their labor mine, with or without wage; the food they raise not their property but mine; the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land mine -- mine solely -- and gathered for me by the men, the women and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, mutilation and the halter.