FROM LEOPOLD TO TSHISEKEDI WITH BLOOD

President Tshisekedi must lead Africa against all forms of victimisation and terrorism, writes Okello Oculi

King Leopold ruled Belgium carved out by Europe’s barbaric 1810-1848 tribal and religious wars. His extermination of15 million people in the Congo River basin was a familiar use of power.

President Dwight Eisenhower earned military honours from slaughter fields of Europe’s barbarism during the 1938-1945 War. His instructions to American officials

to murder Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s charismatic prime minister, was a habitual reflex. That the decision would turn Congo into a cauldron of civil wars and mass deaths was irrelevant.

Belgian military officers incited a mutiny which led to Joseph Desire Mobutu emerging as the local tool for the overthrow and death of Lumumba. Belgian officials had between 1959 and 1960, sprouted scores of political parties with ethnic loyalties to counter Patrice Lumumba’s countrywide appeal.

Mobutu used his attendance of a military school to read Belgian newspaper; probably enabling him to be a better schemer than Lumumba when faced with a shattered one-week old independence.

In 1965, he decreed the single ‘’Movement for the Popular Revolution (MPR)’’ which created branches into rural areas. Like Belgian colonial rule, local officials were appointed and not elected by local communities. Mobutu sent money which military and civilian officials shared down the chain of power.

Military officials at the village level seized yam tubers, chicken, beans, salt and smoked fish and ‘’bushmeat’’ from traders and women on market days. Mobutu’s machine ensured loyalty, while leaving those with suspicious political ambitions vulnerable to being dismissed for stealing salaries of lower officials.

Mobutu was also accused of inciting attacks against Tutsi immigrants –the ‘’Banyamulenge” when their kin were massacred in Rwanda. He crushed students when they criticised his political and cultural engineering, including: the use of only ethnic names and banning Euro-American pop music. ‘’Congolese Music’’ seized Africa’s skies from Mombasa to Bamako. The name of the country was changed from ‘’Congo’’ to ‘’Zaire’’.

These aspects of Mobutu’s cultural rebirth or ‘’Authenticity’’ were easy diet for Laurent Kabila’s revolutionary appetite. Reinstating foreign religious names won him support from the Catholic Church. Descendants of the KONGO kingdom were happy to see Mobutu’s spiteful ‘’ZAIRE’’ drowned in the Congo river.

His war against Mobutu came along with armies from Uganda and Rwanda with rapacious appetites for the country’s natural resources. Conquering armies ransack and loot property and peoples they defeat. Armies of Rwanda and Uganda were fascinated by the prospect of repeating Congo’s colonisation by tiny Belgium; their small countries ruling a vast African territory. Kabila’s subsequent assassination was blamed on Rwanda’s agents furious with his turning against ‘hands that gave birth to his power’.

A zone of ethnic massacres, rape, forced recruitment of children to kill with guns, pillage of property and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people has replaced the social trust, social peace, and sense of national citizenship which Mobutu invested a lot of personal charisma into building. South Kivu, North Kivu and north-eastern Congo remain soaked in blood and death in the way King Leopold had tortured them.

Mobutu renamed himself as ‘’Sese Seko Kukubendu Wa Zabanga’’. Tshisekedi competes well with his ‘’Felix-Antoine Tshikedi Tshilombo’’. The Catholic clergy, however, opposed his election, awarding 60 per cent of votes in 2018 election to wealthy Martin Fayulu. Joseph Kabila inherited Mobutu’s use of state money to feed political patronage but competed in an election populated by 599 political parties, most of them ethnic followers of a leader with money. NGOs numbering 5000 ‘’rarely act for common social benefit’’.

In 2016 Kabila extended social welfare with ‘’a daily allowance for women during maternity leave’’. The 86 per cent of the population in the ‘’informal sector’’ and subsistence agriculture are excluded.

Leopold killed to loot Congo’s resources. In 2000, a United Nations Committee accused 83 multinational corporations of arming killers who help them to loot. Even the richest 10 per cent of Congolese own a mere 32 per cent, while the poorest 10 per cent take a wretched two per cent of Congo’s GDP. War is a tool for looting the Congo.

Tshisekedi is chairing the African Union when 75 million Americans furiously reject President Biden’s election; pushing Congress to vote trillions of dollars for eroding poverty by using a ‘New Capitalism driven by American IDEALS’. Africa must demand UBUNTU in Biden’s American relations with Africa.

Rebel Scientists are warning on Social Media against the use of anti-COVID-19 vaccines to commit genocide globally. Terroristic governance is herding people into taking these vaccines.

PresidentTshisekedi must protect African immunities developed over centuries; resist racist dismissals of preventive and curative power in plants, vegetables, mushrooms and wild fruits. German racists decimated the Herero nation. Fleeing into the Sahara Desert saved Libyans from genocidal Italian colonisers. COVID-19 must not be King Leopold inside mutating vaccines.

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