Félix Tshisekedi's 2019 Inauguration and the DRC's Disputed 'Peaceful Transfer'

On January 24, 2019, Félix Tshisekedi was sworn in as president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, succeeding Joseph Kabila, who had governed since his father Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s assassination in 2001. The inauguration was widely reported at the time as a milestone: the first peaceful transfer of power in Congo’s history as an independent state, in a country whose modern political history has otherwise run from the chaos following Patrice Lumumba’s 1961 assassination through Mobutu Sese Seko’s three-decade dictatorship, two brutal wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Kabila’s own extended and constitutionally overdue tenure.

That “peaceful” framing was accurate as far as it went: no coup, no civil war, no bloodshed accompanied the transition. But it obscured a vote count that independent observers found deeply implausible. Congo’s electoral commission, CENI, declared Tshisekedi the winner of the December 30, 2018 election with roughly 38.5 percent of the vote, ahead of opposition candidate Martin Fayulu at about 34.7 percent. That result immediately clashed with data gathered by the Catholic Church’s National Episcopal Conference of Congo, CENCO, which had deployed some 40,000 observers to polling stations nationwide, one of the largest independent monitoring efforts in the country’s history. CENCO’s own tally, according to diplomats and rights monitors briefed on it, showed Fayulu winning an outright majority, with figures reported in the range of 47 percent for Fayulu against roughly 24 percent for Tshisekedi. Diplomatic sources also indicated that separate tallies compiled by the African Union and the Southern African Development Community’s observer missions pointed to the same conclusion: Fayulu, not Tshisekedi, had won.

Fayulu challenged the results before Congo’s Constitutional Court, which rejected his appeal and upheld Tshisekedi’s victory, clearing the way for the inauguration to proceed. The widely discussed theory among analysts and diplomats at the time was that outgoing president Kabila, unable to run again himself and facing an untenable outcome if his preferred candidate had openly lost, had struck a backroom arrangement with Tshisekedi to accept the presidency in exchange for protecting Kabila’s political and business interests, an arrangement both men denied, but one that a functioning parliamentary majority still aligned with Kabila’s coalition made plausible in the following months.

The result is a transition that genuinely broke a pattern of coups and violent successions stretching back to independence, while resting on an election outcome that credible independent observers did not believe reflected the actual vote. Both things are part of the honest historical record: 2019 marked real, unprecedented progress in how power changed hands in a country roughly the size of Western Europe, and it did so through a count that much of the evidence suggests was not the one Congolese voters actually cast.