How does a simple census – the exercise that tries to gauge how many people live in a polity – become so contentious that people lose their lives in confrontations with instruments of state terror?

Easy: In a country such as the “Democratic Republic” of Congo, after some four decades without one, the government wakes up one morning and announces that it’s going to organise a census.

The people don’t believe the government any more than they believed it when they were told the last fib, so they start looking for possible ruses here.

They discover that in another year or so, a General Election is scheduled to take place, which should spell the end of the last term in office for the current president. Then they look at what a referendum in these circumstances would entail.

The huge country – the second largest on the continent – has 26 provinces that straddle two time zones, and the infrastructure is about the worst in Africa. To organise the referendum, the administration needs to erect hundreds of offices and data collection centres, whose source of financing is still being mooted.

Next they inquire about how long the whole exercise is likely to take and they get as many answers as the individuals who ask. One official says it should be over in 20 months, max. Another says it should be over in three years.

The chairman of the electoral body himself, Bishop Apollinaire Malu Malu, worries that the census could interfere with the electoral calendar.

That’s the rub, interference with the electoral calendar. Everybody knows that Joseph Kabila is looking for ways to extend his time in office beyond the two terms allowed him, but is facing a lot of resistance from people who think he should go, like yesterday.

His opponents looked at all the factors above, and decided the census was a ploy, a wild-goose chase that will never be completed before the election that sees Kabila say adieu.

So they revolted, poured into the streets in mass protests that claimed lives, and parliament duly nipped the census law in the bud.

But more is still to come. Kabila seems determined to get his way in his bid to stay on, even if he does not necessarily go down the census route.

He has reportedly started harassing individuals known to be openly against him staying on beyond his sell-by date. One target of note is Moise Katumbi, the powerful (and extremely rich) governor of Katanga; he is also the proud owner of Tout Puissant (All Powerful) Mazembe, a soccer club that has posted phenomenal success in recent years.

Between frosty meetings between him and Kabila and his unexplained absences from the country, it has been suggested that Katumbi may have been made to ingest something that made him sick. That may or may not be. But other forms of action can be effective as well.

Jeune Afrique, the Paris-based weekly magazine, recently suggested that Katumbi’s close associates in business – he has a finger in every pie, or so it seems – have received unwelcome visits from state controllers and auditors, while others have lost high posts they had held in government.

The magazine does not end there. It reports that a hastily passed law seeks to redraw the maps of provinces with a view to clipping Katanga and leaving Katumbi with a smaller realm.

One can imagine what would happen to the uppity governor if a substantial share of his copper revenues were hived off.

And still more can be done to get rid of this Katumbi menace. As he is known to harbour presidential ambitions, a new law under discussion would bar from becoming president anyone with a non-Congolese parent. Like Katumbi.

That’s a favourite trick with African dictators. When they lose an argument, or they fear a potential challenger, they deploy their ultimate argument; they send immigration departments to find out if the irksome individual has an iguana for a mother.

Trouble is, sometimes the dictators themselves cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that their mothers (or fathers), were not iguanas.
Can Kabila prove that?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]