The news out of Burundi continues to be thoroughly alarming. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch said the Pierre Nkurunziza government is torturing opponents in the most horrible way.

They beat them up, and then make some of sit in pools of acid! Now every morning when Burundians wake up, they find streets strewn with bodies of people killed overnight, most with their hands tied behind their backs.

And reports of assassinations are now so common, the media is beginning to ignore the killing of “minor” officials.

It is hard to imagine that a day would come so soon, when with all its difficulties, the Democratic Republic of Congo is a more hopeful story.

Yet, it is. And because DRC seemed to be a hopeless case, there are many things we have missed about that vast land.

To begin with, DRC is not actually a bad place to be an opposition politician. You are less likely to be jailed, killed, slapped with a trumped up charge, or harassed than in all countries in East and Central Africa except perhaps Kenya.

The other thing we have almost missed is how Joseph Kabila, whose last term runs out next year, is going about his president for life project.

His peers in the region brazenly amend constitutions after bribing parliamentarians or manufacturing a cowed consensus, but Kabila goes about it in a remarkably Congolese way.

Early this year, there were bloody protests in DRC over suspected plans by Kabila to continue on the hog. But, perplexingly, it played out as a proxy war over a population census.

The issue was whether the country should go ahead with elections that are starting next month before or after a census.

Because DRC is so big, and a census can be very complex, holding it before elections would have meant Kabila would stay in office at least for two more years after his term expired. He would get a term extension through a population census, not through a constitutional amendment.

That plan eventually fell apart, but Kabila is not done.

The Kinshasa government just backed legislation by lawmakers that would allow the country to hold referenda. The interesting thing about that is that no referendum is currently planned.

The law was passed to give DRC the option of holding a referendum on constitutional issues, government spokesman Lambert Mende said.

Call it Plan B. Kabila’s Plan A, is the holding from November of the first of six elections that will culminate in the vote for a new president in November 2016.

Nothing untoward there. However, the opposition says that the packed election programme is designed to fail and thus allow Kabila to extend his presidency beyond a second term.

Kabila’s government also says donors, who think the election schedule is crazy and too expensive, should pay for it all — which they many of them have said they won’t — or else there may be no election.

In this way, Kabila does not have to argue for scrapping term limits, or changing the DRC Constitution to allow one man to continue ruling. He can argue that his continuing in office is other people’s fault, and he is just a victim. Welcome to the Kabila Way.