Thread: Ballot year 2026

In his last letter, written in Thysville prison weeks before his killing in January 1961, Patrice Lumumba told his wife that history would one day have its say — not the history taught in Brussels or Washington, but the one Africa would write itself, “a history of glory and dignity.” Sixty-five years on, both claimants to Congo's pen sit awkwardly in that sentence: Kabila, who stayed two years past the end of his final mandate before leaving in 2019, now preaches refoundation from a city held by a force that the UN, the US and Kinshasa all say Rwanda backs — and that Kigali denies; Tshisekedi's government, defending a constitution it is itself preparing to revise, answered with the instrument Mobutu governed by for a generation, a ministerial ban on parties issued with no stated legal ground. Our Scorecard gives Tshisekedi a real argument — rule of law and control of corruption at the 68th percentile of African countries since 2019 — but electoral democracy sits at P38 and rights at P34, and banning 13 parties in a week moves neither number in the direction his case needs. We said on 18 September that his third-term route runs through a locked clause; a war with an ex-president at its head makes every argument for exceptional powers easier, and every referendum harder to referee. The real test is whether the talks expected in Qatar in November still happen now that M23's political cover is a former head of state — and whether any of the 13 banned parties gets a hearing before a judge rather than a governor.