Analysis: Lungu offers to help in DRC’s electoral process
Togolese president with Lungu
President Edgar Lungu is reported to have pledged support to The Democratic Republic of Congo in the electoral process to enhance its stability ahead of the elections at the end of the year.
I wish to reflect on the above statement and see whether President Edgar Chagwa Lungu would be the best person and Zambia the best country to pledge uncompromised electoral help to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s electoral process that would ultimately enhance stability in that country ahead of the election.
My sincere feel is that President Lungu is not the right person and Zambia will not be the right country at the moment to offer that electoral help unless our aim is to cause more electoral instability before, during and after the elections in that country due to increased suspicions, speculations and finger pointing over electoral rigging.
Zambia and President Lungu must first heal the electoral wounds occasioned before, during and after the 2016 general elections currently obtaining in Zambia, before he can pledge Zambia and his own electoral assistance to a neighboring country.
In any case, DRC’s electoral process is more complicated, usually controversial and full of suspicions thereby our involvement as a country in or coming out of a controversial electoral process and allowing our president to get involved in another complex electoral process is actually courting electoral dust, if not, soil and risking our remaining little electoral credibility people may have in country.
It is known fact that when one of the opposition leaders from DRC visited Zambia, the Congolese Government took offence and this same opposition leader may be contesting these same elections where Zambia is offering unsolicited electoral help. How will the DRC government going to take it seeing Zambia and its president highly involved in its electoral process?
In an electoral process, you don’t offer unsolicited help but wait to be invited and more especially in the case of President Lungu, with a background of having reigned over a disputed electoral process in Zambia which, up to date, is still unresolved, will be ill-timed for him to get deeply involved in the DRC’s electoral process.
The question that his advisors and handlers must try to answer is, would the electoral stakeholders accept president Lungu as a neutral and unbiased electoral arbiter in their electoral process puzzle? Would they not ask how Zambia has conducted her recent elections and to what extent these elections were free, fair and credible and what was the legitimacy of the electoral outcomes?
My honest advice to the President is that Zambia, at the moment, is not electorally upright, clean and in good standing to give sound electoral advice especially at political level to any country on the electoral process because of the electoral questions still surrounding the 2016 general elections.
If it were after the 2011 general elections and Zambia is invited to help enhance electoral and political stability in any country using the electoral process and her electoral experience is summoned, I would have no qualms with that.
Let us spare our energies to dialogue and make peace with each other and enhance our electoral stability within the country first before we decide to pledge support to other electoral processes in other countries.
Therefore, this unsolicited and self-imposed pledge to help in the DRC’s electoral process to enhance that country’s stability is ill-timed and may contribute to more electoral problems in that country. Let us serious reflect.
By MacDonald Chipenzi