Kinshasa, February 8th of 2024.

Katumbi had already pledged to maintain its strong, anti-corruption rhetoric and policies; that was one of the main reasons, after all, that the Congolese politician even won the 2023 general election. Now, of course, it was time to make good on that promise, and to mobilize his government to pass one of the most meaningful pieces of legislation in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Act for the Removal of Corrupt Elements in the Congo, or the RCEC bill.

This bill, which took from January 11th to February 6th to complete, was the tremendous effort of a plethora of Congolese jurists, law experts, and experienced anti-corruption activists; the goal of the RCEC bill was to, as Katumbi named it, “propel the DRC fifty years into the future”.

The Necessary Reforms

To begin, Katumbi drafted an executive decision to create a new government agency; the Office for Political and Corruption Crimes of the Republic, or the OPCCR. This agency has many purposes; but in general, it is responsible for investigating political crimes, which include corruption and its many forms, be it nepotism, cronyism, extortion, passive corruption, active corruption, bribery, and so on and so forth.

The OPCCR will be solely responsible for investigating these crimes of corruption, which will then be passed to the judiciary system of the DRC, which will be bolstered with a major injection of funds.

The OPCCR will be composed of officials trained by both the United States and our own police academy; its staff will be vetted by trusted government officials and their salaries will be beyond the average pay grade of a police officer in the DRC; our goal is to instill a sense of professionalism with well-trained officers who have both a distaste for corruption, and an unwillingness to participate in it.

The OPCCR will be funded with US$75 million for starters, and if there’s any necessity, the government is more than willing to provide the funds for more assets. The RCEC bill will be revisiting the Congolese Penal Code, and will be criminalizing all forms of corruption; in it, all of the offenses, including abuse of office, will have harsh, long criminal sentences, including seizure of assets, a comprehensive audit of the offender’s properties, and a minimal sentence of 20 years, and a maximum imprisonment of 50 years.

Alongside of it, the Money Laundering Act will be absorbed into the RCEC bill and will institute the same criminal punishments as the other forms of corruption, including harsher fines and seizure of assets.

All previous financial disclosure laws will be reviewed, and re-established into the RCEC bill; the financial disclosure laws will mean that all politicians in the DRC, regardless of their political party, and their status in the National Assembly or the Senate, will be subject to testifying to a government committee, and report their financial expenditures, their tax payments, and their assets, to the website of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the section for these financial disclosures will be freely available to the Congolese public.

Furthermore, while previous administrations – namely the administration of Joseph Kabila – has established a code of conduct which is meant to promote transparency and integrity in the public and private sector, as well as civil society organizations, this code is not implemented in practice at all (BTI 2016).

This is why this code of conduct will be re-established as a formal law, which formally obligates the government to publish financial records on expenditure, on its national budget, on government projects, on timelines, and in future projects, on a quarterly basis, in the national government website of the DRC.

Under that code of conduct, the Congolese government, its state-owned enterprises and parastatals, alongside its government employees, are subject to surprise, unscheduled audits by the OPCCR, which is later given to the state auditor for approval.

The RCEC bill also includes a protection mechanism for whistleblowers, which includes a witness protection program with stringent protocols for security, including 24-hour security for whistleblowers and their relocation.

While it is impossible, at this exact moment, to combat Kabilist monopolies over certain market resources, the government can certainly apply massive pressure over it; accountability and responsibility are two key measures of the RCEC bill, and as such, government accountability will be stressed to the media, the public, and to the international community; with a lot of mechanisms allowing for government transparency to flourish, such as quarterly government reports on expenditures and revenues, quarterly government reports on taxations, and quarterly government reports on the state of the economy and ongoing projects, with timelines and foreseen expenditures.

The Struggle

Katumbi, in order to honor the spirit of the bill itself, was very communicative in its drafting process and discussed plentifully about how it would affect the DRC; he presented data, charts, interviews, he wanted to demonstrate a lot of attention to the bill; its importance could not be understated to the media, the public, and, most importantly, to both the National Assembly and the Senate.

It was for that reason, that on February 8th of 2024, Katumbi presented the bill to the National Assembly, and it threw the entire Congo into a total uproar. The Kabilist bloc was both angry and terrified; they threw long rants about the expenditures, and how the expansion of government power could lead to government authoritarianism; it was rant after rant, and their demands meant that the bill had to pass through boards, through reviews, through adaptations, it took the bill from February to April for it to be voted in the National Assembly.

The President of the National Assembly was a DA-aligned politician, and he did everything in his power to ensure that the bill was at least voted on; and in the National Assembly, the RCEC bill ended up passing with a total of 58.1% of approval, or 291 seats approving of it; this was the work of a major collaboration between the DA and the MLC, but even with that, there was still some dissent from both parties. During the bill’s movement from the National Assembly to the Senate, from April 11th to May 19th, there were major protests in Kinshasa, mainly, arguing that the bill does not go far enough to prosecute corruption in the DRC; it all occurred near the Senate, and pressure was being put heavily on its political members in order to pass the bill.

Katumbi stood neutral on the matter, as he wished to maintain the doctrine of no government pressure on the political process, and was quoted saying: “there should be no government interference on the bill, but the politicians must, always, answer to the popular will; I eagerly recommend that the senators listen to the popular protests outside of the Senate at this very moment.”

At the end of it, on May 20th of 2024, the Senate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, passed the RCEC bill. The vote, which was filled with pressure, and a profound tension in the air, passed with 51% of the vote. It was a total of 56 seats out of the 109 seats in the Senate.

This victory was major for Katumbi, so major in fact, that it was probably the cornerstone of Katumbist policies for the remainder of his term; Katumbi was hailed in his party as a hero, and Joseph Kabila became vocally opposed to Katumbi after this move; so much that, as a senator, he vowed to thoroughly vote no in every policy that is presented by the DA.