Like many of my compatriots, I have followed the lessons in courage and fear. Courage cannot be decreed. Declaring oneself brave does not make one so.
Maître Moïse Nyarugabo has offered a candid reading of the manipulation and inconsistencies of Félix Tshisekedi, the "resident" of Kinshasa, without naming him. He brands his predecessor a coward, yet is himself afraid of his own army, which he dismisses as "tramps", and prefers to turn to white mercenaries and foreign armies.
The "brave one" said he would move to Goma to restore peace in the east. He has never set foot there since, not even in transit. He said that at the slightest skirmish he would summon both chambers and declare war. He did not. Instead, he ended up admitting he had been mistaken: someone had lied to him. In his favour, it must be said that last Saturday he did summon both chambers, merely to flex his biceps for them, though on the veranda of his own home.
He said that, from Goma, he would reach a certain capital, and that a head of state there would no longer sleep soundly in his bed. He did not. Yet he had told us to read his lips, and we did.
“The brave one has never visited a single frontline, as every true commander-in-chief does, nor even a single province at war. I hope that at Christmas he will at least share a meal with those he himself calls "tramps", on a frontline. Of course, we shall need to be sure that, at the slightest skirmish, he and his army will hold the line, if only for as long as it takes to finish the meal.”
Brave he is, nonetheless, but only in certain specific areas. I will cite just three by way of example:
- When, in a single decree, he appoints 80 to 90 per cent Tshi… and feels no embarrassment. It takes courage to embrace tribalism on such a scale with pride.
- When he steals, and not theft as legally defined, "the fraudulent removal of another's property", but burglary at gunpoint, enough to fill Ali Baba's cave and its 40 thieves (he has more, of course), it takes courage. The raids in Belgium, which are merely the visible tip of the iceberg, are only a sample. Plenty of other scandals are in the pipeline, all involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. On the scandal and the raids in Belgium, one thing puzzles me: why does the Congolese presidency bridle when Belgium prosecutes its own citizens?
- Having twice sworn before God and the Nation to uphold and defend the Constitution, he gathered the Sacred Union's MPs and senators to tell them: "I do not like this Constitution, and you are my witnesses; I despise your handiwork, but I love the people who adopted it by referendum." That takes courage.
“So, after all these revelations, this man has the courage, or perhaps rather the nerve, to look people in the eye and speak of his love for the country and its people, over whom he claims to have a mission! That is the courage of Ivan the Terrible, who killed his own son with his own hands. The love of the greenback, yes. The mission of multiplying the fat cats, yes. Everything else is just "Miso makasi, ndoki te".”
“Félix Tshisekedi has also broken the record for tribalism, misrule and plunder of the country's natural resources, all while manipulating the public with a hollow, mendacious slogan about a so-called Rwandan aggression, when the Congolese crisis is homegrown and dates back to 1960.”
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