DRC: Gift vehicles, an “encouragement” not a corruption!

The UDPS Kinshasa has its own personal explanation to justify its generosity towards regional deputies.

Clearly, Congolese politicians seem very sensitive to beautiful bodywork. No one has forgotten the affair of the Hyundai Palissade jeeps allocated to the 500 elected representatives of the National Assembly under the former legislature. A generous gesture from President Tshisekedi which cost the state coffers a whopping $27.5 million at a time when the head of state needed to ensure the docility of national elected officials in the wake of his divorce with the political bloc of Joseph Kabila.

At the start of 2024, the UDPS, the presidential party, visibly remembered the elected officials' taste for cars, which did not hesitate to offer a shiny four-wheeler to all the provincial deputies of Kinshasa, on the eve of the designation, by these elected officials, of the new governor, vice-governor and senators from the capital.

At the helm of this operation is Augustin Kabuya, the secretary general of the UDPS. For civil society in Kinshasa, there is no doubt that this is corruption. The intelligence service (ANR) intervenes and discovers around ten vehicles.

The investigation quickly concluded that these cars were a donation from the UDPS to provincial elected officials. The leaders of the presidential party, Augustin Kabuya in the lead, do not give up and present these cars as an “incentive bonus” to “generate the motivation of elected officials” and evoke a “donation for the sake of comfort, for certain elected officials who are travel by taxi or motorbike. Better, he suggests that there can be no corruption because these elected officials are essentially from his party.

As for the descent of the ANR? An error due to the fact that the agency did not know of the generous donor's gift…