Presidential candidate in the December 20, 2023 election, Delly Sesanga, has condemned proponents of the Tshiani Law describing them as “enemies” of the Democratic Republic of Congo who are behind calls for the balkanization of the country.
Sesanga says the question of nationality is a sensitive subject which must be handled with great political caution and legal dexterity.
A pawn of President Felix Tshisekedi, Noel Tshiani, has revived a failed proposal to restrict Congolese from contesting the highest office in the land.
The proposal, which was defeated by the same parliament two years ago, targets popular opposition leader Moise Katumbi from challenging President Tshisekedi as it will restrict anyone with a parent born outside Congo from seeking the top office.
Katumbi’s father is originally a Jewish-Greek who settled in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1900s and married a Congolese woman with whom he raised a family that has become a political powerhouse in the mineral rich central African nation.
In a statement dubbed “My Vision Of National Unity Against A Law Of Discrimination”, Sesanga says Congo runs the risk of being governed on the basis of fantacies.
Sesanga says history will remember the leaders of the current regime as individuals who chose selfish paths that put the majority of their people at risk to satisfy their selfish agenda rather than play a part in reconstructing broken pieces.
“In order to obtain personal satisfaction, they transgress the rules built for national cohesion and our desire to live together to the detriment of the general interest and sense of the common good,” the presidential candidate says.
Sesanga says the so-called “father and mother” bill commonly referred to as the Tshiani Law is being fronted a nationalist initiative yet it is a pure manipulative agenda for electoral purposes.
“This is the idea of a private group which has degraded the Institutions (of Governance) and no can longer respect the process, purposes and designs of preserving power by restricting political space to its office holders. This is indeed a threat to the nation,” he said.
Sesanga explains that it is these same people pushing the repulsive and discriminatory agenda that are behind an emerging enterprise now advancing an agenda for the balkanization of the Congo.
“The resurgence of tribal discourse, regionalism and clientelism, to which they now have added the rogue laws of racial discrimination and ethnicity threatens national unity and the integrity of the territory in the same way as external threats have been posed by countries like through the M23 rebel group,” he said.
Sesanga says the Tshiani Law is an initiative that is complicit to maintaining the conflict that has engulfed the country and has subjected people to untold suffering so that it ends in the balkanization of our country.
“All those who are carry these types of initiatives must be regarded as enemies of the Republic, of the peace and stability of our country. They deserve the total reprobation of all democrats,” he said.
The National Assembly has admitted the Tshiani Bill through a kasai MP and is due for discussion for possible voting into law during the plenary session currently under way. No date has been given for the law to come for discussion.
