Congolese Constitutional Fetishism: What the Ghost of Luluabourg Whispers to Today’s Revisionists
The illusory quest for an authentically Congolese text
As debate over a possible revision or full rewriting of the 2006 Constitution resurfaces, Congolese constitutional history offers a mirror rich in lessons. By revisiting the experience of the 1964 Luluabourg Constitution, this analysis explores the historical tension between the quest for an “authentically Congolese” text and the political instrumentalization of fundamental laws.
For several months now, the specter of revising, or even entirely rewriting, the Constitution of 18 February 2006 has once again been haunting Kinshasa’s political salons, its intellectual circles, and the passionate debates of the diaspora. The argument underlying this desire for change is by now well known, almost ritualized in public discourse: the current text is said to be a “compromise among belligerents,” an imported institutional straitjacket, born in the urgency of the Sun City talks, and fundamentally unsuited to the “sociological realities” of the Democratic Republic of Congo. For its detractors, the cumbersomeness of the state apparatus, the recurring crises, and even certain security weaknesses supposedly find their source in the flaws of this supreme law.
A sense of déjà vu
Faced with this rhetoric, the seasoned observer of the Congolese political scene is inevitably struck by a sense of déjà vu. The current debate does not arise out of nowhere; on the contrary, it belongs to a long national tradition that could be called “constitutional fetishism.” This belief, deeply rooted in our political culture, holds that it would be enough to change the State’s legal architecture to cure its structural ills. To understand the potential dead end of such an approach, it is illuminating to summon our own history, and in particular the fascinating and tragic precedent of the 1964 Luluabourg Constitution.
The Fundamental Law and its demons
Let us return for a moment to the early 1960s. In the wake of independence, the young Republic of Congo was governed by the Fundamental Law, a text drafted in Brussels, modeled on the Belgian parliamentary system, and effectively imposed on the Congolese elites. This text, genuinely “imported” this time, would quickly prove incapable of containing the young country’s political contradictions. The conflict at the top of the executive between President Joseph Kasa-Vubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, compounded by the Katangese and South Kasai secessions, plunged the country into unprecedented institutional chaos.
The aborted promises of the Luluabourg Constitution
It was in this context of existential crisis that the idea of a new constitution took root — one that would, this time, be the exclusive work of Congolese people, designed for Congolese people. In 1963, a constitutional commission was convened in Luluabourg (present-day Kananga). For several months, the Congolese intelligentsia, gathered far from the direct pressures of the capital and the former colonial powers, debated passionately over the form of the State, the distribution of powers, and the balance between institutions. The resulting Constitution, promulgated on 1 August 1964, was a text of great legal richness. It attempted to rationalize parliamentarism, establish a moderate federalism (the famous era of the “provincettes”), and equip the country with strong institutions meant to prevent a repeat of the crises of 1960.
At the time, the prevailing discourse bore a striking resemblance to what we hear today. The Luluabourg Constitution was celebrated as the panacea, the authentic and sovereign remedy that would finally stabilize the country and allow it to take off. And yet, what do subsequent events teach us?
Despite the technical quality of the 1964 text and its undeniable “indigenous” legitimacy, it did not survive the test of political fire. Personal ambitions, ethnic-political rivalries, and the absence of a culture of compromise quickly got the better of the noble principles set down on paper. Institutional deadlock resumed with a vengeance between Kasa-Vubu and his new Prime Minister, Moïse Tshombe. It was this paralysis, which the text failed to prevent, that gave Joseph-Désiré Mobutu the ideal pretext for his coup d’état of 24 November 1965 — sweeping away the Luluabourg Constitution in the same stroke, barely a year after its promulgation.
It is political virtue that gives life to the law
The ghost of Luluabourg thus whispers a cruel but essential lesson to today’s revisionists: a constitution, however “authentic” and “well-adapted” it may be, is never more than a piece of paper if the political actors tasked with animating it do not share a common foundation of democratic values and respect for the rules of the game. Constitutional fetishism consists precisely in reversing cause and effect, in believing that it is the law that creates political virtue, when history shows that it is political virtue that gives life to the law.
The instrumentalization of the Constitution for personal ends
This historical precedent also sheds light on another recurring tendency in Congolese political culture: the temptation of instrumentalization. After suspending the 1964 text, Mobutu did not content himself with ruling by decree. He understood that a constitution could be a formidable tool of domination. The 1967 Constitution, and its successive revisions up to 1974, were presented under the flattering guise of a “return to authenticity” and adaptation to African realities (the rejection of a two-party system, the institutionalization of the MPR as a party-state). Under the pretext of creating an institutional framework in keeping with the Congolese soul, the regime methodically dismantled every check on power in order to establish an absolute personal dictatorship.
It is this historical trauma, deeply buried in collective memory, that today explains the visceral distrust of a large part of the population and civil society toward any attempt to “touch” the 2006 Constitution. Although born in the troubled context of Sun City, the current Constitution has, over nearly two decades of existence, undergone a remarkable sociological transformation that its detractors often pretend to ignore.
The 2006 Constitution: its appropriation through political struggle and bloodshed
Indeed, the 2006 text is no longer, today, the simple peace treaty among belligerents that it was at birth. Between 2015 and 2018, during the great popular mobilizations against the slippage of the electoral calendar and the attempt to amend the fundamental law, the Congolese people made this text their own. Young people died in the streets of Kinshasa, Goma, and Lubumbashi — not to defend a compromise among warlords, but to sanctify an emerging social contract, in particular the fundamental principle of alternation in power and term limits. Through bloodshed, the 2006 Constitution was “Congolized” in the most tragic and most noble way possible. It acquired a sacred dimension that neither the 1960 Fundamental Law nor the 1964 Luluabourg Constitution ever managed to achieve in the collective unconscious.
From this point on, the argument that dismisses the current Constitution on the grounds that it is foreign in essence loses much of its validity. The real issue today is not the law’s origin, but the political elite’s capacity to submit to it. When the need to adapt the Constitution to “Congolese realities” is invoked, it is legitimate to ask which realities are meant. Is it a matter of adapting the law to better organize development and decentralization? Or is it, more prosaically, a matter of adapting the rules of the game to the power appetites of the moment, to the difficulty of governing under constraint, and to the persistent culture of neopatrimonialism?
It is likely that certain provisions of the 2006 Constitution deserve to be revisited. The management of the form of the State, the complex relations between the central government and the provinces, or accountability mechanisms could all benefit from technical adjustments. However, history commands the utmost caution. The transition from the First to the Second Republic showed us with blinding clarity that chronic instability in fundamental texts is the best ally of arbitrary rule.
Conclusion: consolidating an institutional tradition
The Democratic Republic of Congo suffers less from the inadequacy of its texts than from its chronic inability to consolidate an institutional tradition. The strength of great democracies lies precisely in the longevity of their institutions, which end up imposing themselves on the moods of the men who pass through them. To start from scratch today, under the seductive pretext of building a more authentic “Fourth Republic,” is to risk destroying the fragile gains of 2006 with no guarantee that the new text, once confronted with the wear of power, will not suffer the same fate as its predecessors.
Ultimately, the mirror held up by the Luluabourg experience sends us back to our own responsibilities. It reminds us that the quest for the perfect Constitution is a dangerous illusion if it serves as a screen for refusing to submit to the law. The challenge facing the contemporary Congolese political class is not to prove its ability to draft a new social contract, but to demonstrate, at last, its maturity in living and governing within the respect of the one that already exists. Without this ethical awakening, any new institutional architecture, however brilliant on paper, will be just one more house of cards on the altar of our endless fresh starts.