National Dialogue in the DRC: From Citizens’ Voice to the National Pact

How can we ensure that the concerns of territories and populations are genuinely heard?

Introduction

This reflection continues our previous analysis of the stakes and dynamics surrounding the ordinance of 13 September 2026 on the national dialogue process in the DRC, published on CONGOPROFOND.NET on 15 September 2026. In it, we examined the conditions of trust, representativeness, transparency and neutrality needed for such a process to be credible.

However, several reactions to that first contribution brought out a question that deserves closer examination: how can the voice of territories and populations genuinely travel up to the national level and shape the content of the future National Pact?

The announcement of consultations in the 26 provinces is, in this respect, an important ambition. But consulting a population does not by itself guarantee that its concerns will actually be taken into account in national decisions. Between the words spoken in a territory and their eventual translation into a National Pact lie several steps: collection, representation, transmission, synthesis, confrontation of viewpoints and, finally, arbitration.

It is precisely along this path that the stakes of this second reflection lie.

1. Consulting the 26 provinces: a national ambition confronted with realities on the ground

The prospect of organizing consultations in the 26 provinces aims to give the process a genuinely national dimension.

In principle, this territorialization matters. The Democratic Republic of Congo cannot be reduced to Kinshasa, any more than national concerns can be identified solely from the debates that take place in the capital.

Economic, social, security and institutional realities differ considerably from one province to another. The priorities voiced in a province affected by armed conflict are not necessarily the same as those of a province mainly confronted with unemployment, remoteness, difficulty accessing public services, or weak infrastructure.

A credible national consultation should therefore be able to bring out this diversity.

But simply travelling to the 26 provinces will not be enough.

The real issue will be knowing who is consulted, on what subjects, according to what methods, and with what feedback mechanism.

A consultation organized mainly with administrative authorities, political officials and institutional representatives would not necessarily produce the same picture of the country’s concerns as one that also included civil-society organizations, professional associations, youth and women’s organizations, community actors, representatives of the business world, faith-based organizations and, more broadly, citizens themselves.

The territorialization of the dialogue should therefore not be understood merely as a geographic distribution of meetings. It should also be conceived as an effective decentralization of voice.

2. Territories affected by conflict: how to avoid political invisibility?

This question becomes even more important when it comes to territories directly affected by armed conflict.

Part of the national territory is experiencing security conditions that make travel, and the organizing of conventional consultations, difficult or even impossible.

Yet it is precisely the populations living in these areas who have particular concerns: security, forced displacement, access to social services, the return of displaced populations, local administration, justice, reconciliation, reconstruction and coexistence between communities.

How could these concerns be integrated into the national dialogue if the populations concerned cannot take part under the same conditions as those in more accessible territories?

The risk would be to create, without intending to, a form of political invisibility for populations living in conflict zones.

The difficulty is real. It is not a matter of pretending that the same consultations can be organized everywhere under the same conditions.

But precisely because of these, security constraints should prompt reflection on adapted mechanisms: relocated consultations, reliance on local organizations, hearings of representatives of displaced populations, written submissions, or consultations with the actors who work directly in these territories.

The goal should be that the absence of security does not automatically mean the absence of voice.

A national dialogue that claims to seek a National Pact should also be able to hear those who live through the heaviest consequences of the national crises.

3. National members of parliament: an institutional channel that already exists

There is also an institutional channel that could be more fully mobilized: that of national members of parliament.

During parliamentary recesses, MPs return to their electoral constituencies and remain, in principle, in contact with the populations they represent.

This reality could be put to use within the dialogue process.

Without turning MPs into organizers of the dialogue, they could be asked to gather the main concerns expressed in their constituencies and report them back in a format allowing consolidation at national level.

Such a mechanism would have one advantage: it would not require creating a new network of territorial representation.

MPs already have elective legitimacy and on-the-ground knowledge that could complement the consultations organized by the Organizing Committee or, later, by the body responsible for preparing the dialogue.

This obviously does not mean that MPs would be the sole spokespeople for the population.

Political representation is not the same as the whole of society. Civil-society organizations, customary authorities, professional associations, young people, women, religious communities and other actors must also be able to make their voices heard.

But MPs constitute an existing institutional channel that could help bring local concerns up to the national level.

4. From consultation to participation: the essential link of transmission

This is where an important distinction appears: to consult is not necessarily to make people participate.

A population can be invited to speak without knowing what will become of its contribution.

It can be heard without its words being integrated into subsequent discussions.

It can even be extensively consulted and still end up feeling that the decisions had already been made.

The real issue therefore lies in the mechanism linking consultation to decisions.

This path could be schematically represented as follows:

Population → local communities → elected officials and local actors → provincial consultations → national synthesis → National Pact.

Each of these links has a function:

• The population expresses its concerns.
• Local actors help organize and contextualize them.
• Elected officials and other territorial representatives enable their transmission.
• Provincial consultations bring the different concerns into confrontation.
• A national synthesis then identifies convergences, divergences and priorities.
• Finally, the national dialogue must determine how these elements can be reflected in the National Pact.

If any one of these links is missing, there is a real risk of creating a rupture between consultation and decision.

5. The traceability of citizens’ voice

This question leads directly to that of traceability.

A citizen who takes part in a consultation should be able, at least as far as possible, to know what becomes of their contribution.

This does not necessarily mean publishing every individual intervention. But the process could include mechanisms to keep track of the main concerns expressed.

For example, provincial consultations could produce structured summaries showing the main proposals, recurring concerns, points of disagreement and proposals specific to certain areas.

These summaries could then be brought together and compared at national level.

Traceability would then serve a double function.

First, it would help prevent contributions from disappearing in the consolidation process.

Second, it would allow participants to check, at some point, whether their concerns were actually taken into consideration.

The fundamental question would then be less “Was the population consulted?” than: “What can be shown of what the population said, and of how that voice was taken into account?”

This difference is essential to the credibility of the process.

6. Avoiding the juxtaposition of consultations

Another risk deserves consideration: that of juxtaposition. There could be, on one side, the consultations organized by the Organizing Committee; on another, those of the MPs; elsewhere, those of civil-society organizations, religious confessions, professional associations or other actors.

Each could produce its own report.

But if these various reports are never brought together or consolidated, the process could produce an abundance of contributions without any real convergence.

The problem would then no longer be the absence of voice, but its scattering.

Thought should therefore be given early enough to a mechanism allowing the different sources of consultation to be put in dialogue with one another.

This could take the form of a shared collection framework, a harmonized reporting format, or a body tasked with comparing the various contributions.

The goal would not be to make disagreements disappear.

On the contrary, a genuine dialogue must be able to bring disagreements to light.

But it must also make it possible to identify shared concerns and proposals capable of gathering sufficiently broad consensus.

7. From Kinshasa to the provinces… and from the provinces to Kinshasa

The national dialogue should not be conceived as a process running only from Kinshasa to the provinces.

It should also work in the other direction.

Kinshasa can define a general framework, propose themes for reflection and organize the process.

But the provinces must be able to contribute to defining the content of the dialogue.

This implies a two-way movement:

• Kinshasa → provinces: information, framing, organization and facilitation.
• Provinces → Kinshasa: concerns, proposals, local experiences, expectations and recommendations.

It is this two-way circulation that could give the process a genuinely national dimension.

Otherwise, provincial consultation would risk being limited to a communication exercise meant to explain to populations a process already defined at the central level.

The challenge, then, is to make the provinces not only places of consultation, but also places where proposals are produced.

8. What place for the ordinary citizen?

Another question deserves to be asked: what place will genuinely be given to the citizen who represents no organization?

In political processes, representation often passes through parties, civil-society organizations, religious confessions, professional associations or local authorities.

These structures are necessary.

But they never, by themselves, represent the whole of society.

The citizen who holds no political or associative role, the parent worried about their children’s education, the young person facing unemployment, the farmer, the shopkeeper, the teacher, the health worker, or the worker whose purchasing power has fallen sharply — all of them, too, have an experience of the country and expectations to voice.

Their direct participation obviously cannot be organized on the scale of millions of people.

But more open consultation mechanisms could help gather a diversity of individual and community contributions.

This could also help reduce the risk of the national dialogue being seen essentially as a matter for political officials.

A National Pact should not only be a compromise among political elites.

It should also be able to appear as a response to the population’s concrete concerns.

9. The real issue: turning consultation into a process of national convergence

At bottom, the question is therefore not only whether the 26 provinces will be consulted.

It is what will become of what was said in those provinces.

A consultation has real political weight only if it identifiably influences the discussions and decisions that follow.

This requires, at a minimum, four conditions:

• sufficiently diverse representation,
• a clear transmission mechanism,
• traceability of contributions, and
• a consolidation method capable of bringing out both convergences and divergences.

The future National Pact could thus become the meeting point between several levels of voice: that of institutions, that of political actors, that of civil society, and that of citizens.

This would not necessarily mean turning the Pact into a simple sum of every demand voiced in the provinces.

A national document must involve trade-offs.

But those trade-offs would gain in legitimacy if actors and populations could see that their concerns had been heard, weighed against the country’s other realities, and taken into consideration in shaping the final decisions.

Conclusion

The real stake of the national dialogue process is therefore not only to succeed in organizing consultations in the 26 provinces.

It is to build a mechanism that lets the voice gathered in the territories actually travel the path leading up to the national level.

That path must be clear enough for one to understand how a concern expressed locally becomes a provincial contribution, how it is then set alongside the contributions of other provinces, and how, finally, convergences and divergences are taken into account in drafting the National Pact.

Only under this condition can consultation move beyond a one-off exercise to become a genuine process of participation.

The national dialogue will therefore not earn its credibility only through the number of provinces visited or the number of people consulted. It will also earn it through the process’s ability to demonstrate that the voice gathered has a path, a trace, and a real chance of influencing the decisions that will ultimately be made.

The fundamental question could thus be summed up in a simple formula: between the citizen’s voice and the National Pact, what mechanism will guarantee that the one can genuinely help build the other?

Victor Kashosi
Consultant in Organizational Development and Governance
kashosivictor@gmail.com
+243 818 137 972