A displaced Simmers Club Congolese band is an apt metaphor for the mess in DRC

The Simmers Club (nicknamed the Sinners Club) was the quintessential drinking joint and a meeting hub of all manner of people – polished and unkempt, sophisticated and rustic, educated and illiterate – that was right in the centre of Nairobi.

About a fortnight ago, the “open-air” pub’s semi-structures were razed, bringing to an end possibly the central business district’s only joint that hosted the liveliest live band gig.

But pardon me, this is not a story about Simmers Club, which since the mid 1990s was run and operated by Suleiman Murunga, the immediate former MP for Kimilili, in Trans Nzoia County, and who together with Deputy President William Ruto were some of the earliest founders of YK92. YK92 was an amorphous outfit formed by a panicky President Moi in 1992, after the country returned to multiparty politics in 1991. I want to write about the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire.

The live band, which basically belted rhumba tunes to a loyal crowd that had over time come to be emotionally connected to the band members, was composed of Congolese lyricists, mainly from eastern DRC. I came to learn from them and other Congolese emigres in Nairobi that Congolese were generally a happy lot, but who came from a gigantic country that was one of the most unhappy places to live in on the African continent, if not in the world.

FORGOTTEN STORY

It is increasingly becoming clear that DRC is the unfolding forgotten story that the world has chosen to ignore and brush aside. Or it is simply the story that people are tired of hearing. Possibly because of its unmitigated catastrophes that can wear down even the most patient of humanitarian workers, tragedies that boggle the mind, mostly man-made, and being a country so huge, describing it wholly is near impossible, DRC is Africa’s greatest political tragedy. It is a calamity that has claimed more than five million people, since President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga was ferreted out of town in late 1997.

In Kinshasa, the capital – Western Europe, excluding the island of the United Kingdom, can fit inside DRC – the people have a saying: “Kinshasa makambo zali minene.” Loosely translated, it means in Kinshasa you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you thought when it rains seriously heavy in Nairobi, as it did on the morning of March 15, there are floods, in Kinshasa, it does not rain – it pours. When there is a proper downpour, people have to be ferried across streets by canoes and boats, just like they do on the mighty River Congo.

Listen to this: in May 2017, Kinshasa residents woke to the news that more than 3,000 prisoners had escaped from Makala Prison, one of the biggest and most notorious jails in DRC. To be sure, the Congolese themselves are not sure how many prisoners escaped – the quoted figure ranges from 3,000–4,000. According to local and international news outlets, the prisoners, who included murderers, rapists and some of the most notorious criminals in DRC, were not tracked down by police, because, hear this, the police could not find and trace them.

PRISON ESCAPES

That news was not funny at all. Just think about it – 3,000 prisoners escape from Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, which is in Kahawa West, just 12km from the city centre. Imagine the pandemonium that that kind of news would create in Nairobi and its environs. A week later, another batch of prisoners escaped from a prison in Beni, North Kivu. Just like the numbers of Makala escapees are shrouded in mystery, the prisoners who escaped from Kivu range from 900–1,000.

According to a European Union (EU) updated report in January this year, 2017 was “one of the most violent years in DRC’s recent history”. The renewed conflict in the larger Kivu region has already displaced four million people – the largest number of people internally displaced anywhere, in African and the world. As fate would have it, DRC, which borders nine countries, is also host to half a million refugees from neighbouring countries. DRC is truly a microcosm of the sociopolitical and economic malaise afflicting the African continent.

My Congolese friends who used to play at Simmers Club liked to dazzle my imagination of the chaotic Kinshasa by telling me: “Kinshasa big, Nairobi small.” The DRC’s capital, which has a population of 17 million, a third of the entire Kenyan populace, has 24 communes or, if you like, municipalities. Makala Prison is in Selembao commune, which is not far from the posh and leafy suburb of Ngaliema, where President Joseph Kabila’s residence is located.

CHURCH ATTACKS

As prisoners were “escaping” left, right, and centre in Makala, the communes of Limba and Njili were being infiltrated by the Red Berets – the presidential guards – the best military outfit in DRC (because they are paid on time and are the best trained militarily) and that protects President Kabila.

As if that was not enough, churches in the upstream city of Kisangani were being attacked by “unknown” people. One particular Sunday, worshippers trooped to their churches as usual in the morning, to find their churches already occupied by early worshippers. Lo and behold, these were not your usual churchgoers, because once the bona fide Christians entered the churches’ compounds, they were ambushed and thoroughly beaten by the early “worshippers”.

DRC is 80 per cent Catholic and so it follows the churches that were attacked were Catholic. The Catholic clergy, led by Cardinal Laurent Mosengwo Pasinya, the archbishop of Kinshasa, has been agitating for political change in the country and it has been asking President Kabila, whose term expired in 2016, to step down and allow for the general election to take place towards the end of this year.

President Kabila, who took over from his father Laurent Kabila at the age of 29 in 2001, has refused to vacate the presidential office. Although he already has served the maximum two five-year terms allowed by the constitution, and is only 46, Kabila cannot contemplate life outside the presidency.

'FATHER FIGURE'

My Kinshasa and Kivu sources told me the prison escapes were choreographed to intimidate and cause mayhem to the residents, who are seemingly backing the Church’s push for a fair, accountable and transparent election, by unleashing unmitigated violence on them. As the country looks forward to the election – about which, to be honest, the Congolese are holding their breath, hoping it will take place – the behaviour of President Kabila does not offer much inspiration.

Like his friend President Pierre Nkurunziza of tiny Burundi, Kabila is increasingly taking the posture of an eternal “father figure” of DRC, which means a father figure cannot and will not be subjected to an irritating exercise called a general election.

DRC, so rich in resources and so big, is one of the poorest countries in the world. The displacement and the precarious nature of the Congolese band that entertained loyal patrons at Simmers Club for the longest time is a metaphor for the displacement that daily occurs in DRC because of the incessant ethnic strife and internecine wars, especially in eastern DRC.

Mr Kahura is a senior writer for 'The Elephant', a Nairobi-based publication. Twitter: @KahuraDauti