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Congo election a turning point for Africa

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 22, 2006

NDAKU YA PEMBE, Congo - Election banners festoon the rutted main road that divides this village, 60 miles south of Kinshasa, the capital, but no candidates have come to press for votes from these cassava farmers whose lives seem locked in another century. Three stopped clocks adorn a wall of the chief's home.

Yet the political chatter is lively and savvy in Ndaku ya Pembe as villagers prepare to join some 25-million of Congo's 58-million people in their first free elections of a president and Parliament in 46 years.

The July 30 vote puts this vast heart of Africa among the continent's growing array of countries that have embraced democracy, however fitfully. If multiparty politics can take hold here, after decades of dictatorship, misrule and two multinational conflicts that came to be called an African world war, all of Africa will have turned a critical corner.

"We need a really credible head of state, one that will take his duties seriously, that will help provide a good quality of life to alleviate the misery, and that means creating jobs that pay a livable wage, not such a pittance that it's hardly worth waking up in the morning," said Guylain Kasongo, a 25-year-old farmer.

It is bound to be an imperfect poll, but Congolese have seized the moment with gusto. Despite a prohibitive $50,000 registration fee, 33 Congolese are running for president and 9,500 for 500 legislative seats. In some districts so many candidates are running that the six-page ballot slips are bigger than newspapers.

Congo last elected a leader in 1960 when it won independence from Belgium, which had done little to prepare it for self-government. The man elected prime minister was the charismatic Patrice Lumumba, a left-winger who planned to kick out white colonizers and their exploitative mining companies. He escaped a CIA plot to poison him, only to be assassinated by Congolese troops as Belgian officers looked on.

[Last modified July 22, 2006, 01:27:36]