Kabila sacks cabinet

DRC President Joseph Kabila on Wednesday sacked his entire cabinet, a statement read on state television from the chef de cabinet, Theophile Bemba, said. According to the statement, the ministers would continue to perform their day-to-day functions on a limited scale until a new cabinet was appointed. The news bulletin said that Kabila, “who is conscious of the socio-economic situation prevailing in the country, considers it disturbing”. It noted the deterioration of living conditions, aggravated by the long-running civil war. “The Public Salvation government is declared to have resigned as of today (Wednesday). All missions abroad at the expense of the public treasury and public enterprises are suspended until further notice. Of course, ongoing missions will continue,” the statement said. It also said that an audit would be conducted into public enterprises, companies and the provinces to examine the situation of public management covering the period from January 2001 to date. Kabila was expected to travel to Germany on Thursday with his foreign and health ministers to explain the situation. Analysts and diplomatic sources told IRIN on Thursday that Kabila’s dissolution of the cabinet was not surprising. “Everybody was expecting it. It was diplomatically known that he would change his government,” a diplomatic source told IRIN. He noted that “business was as usual in Kinshasa and everything was calm and normal”. “Everything is in control,” he added. Regional analyst Hannelie De Beer from South Africa’s Institute of Security Studies (ISS) noted that although it could be “a bit early” to gauge Kabila’s move, the president could have been responding to international pressure, trying to assert his internal power, or just trying to make a change in the cabinet. She commented that the most important thing to look out for was who he would appoint or reappoint, who he would leave out and how those who were left out would react. “Is it going to be a real change?,” she wondered. She is of the opinion that either way, Angola still plays a very important role in the internal affairs of the DRC. “Angola has a lot of influence on the military and political levels.” Zimbabwe, for its part, is strongly aligned to DRC economically. She says Kabila still needs these allies, hence somehow the choice of his cabinet could reflect this. She said Kabila’s silence over the new cabinet could be that he was “testing the waters”.