The creation of Rukungiri municipality represents robbery at gun point

In theory, the idea of democracy, of elections and of decentralization is to enable local communities to participate in discussions and make informed decisions including electing representatives that protect, promote and improve the quality of their lives.

Furthermore, the idea of market forces, laissez faire (let alone) and private ownership is designed to allocate resources efficiently, encourage private initiative, speed up economic growth, create jobs and, through a trickle down mechanism, benefit everyone in the community.

The two ideas, largely foreign in origin, have been fully embraced by the NRM government since 1987. The NRM leadership originally rejected stabilization and structural adjustment as promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for the good and simple reason that if implemented as recommended it would hurt ordinary citizens by reducing jobs, education, health care, nutrition and bargaining power of workers, etc. Given the profit motive of the private sector many in the government felt that, left alone, structural adjustment would squeeze the weak and force them into endemic poverty and permanent under-development.

Why patriotic Congolese have misgivings about decentralization

The Congolese people that want to keep the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as one country have expressed misgivings about the idea of decentralization. While they are not totally against decentralization as such, they reason that decentralization presupposes the existence of a strong central state with viable institutions. In any state a certain amount of centralization is essential for the effective functioning of a large entity, be it a corporation or a state. On the other hand, over-centralization produces undesirable outcomes such as inefficiency and red tape. When this occurs decentralization is recommended in which minor decisions are made on lower levels of administration.

Since its creation as a state in 1885 in the wake of the Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa among European countries without waging war against one another, no efforts were made neither by king Leopold II who owned Congo Free State as a private property until 1907, nor by the Belgian government that assumed colonial responsibility for Congo from 1908 to 1960 when the country became independent as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nor since independence as Zaire and now again as DRC since 1997.