Congo's Constitution Was Never the Problem — Tshisekedi Rewriting It Is

On September 15, riot police met opposition marchers in Kinshasa with tear gas and warning shots. In Lubumbashi and Uvira, authorities banned the protests outright and broke them up anyway. The trigger: a Senate-passed bill that would let President Félix Tshisekedi initiate changes to the one clause of the constitution that was supposed to be untouchable — the two-term limit on the presidency. Tshisekedi has already said, in May, that he'd "accept" a third term if the Congolese people wanted it. That is the standard script. Nobody ever seizes a third term; the people simply, conveniently, demand it.

The DRC's 2006 constitution was written specifically to prevent a repeat of Mobutu's three-decade dictatorship and the wars that followed it. Term limits were the one guardrail everyone agreed on, and the constitution explicitly bars revision of them. The bill working through the Senate doesn't repeal that clause — it just gives the president power to "initiate" constitutional revision, the same procedural sleight-of-hand that has gutted term limits across the continent for two decades. You don't announce the coup; you announce the referendum, and let a captured court, a bought legislature, or a militia-backed street count the votes.

What makes this uglier than most is who's doing the enforcing. RFI reported an opposition figure in Kinshasa saying plainly the government is working with a private militia against protesters alongside police — stone-throwing, machete-wielding pro-government mobs let loose on an authorised march before police moved in to "restore order." This is the ordinary technique of managed democracy: outsource the violence to deniable civilians, then have the state intervene as the neutral arbiter. It's the same move Bukavu and Goma have watched for years while M23 chews through the east with backing that Kinshasa's own security services, weakened and distracted by a term-limit power grab, are in no position to resist.

This isn't an isolated African pathology — it's a continental pattern, and pretending otherwise is exactly the condescension the DRC's opposition is fighting. From Congo-Brazzaville's Sassou Nguesso to Rwanda's Kagame to Uganda's Museveni, the mechanism is identical: rewrite the clock, not the constitution's spirit, and call it stability. Each time, international partners who profit from cobalt, coltan, or basing rights issue a statement of "concern" and keep the aid flowing. ISS Africa's own analysis of this bill makes the point directly: a president who spends his political capital extending his own rule has less capital left to face down Rwanda-backed M23 — an entrenched Tshisekedi may be a gift to the very forces destabilizing his country's east.

None of this is about defending an opposition that has its own reactionary and ethno-nationalist currents — Congolese politics is not a clean binary. It's about naming the mechanism: term-limit erosion is not a local quirk, it's the standard toolkit of entrenched power everywhere, run through courts and "popular demand" instead of tanks, backed when necessary by hired street muscle. Solidarity means watching Kinshasa's streets as closely as we watch Bautzen's or Brandenburg's — the tools are the same, only the uniform's color changes.

Sources

Reuters: Congo police break up protests against proposed constitutional changes

Al Jazeera: Police crack down on protests against constitutional change in DR Congo

RFI: DRC opposition condemns violence at protests over constitutional changes

Human Rights Watch: DR Congo President Suggests Changes to Term Limits

ISS Africa: Does Tshisekedi's third-term bid benefit Rwanda and M23?