Lucha members educate voters about their rights in election that has been due since 2016Hundreds of activists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are risking arrest and torture to educate voters about their rights in the final days before the country’s long-awaited presidential election. The delay to the election, already postponed repeatedly since 2016, angered supporters of the DRC’s fractured opposition. Kabila has been in power since 2001, and the election would be the DRC’s first democratic transition of power since independence from Belgium in 1960. However, Lucha activists in Kinshasa said they had not been targeted “as badly as before” during the campaign for the current election. After two political heavyweights were banned from contesting the election on legal technicalities, the remaining opposition candidates failed to unite on a common platform.

Source: The Guardian December 26, 2018 10:41 UTC