DRC: The New Embassy Offices in Pretoria

It was about time, chanted the Congolese diaspora in Pretoria on Friday March 31, 2023. On the front page, His Excellency the Ambassador of the DRC to South Africa, Fidèle Mulaja Binene, revealed to the world the new premises which will now house the offices of the new DRC Embassy in the Rainbow Nation. Second good news in a week after the publication of the Sama Lukonde II government – that’s killing two birds with one stone! As there are never two without three, the good news from the East is in the pipelines and will spring out from their outlets like gospel.

Everything was perfectly planned but nothing and no one could have predicted what happened in Pretoria. A luxury house on a large area, large in the size to conform in size as DRC, and expensive like its wealth which attracts all covetousness, eve wars. From Ngongo Kamanda to the irremovable old man Mpoko Ben, the DRC has never been well off in terms of a building that better describes the diplomatic representation worthy of the name. It would have been necessary to wait for the appointment of Fidèle Mulaja Binene as Ambassador for this continental country to finally have a building that sends a positive image. Ben Mpoko will have marked Congolese minds in the worst possible way. The old man had chosen a dwelling which looked like laboratory rooms in which the culture of coccobacilli, bifidobacteria and coli bacteria presaged a death-bed, on Schoeman Street, renamed Frances Baard Street. His Excellency the President of the Republic has spent consciously to offer the Congolese people and endow the nation with architecture on the scale of a new look version Buckingham Palace, and Union Building, housing the Presidency of the Republic in South Africa!

From Kinshasa, informed of the official opening of the new DRC Embassy in Pretoria together with the Congolese and the world in Pretoria, the Head of State was worthily represented by Professor Serge Tshibangu, his Special Adviser recently appointed for the monitoring of peace talks according to Nairobi and Luanda framework,  with the aim of pacifying the east of the country. The frown on faces that once reflected sadness, pain and despair in the Congolese community has finally been replaced by ear-to-ear smiles and joy. These Congolese who were for a long time confined in the yoke of an opacity of Embassy management à la Caligula and Vespasien by the predecessors of Fidèle Mulaja, were freed from the yoke of these poisonous dictators, like a Ben Mpoko who transformed the Embassy into a ladybird messenger of Kabila, otherwise Hyppolite Kanambe, never on behalf of and in favor of the Congolese.

Prof Serge Tshibangu wished to congratulate the President of the Republic and the stakeholders for their determination to command respect. Everything related to the DRC was, in the past, synonymous with shadowy mediocrity. From the shack in front of Loftus Versfeld Stadium to the haunted house described above, it was purgatory! The hour of glory has sounded to close the obscurantist chapters which symbolized the twists and turns of death row where the Congo and its population had been condemned by the primacurias which succeeded one another at the head of the Congolese nation.

All  Congolese living in South Africa had been at this magnanimous launching. Among them the members of the Congolese ecclesiastical pastorate in this country, the Congolese medical profession including Dr Loposo and Dr David Kalombo, specialists and contemporaries of His Excellency, including representatives of the national, international and Congolese medial. One member, and not least , of Amagep administration -Alain Matundu. Among the guests, there was also the army officer John Tshibangu, promoted to the rank of brigadier general and appointed commander of the 21st military regiment whose staff is based in Mbuji-Mayi (Kasaï Oriental) but which includes the five provinces of the Kasaï space. The ingredients of a rediscovered gaiety were mixed with hopes for a tomorrow in grandiloquent antipodes. The operations of the RFE (Revision of the Electoral File – voters’ registration) carried out by the CENI in the diaspora, for the very first time in the electoral history of the country, bear testimony to the importance that the new regime attaches to the improving life conditions of the Congolese people in all respects.

832 Jan Shoba Street – Blooklyn, Pretoria, South Africa, is the new address of the DRC Embassy. It is the home of Congolese from all horizons. This is not a house of tribal, religious or racial discrimination. Any Congolese is and will always be welcome in case of problems; help and assistance are also available therein depending on the need and the level of intervention. His Excellency Fidèle Mulaja is not immune to the suffering of Congolese in Africa. He knows all the frustrations thereof. As a father, he promised to make the problems inherent in the survival of the Congolese diaspora in South Africa his own!