Analysis | The African Union called on Congo to suspend its election’s results. That’s unprecedented

Analysis | The African Union called on Congo to suspend its election’s results. That’s unprecedented.
AU, SADC, election observers, DRC, ECOWAS, EAC, ICGLR, EISA, UN, CENCO, Cameroon, Kenya, Felix Tshisekedi, Fayulu
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By Anna Kapambwe Mwaba January 21 at 6:00 AM After a contentious race, on Jan. 10, Democratic Republic of Congo’s electoral commission pronounced Felix Tshisekedi the winner of the country’s Dec. 30 presidential elections. But polling data and parallel vote tabulations suggest it was“highly implausible” that Tshisekedi actually won, and the true winner was Martin Fayulu, who appealed the result. [Congo’s election had a startling result. This is what is going on.] In an unprecedented response, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), headed by Zambian President Edgar Lungu, called for a recount last week and proposed that the DRC consider forming a national unity government. SADC is known for not publicly intervening in member state electoral affairs. In the week since then, the African Union convened a high-level meeting among heads of state or their representatives from several African regional organizations, including SADC; the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR); the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS); the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS); the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD); the East African Community; the African members of the United Nations Security Council (Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, and South Africa); and the AU troika. After this meeting at the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa, AU representatives called on the Congolese electoral commission to suspend its pronouncements of the results, and dispatched a delegation to Kinshasa to work with Congolese stakeholders on finding a solution to the country’s post-electoral crisis. The AU has a long history of monitoring elections, but this decision is historic The AU has been monitoring elections on the continent since 1989. AU monitors are tasked with gathering information and making informed judgments on elections. This involves meeting with political stakeholders, collecting data on the electoral process and highlighting areas of concern that may have undermined the election’s credibility. AU monitors are mandated to intervene if “relevant laws or standard procedures are being violated or ignored.” Deployed three months before an election, the AU’s pre-election assessment team determines the size and length of monitoring missions. Missions are either short-term, lasting 10 to 14 days, or long-term, lasting three months. AU election monitors observed 423 elections between 1989 and 2013, which is the last time the AU made an official count. Despite this long history, on various occasions, critics from national civil society organizations, think tanks, and academics have lamented the AU’s inaction during critical elections. Consider, for example, AU observers’ failure to criticize Kenya’s 2017 and Cameroon’s 2018 elections. In Kenya, the AU, along with several other international observer missions, did not challenge the process - even though political stakeholders raised a number of concer