A heavy cloud of grief hangs over the Democratic Republic of Congo following an attempt by inmates to break out of Makala Prison in Kinshasa, which led to the deaths of 129 people.
Authorities reported that inmates at the DRC’s overcrowded main penitentiary had sought to dash to freedom from their suffocating cells after water and power went out, according to the New York Times.
Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani said 24 prisoners died of bullet wounds after warning shots were fired in the early hours of Monday morning, September 2, 2024. Most of the others died from suffocation because of a crush during the breakout, reported BBC News.
Shabani posted a video on X a day after the attempted jailbreak confirming the incident, adding that about 60 others were severely injured and were admitted to hospitals.
The minister praised the security services, the national police, and the army, “who responded quickly and were able to contain the situation, preventing the escape.” He said the administration and registry offices caught fire during the attempted breakout.
It was not the first time Makala Prison experienced inmate trouble. In 2017, more than 50, including the leader of a religious sect, broke free in an invasion by the group.
Built in 1950s with a capacity of 1,500 people, Makala Prison is currently holding more than 14,000 inmates. Interviews conducted with prison officials by foreign media and international human rights organisations in 2020 showed how overcrowding, biting food shortages and lack of hygiene at the facility lead to deaths of inmates.
It was estimated that of those held at the prison, only six per cent had been convicted and were serving sentences. The rest were suspects “dumped” in there by the DRC’s sluggish legal system mired in sky-hi bureaucracy and corruption. And because of that anomaly, most cases take so many years to conclude, resulting in overcrowding.
It is instructive that most locally owned media in the DRC avoided the jailbreak story. The very few who attempted to report on it had scanty details, and ended at breaking the news, without follow-up stories. There’s a context to this.
With years of internal conflicts and general lawlessness in its large swathes, government operatives in Kinshasa and the country’s regional administrations have been keen to suppress the truth by constricting media freedoms. They have done this by blatantly jailing, abducting, maiming and killing journalists. In other instances, the enemies of the truth have sponsored attacks on media houses, including newsroom offices, radio and TV stations.
In more latent cases, the ruling political class and mineral-extracting run-by-night local and international bandit capitalists have connived and sponsored the passage of laws aimed at blocking access to information by the media and the public.
For example, the International Press Institute documented in its September 2023 Africa Press Monitoring report that journalist Stanis Bujakera Tshiamala was arrested and detained in Lubumbashi on September 8, 2023, accused of “spreading false rumours” and “disseminating false information.” He had published a story in the monthly magazine, Jeune Afrique, on August 31 about the killing in July of former Transport minister and Opposition lawmaker Cherubin Okende.
Human Rights Watch reported that in July 2024, the Congolese government’s Communications and Broadcasting Board (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel et de la communication, CSAC) suspended journalist Jessy Kabasele for an indefinite period. Reason? He interviewed one of the country’s most famous singerS, Koffi Olomide on Le Panier (The Morning Show) where the musician criticised the army’s response to the M23 rebel attacks as too weak. CSAC accused Kabasele of failing to reframe Olomide’s speech which, it argued, “undermines the enormous efforts and sacrifices made by the government.”
Congo’s media regulator has been stifling reporting on the conflict. In February 2024, CSAC directed the media not to broadcast debates on the country’s army operations without the presence of at least one “expert on the matter.” The directive fell short of openly declaring that that expert must, invariably, be a government apologist. The HRW report recounted that in April 2024, CSAC recommended that media outlets should no longer “broadcast information relating to the rebellion in eastern DRC without referring to official [government] sources.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented many cases where journalists in the DRC have been arrested, accused of alleged crimes, including defamation and sharing false information, and criminally prosecuted because of their work. Several sections of the press law, which replaced legislation from 1996, subject journalists to criminal prosecution without detailing specific breaches. For example, Section 113 provides that “offences by the online press are punished in accordance with the legislation in force in criminal matters.
Section 123 of the press law says the “publication, dissemination or reproduction” of “false news” is punishable under the penal code, or the code of military justice if that media is made in “bad faith” and has “shaken discipline or the morale of the armies or has hindered the war efforts of the nation.” Section 124 says the penal code will also be used to punish anyone who commits a press offence against “magistrates, civil servants, and agents vested with public authority.”
Another threat to media and public access to information is the DRC’s new digital code, whose section 360 says that journalists convicted of relaying false information electronically could be jailed for six months of pay a fine of one million francs ($430). Section 325 prohibits the use of “personal data” to “harm people or their reputation”, and that infractions are prosecuted under the criminal procedure code.
Lesson learnt? Local and international human and media rights organisations should be united in piling pressure on the DRC government to liberate journalists and the citizens from the albatross of stifling laws and regulations. The freedom-constricting legal regime is denying the Congolese the right to access balanced and truthful information.
