Joseph Kabila
Joseph Kabila was president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from January 2001, when his father Laurent was shot by a bodyguard and the inner circle chose the twenty-nine-year-old army chief who spoke Swahili and English better than Lingala and French, to January 2019, two years after his second and last term had ended, when he handed the office to an opposition leader in a deal that kept his party the parliament and the army. The eighteen years were the peace of Sun City in 2002 that ended the war of five countries in which four million had died. There was the transitional government of one president and four vice-presidents, and the constitution of 2006 and the first free election in forty-six years, which he won in a run-off against Bemba whose militia then fought the army in the streets of Kinshasa. There was the Chinese minerals-for-infrastructure contract of 2008 worth six billion dollars. There were the wars in the Kivus that did not end, with the M23 taking Goma in 2012 and being driven out in 2013 by a UN brigade that fought. There was the election of 2011 that observers found not credible, and the two years of glissement, slippage, after 2016, in which he did not hold the election the constitution required and the protests were shot, until the Catholic Church's marches of 2018 and the American sanctions made him name a successor and hold the vote. He was born in 1971 in a rebel camp in the mountains of South Kivu, where his father was fighting Mobutu, the twin of a sister. He grew up in Tanzania and Uganda under other names, and trained in Tanzania and briefly in China. He commanded the child soldiers, the kadogos, of his father's march on Kinshasa in 1997, which made him a general at twenty-six. The election of December 2018 was won, the electoral commission said, by Tshisekedi, and the Church's forty thousand observers said by Fayulu with a majority, and Kabila's coalition took three hundred and thirty-seven of the five hundred seats in the same election, which told the story. The coalition with Tshisekedi broke in 2020 and his people were removed from the government, the army and the courts one by one. He left the country in 2023 for South Africa and studies. In 2025, with the M23 holding Goma and Bukavu again with Rwandan troops, he appeared in Goma under their protection. He was stripped of his senator-for-life immunity, tried in absentia for treason and sentenced to death in September 2025. He is the rebellion's political face, or its prisoner.
- Lived: 1971 CE – ?
- Nationality: Congolese
- Roles: president, soldier, politician
