The Man Who Could Become Nigeria’s Next President (1)–By Jude Egbas

Patrice Lumumba, was the first Prime Minister of the independent Republic of Congo. He was born on 2 July 1925 in Katako Kombe, in the northern province of Kasai. He was a member of the small Batetela tribe, a fact that was to become significant in his later political life.

He was the son of an ordinary farmer. His father wished him to become a teacher, and sent him to a Roman Catholic missionary school, which at that time was almost the only opportunity for Africans to acquire knowledge. At the age of thirteen he moved to a protestant school where he attended a training course for doctor's assistants. Two years later he left these missionaries, to acquire knowledge through independent studies. He was strongly attracted by the ideas of the French Enlightement (18th century) to be found in the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. He read books by Hugo and Moliere. Even at that time he wrote poems, at a later date used his poems as a stirring indictment of the Belgian colonial regime.

After attending a postal worker's school, Lumumba worked as a clerk with the local administration, then shortly as the head of a department in a brewery. Between 1943-1958, Lumumba worked as a nurse’s assistant, postal clerk, and a volunteer librarian. In 1955, he served as secretary and later president of the Association for African Government Employees; founded Post Office Employees Club, member of the Comite de L’union Belgo-Congolaise. He made speeches, wrote articles, did his utmost to unite and organize the Congolese working people. In 1956 Lumumba was invited with others to make a study tour of Belgium under the auspices of the Minister of Colonies. On his return he was arrested on a charge of embezzlement from the post office. He was convicted and condemned one year later, after various reductions of sentence, to 12 months' imprisonment and a fine. He increasingly realized that it was not possible to fight the colonial power effectively unless tribal strife was overcome.

In 1951, he married Pauline Opangu.

Together with like-minded people he wrote a memorandum in 1957 in which they demanded the country's immediate independence. On October 5, 1958, he founded the National Congolese Movement (Movement National Congolaise-MNC) and became its president.

After the Second World War, when the world socialist system had emerged and consolidated, the imperialists' all-pervading power was broken; the anti-colonial struggle of the national liberation movement experienced an upswing. Ghana having been the first country of sub-Saharan Africa to win its independence as a nation in March 1957, hosted the first conference of the peoples of this continent in her capital Accra in December 1957. On 11, December, 1958: Lumumba addressed the Pan-African Conference in Accra-Ghana, where he met nationalists from across the African continent and was made a member of the permanent organization set up by the conference. He resolutely demanded his country's independence. At the same time he called on Africans to unite "irrespective of the frontiers separating us, irrespective of our ethnic differences, in order to make the African continent free and happy, rescued from insecurity, fear and all colonial rule".

On 10 October 1958, Lumumba founded the Congolese National Movement ((Mouvement National Congolais;MNC), the first nationwide Congolese political party. Lumumba pointed out that the Congo would not be able to throw off its colonial shackles unless the whole people joined hands.

The Belgian colonial power, naturally, did not stand and watch, for their domination over one of the world's regions abounding in raw materials was at stake. Belgium had to modify its policy after the 1959 popular revolts and demands for independence became ever more unequivocal in defiance of the colonialists' unbridled rule of terror, when demonstrations and strikes could no longer be controlled.In 1959 the Belgian government announced a pre-5 year independence programme, starting with local elections in December 1959. The nationalists regarded this program as a scheme to install puppets before independence and announced a boycott of the elections. The Belgian authorities responded with repression. On October 30 there was a clash in Stanleyville that resulted in 30 deaths. Lumumba was imprisoned on a charge of inciting to riot.

The MNC changed tactics and entered the elections. It won a sweeping victory in Stanleyville (90 percent of the votes). In January 1960 the Belgian government convened a Round Table Conference in Brussels of all Congolese parties to discuss political change, but the MNC refused to participate without Lumumba. Lumumba was thereupon released from prison and flown to Brussels. The conference agreed on a date for independence, June 30, with national elections in May. Although there was a multiplicity of parties, the MNC became the country’s strongest party during the May 1960 parliamentary elections, and Lumumba emerged as the leading nationalist politician of the Congo. Lumumba became the first prime minister of Congo at his country's independence on 30 June 1960.

A few days after independence, some units of the army rebelled, largely because of objections to their Belgian commander. In the confusion, the mineral-rich province of Katanga proclaimed secession. Belgium sent in troops, ostensibly to protect Belgian nationals in the disorder. But the Belgian troops landed principally in Katanga, where they sustained the secessionist regime of Moise Tshombe, along time enemy of Lumumba. The Congo appealed to the United Nations to expel the Belgians and help them restore internal order. As prime minister, Lumumba did what little he could to redress the situation. His had a weak untrained army. The Belgian troops did not evacuate, and the Katanga secession continued. Since the United Nations forces refused to help suppress the Katangese revolt, Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union for planes to assist in transporting his troops to Katanga. He asked the independent African states to meet in Léopoldville in August to unite their efforts behind him. His moves alarmed many, particularly the Western powers and the supporters of President Joseph Kasavubu, who pursued a moderate course in the coalition government and favoured some local autonomy in the provinces.

On September 5 Sixty-seven days after he came to power, President Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba. The legalities of the move were immediately contested by Lumumba Lumumba in turn, tried to sack Kasavubu. It was stalemate.

There were thus two groups now claiming to be the legal central government. On September 14 power was seized by the Congolese army leader Colonel Joseph Mobutu (president of Zaire as Mobutu Sese Seko), who later reached a working agreement with Kasavubu. In October the General Assembly of the United Nations recognized the credentials of Kasavubu's government. The independent African states split sharply over the issue.


In November Lumumba sought to travel from Leopoldville, where the United Nations had provided him with provisory protection, to Stanleyville, where his supporters had control. With the active complicity of foreign intelligence sources, Joseph Mobutu sent his soldiers after Lumumba. He was caught after several days of pursuit and spent three months in prison, while his adversaries were trying in vain to consolidate their power. Finally, aware that an imprisoned Lumumba was more dangerous than a dead Prime Minister, he was delivered on January 17, 1961, to the Katanga secessionist regime, in Elizabethville, into the hands of his most sworn enemy, President Tschombe of Katanga, where he was executed the same night of his arrival, along with his comrades Mpolo and Okito.

Lumumba was for a unitary Congo and against division of the country along tribal or regional lines. Like many other African leaders, he supported pan-Africanism and the liberation of colonial territories. He proclaimed his regime one of "positive neutralism," which he defined as a return to African values and rejection of any imported ideology, including that of the Soviet Union. However, Lumumba was a man of strong character who intended to pursue his policies, regardless of the enemies he made within his country or abroad. The Congo, furthermore, was a key area in terms of the geopolitics of Africa, and because of its wealth, its size, and its contiguity to white-dominated southern Africa, Lumumba's opponents had reason to fear the consequences of a radical or radicalized Congo regime. Moreover, in the context of the Cold War, the Soviet Union's support for Lumumba appeared at the time as a threat to many in the West. His ideas however, live in the hearts and minds of his people and the peoples of a whole continent.

From his farewell letter to his wife , an excerpt from Lumumba’s last letter to his wife stated;

"The only thing we wanted for our country was the right to a decent existence, to dignity without hypocrisy, to independence without restrictions... The day will come when history will have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity."