The Third Republic of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a unitary state with a five-level hierarchy of types of administrative division. There are nine different types of country subdivision in a new hierarchy with no new types but with two from the previous one abolished.
Under the Third Republic, established in 2006, the number of provinces has gone from ten to twenty-five. By fits and starts the number of towns that have been, or are in the process of being, upgraded to cities has also increased greatly.
Reforms to devolve powers to the provinces were completed in 2006, but devolution to more local levels have again been delayed when elections scheduled for 2019 were not held. Traditional authority continues to play a significant role in governance with traditional leaders leading many of the subdivisions at the lower levels.
The Constitution divides the country into the capital city of Kinshasa and 25 provinces. It also gives the capital the status of a province. The hierarchy of types of administrative division in the province, as set down in other organic law, is as follows:
So a province is divided into territories and cities; a territory into sectors, chiefdoms, and communes; a sector or chiefdom into groupings; and so on.
The Constitution, as before, divides the country into the city of Kinshasa and the provinces; however, it increased the number of provinces from ten to twenty-five. This was put into effect in 2015, when the six largest provinces were split into twenty-one new provinces. Together with the four unsplit provinces—Bas-Congo (renamed Kongo Central), Maniema, Nord-Kivu, and Sud-Kivu—they make up the twenty-five provinces listed in Article 2 of the Constitution.
Under the old organization the six former provinces were divided into districts and cities. The districts were further divided into territories. Each new province was created from the territories of one or two districts, adding any enclosed cities and—if necessary—making the new capital a city. The following table gives the complete details. So for instance, Lommami province resulted from the split of the former Kasaï-Oriental province; created from the territories of the former Kabinda district, the city of Mwene-Ditu, and by making the town of Kabinda the capital city.
| Subdivisions of former province | + New city | = New province | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| District(s) | City(ies) | ||||
| Bandundu | Kwango | Kenge | Kwango | ||
| Kwilu | Bandundu, Kikwit | Kwilu | |||
| Mai-Ndombe, Plateaux | Inongo | Mai-Ndombe | |||
| Équateur | Équateur | Mbandaka | Équateur | ||
| Mongala | Lisala | Mongala | |||
| Nord-Ubangi | Gbadolite | Nord-Ubangi | |||
| Sud-Ubangi | Zongo | Gemena | Sud-Ubangi | ||
| Tshuapa | Boende | Tshuapa | |||
| Kasaï-Occidental | Kasaï | Tshikapa | Kasaï | ||
| Lulua | Kananga | Kasaï-Central | |||
| Kasaï-Oriental | Tshilenge | Mbuji-Mayi | Kasaï-Oriental | ||
| Kabinda | Mwene-Ditu | Kabinda | Lomami | ||
| Sankuru | Lusambo | Sankuru | |||
| Katanga | Haut-Katanga | Likasi, Lubumbashi | Haut-Katanga | ||
| Haut-Lomami | Kamina | Haut-Lomami | |||
| Lualaba, Kolwezi | Lualaba | ||||
| Tanganyika | Kalemie | Tanganyika | |||
| Orientale | Bas-Uélé | Buta | Bas-Uélé | ||
| Haut-Uélé | Isiro | Haut-Uélé | |||
| Ituri | Bunia | Ituri | |||
| Tshopo | Kisangani | Tshopo | |||
| † Kolwezi was a hybrid city/district made up of two communes and two territories. The territories were split off and the rest became the provincial capital. | |||||
In order to pass a modified bill allocating seats for upcoming local elections, it was decided to suspend those articles that were contentious and to revert the affected communities to their 2006 administrative configurations. The articles granting city status to new provincial capitals—Boende, Bunia, Buta, Gemena, Inongo, Isiro, Kabinda, Kalemie, Kamina, Kenge, Lisala, and Lusambo—were not suspended and neither were those granting commune status to the administrative centers of the territories.
Ultimately the planned for local elections never occurred, but the suspensions were not lifted until mid-2018 just months before the general election. The National Alliance of Traditional Authorities of the Congo protested this reinstatement as diminishing traditional authority and as a threat to national security. In addition to reinstating the articles the government decided that disputes over boundaries would be resolved by an ad hoc committee and that the setting up of cities and communes would be prioritized with 18 cities in the initial phase.
In 2019 mayors for the new cities of Uvira, Baraka, Kamituga, and Kasumbalesa were appointed. The setting up of a city administration and those of its subdivisions can take years given the lack of local resources. For instance the town of Buta gained city status when it became a provincial capital in 2015, had its first mayor appointed in 2018, and by June 2019 its four communes were still not operational.
| Level | Total | Breakdown | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 26 | 25 provinces + Kinshasa | |
| 2nd | 177 | 145 territories + 33 cities - Kinshasa | |
| 3rd | 1,045 | 470 sectors + 264 chiefdoms + 311 communes | |
| 4th | 8,471 | 6,070 groupings + 2,401 quarters | |
| 5th | > 86,270 | ~86,270 villages + ? quarter divisions |
The Constitution of 2006 and ensuing organic laws brought reforms to the governance of the subdivisions which are not yet complete. Table 3 sketches the envisioned governance by subdivision type and its current status.
| Type | Leader | Deliberative body | To do | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Selection | |||||
| 1st | Province | Governor | elected by assembly | Assembly of elected and co-opted members | ||
| 2nd | Territory | Territory Administrator | appointed | n/a | ||
| City | Mayor | elected by council | Council elected by commune councils | council and leader elections | ||
| 3rd | Commune | Burgomaster | Council elected by voters | |||
| Sector | Sector Chief | |||||
| Chiefdom | Chiefdom Chief | by tradition | council elections | |||
| 4th | Grouping | Grouping Chief | n/a | |||
| Quarter | Quarter Chief | appointed | ||||
| 5th | Village | Village Chief | by tradition or other local practice | |||
| Notes: a) In French top to bottom: gouverneur, administrateur de territoire (AT), maire, bourgmestre, chef de secteur, chefferie, groupment, quartier, and village. b) Includes Kinshasa. c) Co-opted members are traditional leaders selected by their peers following strict rules including term limits. d) Each Commune Council elects four members of the City Council. | ||||||
These reforms devolved powers to the provinces and, more modestly, to the cities and the subdivisions at the third administrative level. They all were to have both an executive body with a leader and a deliberative body which was to elect the leader. The other subdivisions remained purely administrative in nature.
The Congolese voter would have a direct say in the affairs of the province by voting in a deputy to the provincial assembly which would then go on to elect the governor. The voter was also to have a say in more local affairs by voting in a councilperson to the local council which was then, except in a chiefdom, to go on to elect the local leader. If the voter lived in a provincial city they were also to have a more indirect say, again through the local council, in the composition of the city government.
Devolution to the provinces was launched with the which elected the provincial assemblies of the eleven provinces. Similar elections for local councils have yet to occur. Thus, the effected subdivisions have no deliberative body and their leaders, as provided by law, are unelected and appointed from above. In this way a city mayor is much like a territory administrator. For now the Congolese voter does not have a say in local affairs.[2]
Local council elections were scheduled to occur on 22 September 2019. In April of that year the League of Women Voters for the Elections met with the electoral commission and condemned the delay in starting candidate registration for the local elections. In June, the League of Voters stressed the importance of these elections and asked President Tshisekedi to intervene to get the process going. In August, a petition with two million signatures demanding that the elections be held was filed at the presidential palace. The signatures were collected within two months by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. At the end of October the outgoing electoral commission presented their final report to the National Assembly. At this time their rapporteur said that organizing the local elections required a workforce of 650,000 and the allocation of considerable funds by the government. Finally, in December President Tshisekedi declared that the elections would be held sometime in 2020. This did not happen.
However, in February 2022 the new electoral commission published a roadmap for the next election cycle that would have the local council elections occur in December 2023 along with the elections for the president, the National Assembly, and the provincial assemblies. But, when the electoral calendar was published in November 2022, the elections for sector and chiefdom council were pushed back to 11 July 2024 leaving only the commune elections to be run on 20 December 2023.
Traditional leaders have a significant role in governing the subdivisions. At the first administrative level, 8% of all provincial deputies are co-opted traditional leaders.[3] At the third and forth levels they are the leaders of 25% and 70% of the subdivisions respectively. In 2018, 64% of the electorate lived in a grouping without counting those in embedded groupings.[4]
Traditional authority is recognized by Article 207 of the Constitution and a law defining the legal status of traditional leaders was passed in 2015. In addition to being official leaders of their administrative divisions, these leaders exercise customary authority – which can involve traditional advisory councils – in a way that is not contrary to the Constitution, the law, public order and decency. The leaders are also obligated to be apolitical.
Although selected by local structures according to custom, traditional leaders can only exercise their authority if they are officially recognized and invested by the government. Failure of the government to do so can cause great resentment. In 2013 such a dispute over the leadership of a grouping eventually led, through an escalation of conflicts in 2016, to the Kamwina Nsapu rebellion.
| the Districts are | Total | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| in Provinces | in Kinshasa | Districts | Seats | ||
| National Assembly | territories and cities | Kinshasa I-IV | 181 | 500 | |
| Provincial Assembly | communes | 201 | 715 | ||
| Commune Council | communes | 311 | 2,323 | ||
| Sector or Chiefdom Council | sectors or chiefdoms | n/a | 734 | 7,334 | |
| Notes: a) Kinshasa I: Lukunga, II: Funa, III: Mont-Amba, IV: Tshangu. b) But seats are allocated by grouping. | |||||
Except for the four National Assembly districts in Kinshasa, all electoral districts in Table 4 are administrative divisions. The Carter Center expert mission report for the 2018 elections criticizes the use of these divisions for national and provincial elections as not meeting international standards for uniform allocation of voters per constituency. As example they contrast 27,228 voters per National Assembly seat in the city of Inongo vs. 128,699 in the territory of Lomela.