Kinshasa, 2 October 2026 — The national dialogue announced by President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo is now moving from announcement to debate, and the question dominating discussions in Kinshasa is no longer whether the talks will happen, but what they will leave behind. For Me Ben Touere, a lawyer at the Paris Bar, the initiative should be understood as a political mechanism for consultation and pacification, designed to build compromises on peace and national cohesion — not as a substitute for the country’s constitutional institutions.
A mechanism for consultation, not a parallel institution
In an interview, the lawyer stressed that the dialogue “must be conceived as a political mechanism for consultation and pacification, not as a parallel institution.” According to him, it can help forge compromises on peace, national cohesion, institutional reforms and the functioning of the State. But it must not, he warned, become “a second Parliament, a parallel Government, a political court, or a de facto constituent assembly.”
The distinction matters because it frames the fallout of the process itself. Any political conclusions reached during the consultations, Me Touere argued, “could only produce lasting legal effects after they are translated by the institutions constitutionally competent to do so.”
Who decides what after the dialogue ends?
The public law doctor and lecturer at Sorbonne Paris Nord University laid out a clear division of labour for the post-dialogue phase:
- A legislative reform must go through Parliament;
- A public policy falls to the Government;
- A question of constitutionality belongs to the Constitutional Court;
- And any matter reserved for the direct decision of the people must be submitted to them in the forms laid down by law.
Under this approach, he explained, the process rests on a sequence: dialogue, consensus, intervention by the competent institutions, constitutional review and, where required or legally warranted, popular consultation.
Sovereignty cannot be claimed by any camp in the talks
Me Elenga pointed out that Article 5 of the Constitution enshrines the principle that national sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it directly through elections or referendums and indirectly through their representatives. “Neither the majority, nor the opposition, nor the participants in a dialogue can therefore claim national sovereignty for themselves,” he said.
In his reading, the exercise should ultimately aim to reform and consolidate the State through dialogue, rather than create mechanisms likely to weaken it or share its prerogatives. That, in essence, is the test the process now faces: whether it strengthens the institutions it was meant to serve, or leaves them more contested than before.