Bad weather in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has left four persons dead and around twenty missing in South Kivu, when a building was swept away by a swollen river.
The accident occurred in a rural mining area in the Mwenga territory.
In heavy rain, local residents, small-scale miners, shopkeepers and farmers took shelter under a shed used as a makeshift restaurant on the banks of a river.
Deputy mayor of Kamituga, a large town in this region of South Kivu, Alexandre Ngandu, told news men that the rain “caused a landslide”, The building collapsed and “the river swept away everything, people and property”.
“The toll is 20 missing and four bodies found”, and the search is continuing, added Mr Ngandu.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s electoral commission has continued to release partial results from the December 20-21 presidential election, with incumbent leader Félix Tshisekedi leading by a wide margin of over 80% of the vote.
The results announced so far relate to 1,876,827 voters, out of a total of nearly 44 million registered in the vast country of around 100 million inhabitants.
At this stage of the vote count, according to the Céni, Félix Tshisekedi, who has been in power since the beginning of 2019 and is running for a second five-year term, has achieved a score of 81.4%.
He was followed by businessman and former governor of Katanga (southeast) Moïse Katumbi and the other opponent Martin Fayulu. The twenty or so other candidates in the running, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege, failed to reach 1%.
Opposition candidates have been denouncing the “chaos” and “irregularities” that marred the vote since the very first day.
