© TONY KARUMBAJanuary 24 2019: Outgoing president Joseph Kabila, left, shakes hands with his newly-inaugurated successor, Felix Tshisekedi
A group of DR Congo senators who support former president Joseph Kabila on Thursday condemned a "dictatorial shift" in the country after their bloc became a target in a long-running power struggle.
President Felix Tshisekedi, who took office in January 2019, is pushing through top-level changes in parliament after a two-year tussle with pro-Kabila supporters.
In December, he scrapped a coalition government dominated by Kabila allies and last week pushed out the pro-Kabila prime minister after winning over members of the National Assembly.
On Thursday, the Senate appointed a temporary bureau -- the office which oversees the work of the upper house -- as a first step towards a motion of censure of the pro-Kabila speaker, Alexis Thambwe Mwamba.
This act "is the final blow to the republic's institutions," Tshikez Diemu, the spokesman of senators who belong to Kabila's Common Front for the Congo (FCC).
"We call on the president of the republic, the head of state, to stop this dictatorial drift, which is liable to plunge the country into institutional and social instability," he said.
On Wednesday, a Tshisekedi supporter, 79-year-old Christophe Mboso, was elected speaker of the National Assembly, three weeks after its pro-Kabila head, Jeanine Mabunda, was forced out.
Prime Minister Sylvestre Ilunga Ilunkamba was pushed out last week following a censure motion in parliament, where a majority of deputies have switched allegiance from Kabila to Tshisekedi.
The moves amount to "bare-faced installation of a monolithic dictatorship," the Kabila supporters in the senate said, calling on the African Union (AU) to show its opposition.
Kabila stepped down after 18 years in office, opening the way to elections in December 2018 that were controversially won by Tshisekedi, the son of a veteran opposition leader.
But the new president was forced into a coalition with Kabila supporters in parliament -- an arrangement that, he complained, hamstrung his plans of reform.
Tensions erupted into the open last October when Tshisekedi appointed three judges to the Constitutional Court, the Democratic Republic of Congo's highest judicial authority.
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