An old ally of Joseph Kabila leaves the ruling party

MOÏSE KATUMBI, a cowboy-hat-wearing, football-club-owning, multimillionaire governor, is probably the second most powerful man in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the president, Joseph Kabila. Mr Katumbi has stood by the president’s side since he was first elected in 2006, delivering votes and support from Congo’s richest copper-producing region, Katanga.

That all changed last week when Mr Katumbi announced he was leaving the ruling party, accusing it of trying to twist the country’s constitution so that Mr Kabila could remain in power beyond his second and supposedly final five-year term, which ends in December 2016.

“I had to leave to save our young democracy,” Mr Katumbi says. If that sounds grandiose, Congolese democracy is indeed in need of saving. Despite the presence of a United Nations peacekeeping force, and despite the tens of billions of dollars spent by the international community to prop up Mr Kabila and his enormous, rickety country since the end in 2003 of the savage wars that triggered and followed the downfall of the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo’s democratic experiment is in danger of collapse.

Conflict has continued in Congo’s eastern provinces under Mr Kabila’s watch since Mobutu’s fall, though there has been progress in recent years against some of the several-dozen rebel groups ensconced in the region. The mineral-rich country also rode the copper price boom to some of the highest growth rates in the world. That growth produced limited benefits for average Congolese, who remain among the earth’s poorest. During the last elections in 2011, Mr Kabila had to resort to skulduggery to assure he would win. That anti-democratic trend has continued.

The government’s security forces have been murdering pro-democracy protesters and the judiciary is jailing the president’s political opponents, students among them. Even Mr Katumbi says he’s been threatened. “You don’t even know all the ways,” he says.

The split between the two men was a long time coming. Mr Katumbi has not so secretly been meeting with foreign officials in Western capitals and talking to Mr Kabila’s opponents for more than a year. Even before that, the mining company he founded, MCK, hired a high-powered Washington, DC, lobby group for advice. Recently the firm has been promoting the promise of “African democracy” to members of the American Congress. It’s an odd use of funds for a mining and trucking company, which has led many to speculate that Mr Katumbi has his sights set on Mr Kabila’s seat.

If a vote takes place as scheduled next year, Mr Katumbi could very well win. While some in the country’s Lingala-speaking west are reluctant to have another easterner as president (Mr Kabila is also from Katanga, where Swahili is spoken), Mr Katumbi’s break with the ruling party found support from politicians throughout the country.

For now, Mr Katumbi is hedging. “I’ll take some time to rest and reflect on whether I’ll return to the world of business or the world of politics,” he says. In the meantime he has other distractions: his football club, T.P. Mazembe, is fighting to represent Africa at the FIFA Club World Cup in December, where they could face FC Barcelona. As he has told his football team, “You shouldn’t talk before killing a lion; you first wait until the lion is dead." That might apply to more than just football. If Congo’s next president does not come with his own militia, that would be a welcome change for the region, whose politics are still dominated by ex-rebels with links to the devastating wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Another local scourge is corruption, and Mr Katumbi hasn’t been immune to accusations of graft. He says his conscience is clear. “I come from a family of businessmen. We have our history, we have our contracts, we have our proof.” Mr Katumbi says all Congolese politicians should be required to show where their wealth came from—perhaps a dig at his former friend. "What did we have before we entered politics?” he asks. “I had my own private jet. Before I was governor, T.P. Mazembe was already flying in a private jet.” Those jets would also be useful for a presidential campaign. Or, if Mr Kabila tries to stay in power by force, Mr Katumbi might need to use them to escape.