Leading article: A first, fragile step towards normality

No country sums up the tragic paradoxes of Africa more than Congo, which is why the holding of more or less free elections there deserves our attention. Let's start with those paradoxes. Congo, formerly known as Zaire, ought to be one of the world's richer states. Vast, green and fertile, it holds huge stocks of precious minerals, including cobalt, gold and diamonds.

Instead, its decline since independence from Belgium in 1960 under predatory dictators has been precipitate. Most colonial-era infrastructure has fallen to pieces, while poverty and general collapse have exposed the country to outside invasions and civil war.

More than 4 million people have died since 1998 in conditions of horrible, confused violence, most of them children, mostly in the east. Untold thousands have been raped by militias. Against that backdrop, any advance towards free elections can only be good. It deals a blow to a nasty but tenacious thesis, often put forward in the West since the 1970s and 1980s, that multi-party democracy does not match Africa's needs or traditions. In other words, the best that the Continent can look forward to is more venial dictators of the same type as Mobutu Sese Seko, the former ruler of Zaire who died in 1997 having reportedly squirrelled away billions of dollars in foreign banks.

Joseph Kabila, Congo's president since 2001 and the likely winner of the presidential election, is neither a saint nor a genuine reformer. But he is not quite in Mobutu's league.

On the debit side, his supporters have taken control of most of the media in the run-up to the poll and his thuggish party militia has intimidated and even murdered opponents. The death of a veteran pro-democracy journalist this weekend, after denouncing this intimidation, was a reminder that Congo has a way to go on the road to political liberty. On the plus side, none of the Kabila camp's dirty tactics has eliminated the element of genuine choice in this election, nor dulled the determination of most of Congo's 25 million voters to make their voices heard in the ballot box for the first time in 40 years.

The problem in Congo, as elsewhere in Africa, will be matching progress towards democracy with economic gains. Democracy's weakness in Africa since decolonisation has been its failure to deliver tangible change to the lives of ordinary people, rendering populations apathetic towards military coups and takeovers by charismatic individuals.

It is too soon to tell whether Congo's first, halting steps towards freedom will make much difference in this field. But after decades of unrelieved disaster we must hope this election marked an end to a nightmarish period in the life of this huge country.

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