Freedom of expression during each president's tenure

Every president since 1991, ranked by how the freedom of expression changed from their first day in office. Politare shows what happened during a tenure; it does not claim the office-holder caused it.

#	President	In office	Total	Per year	Chart
1	N Laurent-Désiré Kabila	17 May 1997 – 17 Jan 2001	+19.3 points 1996 → 2000	+4.8 points/yr
2	Joseph Kabila	17 Jan 2001 – 24 Jan 2019	+8.3 points 2000 → 2018	+0.5 points/yr
3	UDPS Félix Tshisekedi	24 Jan 2019 – now	−5.7 points 2018 → 2025	−0.8 points/yr

Sorted by total, highest first. Every row is indexed to the last count complete before the first day in office ("from" marks a start that had to move because that count had no data, or because the period cut it); Levels are per cent changes, rates are differences in points; "per year" compounds levels and divides rates. Tenures with under 12 months, or under three observations, are left out. points, 0 to 100, V-Dem's 0 to 1 index times 100 · V-Dem Institute, V-Dem dataset v16 (v2x_freexp_altinf): the freedom of expression and alternative sources of information index, the press, academic and private speech and the media's independence, as V-Dem's country experts rate them, with V-Dem's confidence interval; the 0 to 1 index times 100 · Democratic Republic of the Congo data · as of Oct 2026.