The attention of Monday's Kinshasa press is mainly focused on the publication by the Independent Electoral Commission of the first returns from last week's runoff presidential election.

So far into the count, "[Joseph] Kabila is credited with 68.46 percent of the vote, compared with 31.54 percent for [Jean-Pierre] Bemba," Le Palmarès reports. This means that Kabila is running "over 300,000 votes" ahead of Bemba, explains L'Avenir, noting that the incumbent president not only "has improved his score in the west, [but also] maintained his undisputed lead in the east."

It is true however that veteran opposition leader "Antoine Gizenga's call for a pro-Kabila vote had not been blindly heeded," according to Le Potentiel. PALU leader Gizenga, who finished third in July's first round of voting after collecting most his votes in his stronghold of Bandundu, has been supporting President Kabila in the second round. The partial results show "Bemba win[ning] 93.4 percent of the vote in Bandundu, despite a call for a pro-Kabila vote by Antoine Gizenga who had picked up 73 percent of the vote in that province" in the first round," Le Palmarès notes.

Meanwhile, "the Independent Electoral Commission has urged the political actors and especially the media and the population to keep calm and demonstrate restraint," La Tempête des Tropiques reports.

In related news, Le Potentiel reports that three members of Bemba's campaign team, Joseph Olenghankoy, Gaston Dindo and Gabriel Mokia, have made death threats against Modeste Mutinga, the president of the High Media Authority (HAM, media watchdog). According to the paper, this came after the three persons were barred from speaking to the media after they had "announc[ed] some results from the election in violation of the electoral law". "Olenghankoy had the HAM's president on the phone twice on Saturday, 3 November, hurling abusive words at him, which were punctuated with insults and death threats," Le Potentiel writes. Gaston Dindo "did the same thing...and was followed in that by Gabriel Mokia whose behaviour [towards Mutinga] was just as brutal and threatening...," the paper adds.