During the opening ceremony of the recently-held inaugural International Security Conference on Africa (ISCA) in Kigali, President Kagame laid out three principles that, hopefully, will guide the continent’s efforts to overcome its security challenges: Africa’s security cannot be outsourced; security and governance are deeply interconnected; Africans cannot complain about foreign interference while also creating the very conditions that enable it.
While Kagame’s remarks apply broadly to Africa, nowhere do they ring truer than in the Congo. And listening to recent interventions by former Presidents Joseph Kabila and Thabo Mbeki on the crisis in the DRC, one notices a clear consensus among the three leaders, each of whom has played a key role in efforts to resolve the decades-old conflict. This consensus was neatly summed up in Mbeki’s remarks: the solution to Congo’s crisis does not lie in Kigali, despite what hostile Western actions and media narratives suggest; it lies in Kinshasa. Africans have every reason to support this position.
Humanising Congolese
Unlike dominant Western narratives, this view humanises the Congolese people. It places responsibility in their hands and raises expectations about their capacity to provide public goods in their own country, chief among which is security.
In contrast, a paternalistic approach has defined international engagement with the DRC. Western powers, along with their NGOs, academics, media and UN missions, have long treated the Congolese as inherently incapable of making their country safe. Even now, UN reports, which are contradicted by virtually anyone who has visited the North Kivu capital, Goma, continue to depict the situation there as catastrophic in humanitarian terms, ignoring significant improvements on the ground. These include the return of nearly a million formerly internally displaced people to their villages, the ongoing disarmament of civilians previously armed by the government, and the neutralisation of militias that once terrorised the city.
Such misleading reports do more than prop up the Congolese government; they are desperate attempts to keep the failing UN mission alive at a time when its relevance is increasingly questioned, even by its major funders such as the US government. The underlying message is clear: the Congolese are incapable of pacifying their own country and must therefore depend indefinitely on UN peacekeepers and now even foreign mercenaries. Fortunately, in Eastern Congo, there are Africans who reject this demeaning view that seeks to keep them under foreign tutelage.
Addressing M23 grievances
The Kagame-Mbeki-Kabila consensus deserves African support, not least because it tackles two of the enablers of Western meddling: divisionism and tribalism within Africa itself. Indeed, a leader should not complain of any form of external meddling while also marginalising and brutalising entire communities within their country. It should be obvious by now that the conflicts arising from the chauvinism of the elites in Kinshasa are a magnet for Western meddling and paternalism.
To be clear, no rational African absolves the West of its imperial ambitions and its unquenchable thirst to dominate and dictate, a matter President Kagame has often spoken out on, even as he calls upon Africans to take ownership of the challenges they face. But we can all agree that the solution to these challenges lies within Africa itself. The West will neither act out of mercy nor show restraint when our own actions invite and sustain its imperialism.
More generally, Africans cannot preach more integration and freedom of movement, castigate leaders for not delivering fast enough on those promises, and then offer support to a government in Kinshasa that is the antithesis of these very ideals. The willingness of governing elites in Kinshasa to brand some Congolese citizens as foreigners, and to uproot or even exterminate them on account of their identity, should mark them as reactionaries who must bear the full brunt of the anger felt by Africans.
Mbeki’s consistent view that the issue of Kinyarwanda-speaking communities should be resolved once and for all, and Kabila’s newfound wisdom on the same matter, must be encouraged. Without question, a united Congo stands a better chance of resisting foreign predation and meddling.
Dispelling myths around the conflicts, centring people-first governance
Finally, the consensus that the solution to Congo’s problems lies in Kinshasa brings much-needed clarity to the matter. It underscores that poor governance, rather than minerals, is one of the root causes of the conflict. It also cuts through the smokescreen laid by Western narratives, which often project their own obsession with minerals as Africa’s chief concern. In fact, not once, in his address to the nation, did Kabila mention minerals or any alleged Rwandan aggression. Nor is it Mbeki’s view that some US-backed “minerals-for-security” deal between Rwanda and Congo would settle the crisis.
If the real issue were minerals or access to resources, as some would have us believe,the DRC’s conflict with Rwanda would never have arisen. Rwanda had already signed a gold-refining deal with Congo well before the M23 re-ermeged. Its flagship national carrier, RwandAir, was servicing very lucrative air routes, connecting people and ferrying exports to Kinshasa. But once Kinshasa brought the FDLR into its military fold, those agreements, no matter how profitable, were bound to fall by the wayside. Rwanda was never going to sit by and look on quietly as the DRC government fraternized with, armed and even embedded the FDLR insurgents in its own army. It was bound to take action, even at the risk of sacrificing these lucrative deals. President Kagame has always been unambiguous: for Kigali, Rwanda’s security comes first.
That Pretoria, Brussels, and other capitals — home to major firms whose only preoccupation is with maintaining their corporate footprint in eastern Congo and control over mineral processing — are involved, is no surprise. However, their concerns should not dominate the conversation at the heart of peace efforts if the welfare of the Congolese people and the security of Rwandans are at stake.
No doubt, when the dust finally settles, and peace takes root, Congolese will find it more profitable to either establish local processing plants or work with neighbouring countries based on simple transport economics. That shift will come naturally as a by-product of peaceful coexistence, without need for Washington’s mediation or blessing.
Sadly, however, President Tshisekedi seems to be more interested in waging war than in governing in the interests of all Congolese. His government has now hired Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous American mercenary company Blackwater, who once brazenly called for the recolonisation of Africa on the grounds that Africans are incapable of governing themselves. That this very man is now deploying forces in DRC only reinforces the cynical view that Africans are their own worst enemies.
As it stands, Kinshasa has outsourced national security to aspiring colonisers, abdicated the duty to govern, and opened the door to western meddling in his country and the wider region. A government such as Tshisekedi’s, whose incapacity for governing is on clear display, is not one that clear-headed Africans should support.
The only good news is that Mbeki and Kabila have laid out the right context and a clear roadmap for getting Congo back on its feet. What remains is Africa’s Achilles’ heel: turning words into actions, or simply implementation.
