In the past month alone, M23 forces have conducted systematic raids on villages across the region, displacing over 150 000 people. (File photo)
As technology companies tout their latest innovations at flashy product launches in California and Texas, a devastating war unfolds in central Africa.
Bakavu, capital of the South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has fallen to Rwandan-backed forces. This follows the 27 January capture of Goma, North Kivu’s capital.
The brutality of this invasion was immediately apparent. At Goma’s Munzenze prison, during a mass jailbreak of 4 000 male prisoners, hundreds of women inmates were raped and burned alive in their wing. Two thousand bodies still await burial in Goma.
The M23 militia, backed by the Rwandan Defence Force, isn’t fighting for territory alone — they’re fighting for control of the world’s largest reserves of cobalt, coltan and lithium. These minerals, essential to everything from iPhones to Teslas, have transformed my country into a battleground for corporate interests masked as regional conflict.
The humanitarian crisis in Kivu has reached catastrophic levels. In the past month alone, M23 forces have conducted systematic raids on villages across the region, displacing over 150 000 people.
In Masisi territory, entire communities have been forced to flee as armed groups systematically loot mineral-rich areas. The town of Sake, once home to 70 000 people, now lies empty, its population scattered across makeshift camps while their villages are implanted with people from Rwanda and Uganda. This isn’t just conflict — it’s organised theft on an industrial scale.
Recent market analyses put this in stark perspective. The global electric vehicle market is projected to reach $823.75 billion by 2030, dependent largely on the Congo’s cobalt reserves.
A recent UN report revealed that M23 exported 150 tonnes of coltan to Rwanda in just one year, generating $800 000 monthly. Rwanda, a country with minimal natural mineral deposits, has inexplicably become one of the world’s leading coltan exporters. The maths doesn’t add up — unless you factor in systematic plunder.
This exploitation has a long and bloody history. From King Leopold’s rubber plantations in the late 1800s, which claimed over 10 million lives, to the CIA-backed assassination of prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, Western powers have consistently prevented the Congolese people from controlling their own resources.
Lumumba’s Independence Day speech in 1960 was clear — Congo’s vast mineral wealth must benefit its own people, not foreign interests. For this vision of economic sovereignty, he was marked for death.
The CIA and Belgium orchestrated his assassination and installed Mobutu Sese Seko, who would serve as their puppet for the next 32 years. Under Mobutu’s kleptocracy, an estimated $15 billion was looted from the country — money that still sits in Western banks today. This systematic theft of Congo’s resources has continued in new forms ever since.
Consider the latest development — the “Green Corridor” initiative, championed by the World Economic Forum and promoted by the Congolese government. While it’s marketed as sustainable development, industry insiders acknowledge it’s primarily designed to streamline mineral extraction for Western markets.
The initiative’s corporate partners read like a Who’s Who of tech giants and automotive manufacturers, all seeking to secure their supply chains while paying lip service to environmental concerns.
Behind this plunder stands Rwanda’s increasingly sophisticated dictatorship. Under Paul Kagame’s 24-year rule, Rwanda has built a surveillance state with an iron fist. Opposition leaders face not just imprisonment but death — both inside Rwanda and abroad.
Prominent Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Uganda, Belgium and South Africa. Patrick Karegeya was murdered in the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton, Johannesburg, in 2014. Congolese activists in South Africa know that we are being carefully watched.
The regime’s reach extends far beyond its borders, using Israeli-supplied Pegasus spyware to track critics and sophisticated social media campaigns to silence opposition voices. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s personal phone was spied on by Rwanda using Israeli spyware.
The geopolitical dynamics are equally troubling. For many years the US, UK, France and the EU continued to support the dictatorship in Kigali while claiming to champion democracy. Rwanda, often called the “Israel of Africa”, has long received Western funding, arms and sophisticated Israeli surveillance technology.
The US has provided military aid, training and equipment to the Rwandan Defence Force. The UK, a major donor, has funded Rwanda through bilateral aid, including financial deals such as the Rwanda asylum scheme, while also providing military and intelligence assistance.
France has strengthened military ties with Kigali in recent years after a fallout in political and diplomatic relations over genocide accusations on both sides. Israel has supplied Rwanda with weapons, surveillance technology and cyber-intelligence tools, including those used for internal repression and extraterritorial assassinations.
In Rwanda’s August 2023 election, Kagame claimed to have won a farcical 98.8% of the vote. As in previous elections, opposition candidates faced harassment, imprisonment or being barred from running, yet for years, Western governments have held up Rwanda as an example for other African countries to follow.
Western hypocrisy is stark. Much of the same international community that rightly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has remained conspicuously silent about Rwanda’s invasion of Congo, something that has ebbed and flowed for nearly 30 years.
The same forces that rightly criticised the much less sophisticated dictatorship in Zimbabwe have actively supported the high-tech dictatorship in Rwanda. The same faces that attacked Iraq under Saddam Hussein in 1991 for invading Kuwait and extracting its fuel today support the Rwandan invasion of DRC and the extraction of its natural resources by Rwanda.
The parallels with other global conflicts are striking. Just as apartheid South Africa was built on white supremacy and Israel on Jewish supremacy, Rwanda justifies its regional domination through claims of Tutsi supremacy.
It justifies its invasion via the false claim that is aiming to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kinyarwanda speakers, the Banyamulenge. This ideological framework serves to legitimise what is essentially a resource grab, backed by Western interests seeking to secure their supply chains for the green energy transition.
Market analysts and tech journalists rarely mention that the wars ravaging Congo since 1996 have claimed over six million lives — some experts and Congolese authorities put this number as high as 15 million — more than any conflict since World War II. This staggering death toll, which should have been front-page news, has been relegated to occasional mentions in business sections discussing supply-chain disruptions.
Today, the invasion of the Congo still receives far less media coverage than other conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine or that inIraq in 1991. It is clear that, for the international media, Congolese lives just don’t matter very much.
But the Congolese people themselves are mobilising, from street protests in Kinshasa, and in many other capital cities in the world, to the formation of community defence groups. There have been large and militant protests at Western embassies in Kinshasa. Protestors stormed the French, US, Rwandan, Kenyan and Dutch embassies.
Western governments must acknowledge their role in perpetuating this conflict through years of support of Rwanda and, thereby, its military and proxy forces. Tech companies must be held accountable for their supply chains, with real consequences for profiting from conflict minerals. International financial institutions must stop facilitating the laundering of Congo’s stolen resources through neighbouring countries.
As Ghanaian statesman Kwame Nkrumah observed, “The Congo is the heart of Africa, any wound inflicted upon the Congo is a wound to the whole of Africa.” In today’s interconnected world, this wound affects us all, manifesting in everything from forced migration to market instability.
Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who fought alongside the Congolese in 1965, understood the global nature of this struggle when he warned that, “The Congo problem is a world problem … Victory will be continental in its reach and its consequences and so would defeat.”
South Africans, who have shown tremendous solidarity with Palestine’s struggle for justice and self-determination, understand the importance of international solidarity in the face of occupation and oppression.
That same spirit of solidarity — which helped end apartheid and continues to rally for Palestinian freedom — must extend to the Congolese people as we organise in support of a free, peaceful and democratic Congo, a Congo in which the great wealth of the country is owned and managed by the people. Lumumba’s vision still guides us today.
Shomari Mukandjwa and Raphael Bahebwa are members of the Congolese Solidarity Campaign which was founded in Durban and operates in South Africa and North and South Kivu.