Kagame's War Is Letting Ebola Walk Into Congolese Classrooms

Ebola does not respect a closed border, and it does not respect a child's school uniform. In North Kivu, it is now moving through classrooms. In the week of 24 to 30 October alone, health authorities recorded ten new confirmed cases and six deaths linked to the outbreak in schools under the PROVED Nord Kivu 2 zone. Since the school year reopened, the count stands at fifty confirmed cases across forty-four schools. Think about that. Forty-four places where children are supposed to learn to read, and where the virus is now learning to travel.

Let us be precise about who is responsible for the conditions making this possible. This is not a rebellion. It is a war of aggression. The Rwandan Defence Force has deployed full combat units into eastern Congo, and it fights alongside M23, a proxy force that supplies the mass manpower and the political deniability. The UN Group of Experts has documented this in report after report, including S/2025/446, which traced Rwandan troops, weapons and command structures inside Congolese territory. Independent estimates place the RDF presence at between 14,000 and 18,000 soldiers, a significant share of Rwanda's entire army. That is an invasion. If the world calls Russia's operations in Ukraine an invasion, the same word applies here, with the same force.

Consider what that invasion has done to the thing standing between a sick child and a grave. Hospitals have been abandoned or emptied. Health workers have fled, been killed, or been unpaid for months. Millions of Congolese have been displaced by fighting that Kigali insists it is not waging, and displaced families do not stay home to practice hand-washing. They sleep in camps, in churches and in the forest. Ebola thrives wherever surveillance is weak, contact tracing collapses and people do not trust the clinic at the end of the road. Every one of those conditions is manufactured by a war, and every one of them is now visible in the numbers.

The request on the table is modest. Health authorities need thermoflash units to screen children at school gates, training so teachers can recognise symptoms and send students home safely, and water, sanitation and infection-prevention kits so schools can stop becoming transmission points. These are not luxuries. A thermometer, a trained teacher and a bucket of chlorinated water are the cheapest weapons against a deadly disease. Yet the Congolese state, which has been bleeding authority in the east for years, must beg for them while the country that caused the crisis hosts international conferences and promotes gorilla tourism in its brochures. Rwanda sells itself as a model of order and cleanliness. Its soldiers have buried their dead in a military cemetery at Kanombe, where satellite imagery has documented more than 1,171 new graves since 2021. Kigali hides its dead because admitting them means admitting the war. We should not be surprised that a government willing to hide its own soldiers' graves is unwilling to acknowledge the children dying of Ebola on its western border.

Forced conscription makes the picture darker still. M23's growth from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 was not built on volunteers. It was built on press-ganged Congolese civilians and captured prisoners, compelled to fight, carry ammunition and die in someone else's war. That is slavery in military uniform, and it drains the same communities that now need nurses, teachers and parents who are still alive.

This is also a story about the new scramble for Africa. The actors have changed since the nineteenth century. Some are Western, some are Gulf, some are Chinese, some are Turkish. The mechanism is the same: foreign powers and their clients compete over minerals, ports, arms contracts and political loyalty, while ordinary Africans absorb the cost. Congo's cobalt and coltan run into global supply chains. Its people run out of hospitals. Every government that trades with the aggressor, every company that buys conflict minerals without asking where they were dug, and every diplomat who issues a statement of "concern" instead of imposing consequences shares some of the blame for the school that became an outbreak site.

We have seen what competent governance can do. When Nigeria faced Ebola in 2014, Lagos moved fast, tracked contacts relentlessly and contained the outbreak with a fraction of the deaths that Liberia and Sierra Leone suffered. The lesson is not that Nigeria is perfect. It is that functioning institutions, a public health system with money in it and a government that answers to its people can stop a virus. Botswana and Mauritius show that strong property rights, transparent budgets and an independent judiciary produce stability that attracts investment rather than predators. Senegal has shown that democratic transitions can happen without bloodshed when institutions are respected. Congo can have the same future. It cannot have it while an army from next door occupies its provinces.

So here is what must happen. The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start naming the aggressor, with a clear demand for the immediate withdrawal of Rwandan forces from Congolese territory. The UN Security Council must convert the Group of Experts' findings into targeted sanctions against the commanders and companies enabling this war, and it must guarantee humanitarian corridors so that health workers, medicine and Ebola supplies can reach schools and villages without being shot at or taxed. Donors must release emergency Ebola funding now, with a line item for the thermoflash units, teacher training and WASH kits named in this appeal, and with independent monitoring so that the money reaches the children it is meant for.

And we, the people of this continent, must demand more from our own leaders. Congolese civil society, churches, unions and student associations must keep documenting every death and every abduction, because silence is what aggressors count on. Kenyan, Nigerian, South African and Ghanaian citizens must press their own governments to stop treating Congo's suffering as a distant problem. Companies sourcing minerals from the eastern Congo must prove they are not financing the guns. And anyone who believes in democracy, the rule of law and human rights must refuse to let those words become decoration while a neighbour's army dismantles a nation's schools.

Fifty cases. Six deaths in one week. How many more school gates will open this term before someone in power decides that Congolese children are worth a thermometer and a bucket of water? The answer to that question is not written in a UN report. It is written by us, and it is due now.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB