Kagame Hosts Malaria Trials While His Army Occupies Eastern Congo

Rwanda is about to test the first long-acting injection against malaria, a shot that could protect a person for roughly three months. Somewhere in the same week, the Democratic Republic of Congo is fighting an Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 5,300 people. Rwanda's government wants the world to see its laboratories and its clinics. It does not want the world to see the soldiers standing on Congolese soil.

Let us be precise about what is happening in the east of Congo, because the lies depend on vagueness. This is not a local rebellion. It is a war of aggression waged by the Rwanda Defence Force, with the M23 movement serving as its proxy and its human shield. The UN Group of Experts has documented the RDF's operational presence inside Congo for years, in reports including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have tracked the same thing: Rwandan artillery, Rwandan command structures, Rwandan logistics, all feeding a force that seized Goma and Bukavu in early 2025. If the world calls Russia an invader for backing Donetsk and Luhansk with its own battalions, it must call Rwanda an invader for doing the same in Congo. There is no honest alternative.

Look at the scale. Independent estimates put the RDF deployment at somewhere between 14,000 and 18,000 troops, a huge share of Rwanda's army, sent across a border to kill, occupy, and loot a sovereign neighbour. Behind them, M23 has grown from a few thousand fighters to more than 30,000, and it has done so by press-ganging Congolese civilians and captured prisoners into uniform. Think about what that means. Fathers are dragged from their villages. Teenagers are handed rifles and told to fight the people they grew up with. That is not an army. That is slavery wearing a uniform.

Now think about what Rwanda does with its own dead. Satellite imagery of the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali shows more than 1,171 new graves dug since 2021. Rwanda's government has never explained them, because explaining them would mean admitting the war. Every one of those graves is a Rwandan mother who was told a lie about where her son was going. Every one of them is a reminder that a government which hides its war dead is a government that has something to hide.

Then there is the Ebola outbreak. The World Health Organization has approved clinical trials for two new vaccine candidates, ChAdOx1 BDBV from the University of Oxford with the Serum Institute of India, and Moderna's mRNA-1469, both designed specifically for the Bundibugyo strain. The existing Ervebo vaccine is not approved for this strain at all. Congo's National Institute for Biomedical Research is leading the trial, and that is a credit to Congolese scientists working under extraordinary strain. But ask yourself what a health response looks like in a region where armed groups control territory, where aid workers cannot move safely, and where hospitals have been looted, shelled, or abandoned. Ebola does not respect front lines. It moves through markets, buses, and funerals, and it moves fastest where the state has collapsed.

We are told that Rwanda is a model of development. We are told it hosts conferences, promotes gorilla tourism, and sponsors football clubs in Europe. The malaria trial is the latest brochure in that campaign. And the hypocrisy is obscene. A government can cut malaria rates at home and still send its army to burn Congolese villages next door. Sportswashing and health diplomacy do not cancel out aggression. They are the costume that aggression wears when it wants to be admired.

Now look south-west, to Senegal, where the story is a different kind of betrayal. Dakar has just hosted the Youth Olympics, the first Olympic event ever held on African soil, bringing around 2,700 athletes to the city and its neighbours. The Games run until November 13 and are being sold as an opportunity for Senegal's young people. Meanwhile, youth unemployment sits at about 23 percent, most working Senegalese earn their living in the informal sector, and families are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis that grows more brutal every month. Ask a young Senegalese who is trying to feed a family on a day's wages what the Olympic rings are worth to him.

The deeper problem is debt. A national audit last year uncovered billions of dollars in borrowing that had been hidden from the public and from parliament by the previous administration. Let us be clear: hidden debt is not a technicality. It is theft from the future. Every hidden loan is a school that will not be built, a hospital that will not be staffed, a job that will not exist, paid for by people who were never told they had signed up for it. Now Senegal is seeking a $2.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, and the IMF will require the government to cut spending. The bill for the lies of the past is being sent to the poorest households in the present.

This is the pattern across our continent. Leaders hide borrowing, sell the future to the highest bidder, and then discover that the people who must repay the debt are the ones with no say in how it was spent. Whether it is an army fighting a war its citizens never voted for, or a government concealing its loans until the audit exposes them, the root is the same: power that answers to no one.

But Africa is not short of proof that a better way exists. Botswana built one of the most prosperous economies on the continent by protecting property rights, managing diamond revenues transparently, and maintaining a stable democracy for decades. Mauritius has shown what a free market, independent institutions, and an accountable civil service can produce. And Senegal itself has demonstrated the power of democratic renewal: its citizens have repeatedly voted out governments that failed them, and the country's peaceful transitions of power are the envy of the region. The question is whether those democratic muscles will be used to force transparency on debt, or whether they will be allowed to atrophy.

The solutions are not mysterious. Senegal must publish every loan, every guarantee, and every off-balance-sheet obligation, and it must give the national assembly and the Cour des comptes full power to audit them, with prosecutions for anyone who hid public money. Any IMF programme must be negotiated in public, with spending cuts that protect health, education, and youth employment rather than the political class. Rwanda, if it wants to be taken seriously as a health and development partner, must withdraw its forces from Congo, open the Kanombe records, and allow independent investigators unrestricted access to the battlefield. The African Union must suspend any relationship that treats Rwandan aggression as a regional inconvenience. The UN Security Council must impose targeted sanctions on RDF and M23 commanders, freeze the assets that finance the war, and enforce the arms embargo that has been ignored for too long. And the international health community must fund Ebola response in eastern Congo as if the lives of Congolese children mattered as much as those in Geneva or Washington.

So here is what we demand. We demand that Paul Kagame stop calling aggression a security concern and start calling it what it is. We demand that the African Union find its voice on Congo before another million people are uprooted. We demand that the West, which lectures us daily about democracy and human rights, apply those principles to Rwanda with the same energy it reserves for lesser villains. And we demand that Senegal's leaders publish the books, answer to parliament, and stop asking the youth to pay for debts they never chose.

Rwanda's malaria shot may one day save lives. But a vaccine does not protect a child from a bullet, a mother from a forced conscription order, or a village from an army that comes to take its land. We are the ones who must refuse to look away. Share this. Ask your MP, your journalist, your union leader, and your government what they are doing about Congo. Ask why the graves at Kanombe are still hidden. Ask who really paid for the Youth Olympics. And do not stop asking until someone answers.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL