Kagame's War Leaves Congo Defenceless as Ebola Kills Thousands

Five thousand one hundred and ninety-eight people. That is the official count of Congolese dead from Bundibugyo virus disease as of 3 November 2026, and the real number is higher. Nearly half of everyone confirmed with this virus has died. Most of those deaths happened in villages and homes, not hospitals, and many of the dead were young children. Ask yourself who is counting them, who is burying them, and who is still telling us this is a health crisis with no political cause.

Here is what the data says. The World Health Organization's latest situation report counts 10,668 confirmed cases across 67 health zones in eight provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Transmission is still active in 51 of those zones. Ituri alone has 7,485 confirmed cases and 3,532 deaths. Neighbouring North Kivu has 2,593 cases and 1,422 deaths, with a case fatality rate of 54.8 per cent, the highest of any province. In the 21 days before 3 November, 1,463 new cases were recorded. Of the 512 deaths reported since 21 October, 335 happened in communities, outside any treatment centre. That single number tells you everything about how far the system has collapsed. When most of your dead are dying at home, your surveillance has failed, your clinics are not reachable, and your people have learned not to trust the state.

The response is failing on its most basic task, which is finding people and keeping track of them. Contact tracing, the backbone of any Ebola containment, is running at 86 per cent of daily targets against a minimum of 95 per cent. In Tshopo the figure is 71 per cent. In Haut-Uélé it is 85 per cent, and in North Kivu, 82 per cent. Every contact not followed is a chain of infection left running. Every missed contact is a household that will bury someone next month. We are not talking about abstract epidemiology. We are talking about mothers in Bunia and Beni who were never visited by a tracer because the tracer could not get there.

Now look at what is happening in North Kivu. Goma and Bukavu have been under the control of the M23 rebel alliance since early 2025, and UN Group of Experts reports have repeatedly documented the presence of Rwandan Defence Force units inside eastern Congo, fighting alongside M23 and directing its operations. This is not a rebellion, and anyone who calls it one is helping the invader. When a foreign army occupies cities, shuts down roads, displaces families into camps, and fires on the health workers who try to reach them, it does not just take territory. It takes the Ebola response with it. Supply convoys stop. Lab samples cannot be transported. Health workers flee. Patients hide their symptoms from anyone wearing a uniform. Kagame's war has turned a manageable outbreak into a catastrophe, and the people paying the price are Congolese children who never asked to be part of anyone's geopolitical project.

Consider also what the outbreak reveals about double standards. The source material notes that a health worker was medically evacuated to London, and a patient was flown to Geneva after the case in Nigeria. Those evacuations were the right thing to do for those individuals. But ask why the West can airlift its own citizens out of danger while Congolese children are dying in communities with no oxygen, no isolation beds, and no approved vaccine. Bundibugyo virus has no licensed vaccine or specific treatment. The Tumaini Phase 2/3 trial only opened in Bunia on 23 October. WHO experts have recommended adding the Oxford ChAdOx1 candidate and Moderna's mRNA-1469 to the trial. That is progress, but it arrived months after the outbreak was declared on 15 May. Who funded the research into a virus that killed more than 30 per cent of the people infected in Uganda in 2007 and nearly half in Congo in 2012? Who decided that a Bundibugyo vaccine was not worth the money until Congolese bodies piled up? Those are questions the donor capitals must answer.

Africa is not helpless here. We have already proven that Ebola can be beaten when a state chooses to fight it. Senegal contained its 2014 case quickly and stopped it from becoming an epidemic. Nigeria stopped the Lagos outbreak the same year with a coordinated emergency command, rigorous contact tracing, and open communication with the public. Those victories were not miracles. They were the result of competent institutions, clear chains of command, and governments that treated the lives of ordinary citizens as their first responsibility. Rwanda deserves credit for its health system and its vaccination campaigns, and that credit makes its militarised aggression in Congo harder to excuse, not easier. A state that can run a disciplined health service at home should not be sending its soldiers to make the health service of its neighbour impossible.

So what must happen. The African Union, through Africa CDC, should lead a continental emergency response with transparent public reporting of every case, every death, and every missed contact. The UN Security Council must demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in North Kivu and Ituri, with guaranteed corridors for health workers, supplies, and laboratory samples. Rwanda must withdraw its forces from Congolese territory and stop arming M23, and the Council should impose targeted sanctions on every commander and official involved in sustaining this occupation. Donors should release emergency funding directly tied to contact tracing, safe burials, and community outreach, not only to press releases and conference speeches. Regional governments should build local manufacturing and pooled procurement for diagnostics, PPE, and therapeutics so that the next outbreak does not wait on a Western laboratory's schedule. And the Congolese state itself must be held to account for every dollar and every death. Good governance is not optional in a crisis. It is the difference between a contained outbreak and a generation of orphans.

To the African Union, we say: stop issuing statements and send a mandate. To the Security Council, we say: your silence is a choice, and history will record which side you chose. To the donor governments that lecture us about democracy and human rights, we say: prove those words are more than decoration by funding the response in full and by condemning the army that is making it impossible. To Congolese citizens, we say: demand every death be counted, every contact be traced, and every soldier on your soil be named and challenged. And to the rest of us, the Africans in Nairobi, Lagos, Kampala, and Dakar who read these numbers and scroll on: five thousand people are dead and the number is still climbing. Silence is not neutrality. It is complicity with the people who started this war.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB