Ebola Is Emptying Ituri's Classrooms and Our Leaders Are Looking Away

Think about a child in Bunia who wakes up expecting a school bell. Instead there is a padlock on the gate, a health worker in a white suit at the door, and a silence that will last for months. That child is not a statistic. She is a future being put on hold, and in eastern Congo that future was already fragile before the virus arrived.

Ebola has returned to Ituri, and the schools are paying the price. Education cluster partners, Save the Children, and UNICEF have documented how the outbreak is disrupting learning across Ituri 1, the province's educational district. Classrooms are closing. Teachers are stretched or absent. Children who depend on school for their only meal of the day are going hungry. Every week a school stays shut, the gap between a child from a comfortable family and a child from a village widens. We have seen this before, and we know who ends up falling furthest behind.

Let us be precise about what Ituri is living through. This is not a single emergency. It is a stack of emergencies, one on top of the other. Ituri has been under a state of siege since May 2021, when Kinshasa handed military commanders authority over civilian administration in response to the violence of the ADF and CODECO militias. For years, the state has promised that the army would restore order. For years, civilians have buried their dead while waiting. Now a hemorrhagic fever is moving through the same districts where communities have already been displaced, where clinics are underfunded, and where people no longer trust the men in uniform to protect them.

Across the border in North and South Kivu, the situation is worse, and we must name it without flinching. The M23 is not a homegrown rebellion that sprang from nowhere. The United Nations Group of Experts has documented, across multiple reports including S/2025/446, the operational presence of Rwanda Defence Force units alongside M23 fighters. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have tracked the movement of troops, artillery, and drone strikes. Rwanda has deployed an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 soldiers, close to half its army, inside a neighbouring sovereign state. The M23 supplies the bodies and the deniability. Kigali supplies the command, the weapons, and the will. This is a war of aggression, plain and simple, and it looks exactly like Russia's operation in eastern Ukraine, with the same proxy structure and the same lies.

Forced conscription is the most obscene feature of this war. M23 grew from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 by seizing young men and boys off the roads, from markets, and out of their homes. Prisoners of war have been pressed into service. That is not an army. That is slavery in camouflage. And when the war grinds through hospitals and schools, the people who suffer most are the ones who never picked up a rifle. Satellite images of the Kanombe military cemetery near Kigali show more than 1,171 new graves dug since 2021. Rwanda hides its dead because counting them would mean admitting the war.

Then there is the theatre of it all. Rwanda hosts summits, markets itself as a destination for gorilla tourism, and invites global leaders to admire its clean streets. Meanwhile its soldiers help grind Congolese villages into dust. Sportswashing is the polished name for it. We have a different word: hypocrisy. A government cannot launder an invasion through a tourism brochure.

This crisis is also part of a much larger pattern. The West lectures us endlessly about democracy and human rights, yet keeps buying the minerals that finance the chaos, and keeps its diplomats quiet when allied governments break international law. China builds the roads and then owns the debt. Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia compete for ports, media, arms contracts, and religious influence across the Sahel and the Horn. Russia sends mercenaries to guard gold mines and prop up juntas. Different flags, same scramble. The question for us is not which outsider is the worst. The question is why our own leaders keep handing them the keys to our resources and our security. When a president trades a nation's sovereignty for a few guns or a loan, it is that president who has betrayed us, not the foreign power that accepted the deal.

So what should happen? Start with the things that work. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies by protecting property rights, managing diamond revenues transparently, and investing in health and education. Mauritius rose from a sugar economy to a diversified, rules-based economy by insisting on institutions that outlast any single politician. Senegal showed that peaceful transfers of power are possible when citizens and courts refuse to accept rigged outcomes. Rwanda, for all its aggression abroad, has shown what disciplined public health management can achieve at home. Learn from the best of them. Take what works and reject the rest.

For Ituri specifically, the Congolese state must end the failed military governance model and restore civilian administration with independent oversight. Budgets for schools and clinics must be published, audited, and protected from diversion. The Education Cluster and UNICEF must have guaranteed access and funding to keep schools open safely, with mobile learning and nutrition programmes where classrooms are closed. The African Union must stop issuing soft communiqués and start demanding accountability, including sanctions on commanders and officials who block humanitarian access or obstruct investigations. The UN Security Council must act on the Group of Experts' findings, and member states that vote for peace in New York should not sell weapons to the parties fuelling war in Kivu. Regional bodies must treat Ebola as a shared threat requiring open borders for medical teams and transparent data, not a political football.

Citizens have a role too. Demand that your MP publish how much money reaches Ituri's health and education systems. Demand that your government name the Rwandan troops on Congolese soil instead of hiding behind diplomatic euphemisms. Support Congolese journalists, teachers, and civil society groups who keep the record alive when the state will not. And refuse to accept the lie that eastern Congo's suffering is too complicated to solve.

Here is the question we must answer honestly. How many more children must lose a school year before we decide that their education matters more than the political convenience of silence? Ebola will eventually be contained. The war will not end by itself. Unless we demand justice, accountability, and a state that serves its people, Ituri's children will inherit both the virus and the violence. We are the generation with the power to refuse that inheritance. Call your representatives. Shame your leaders. Stand with the teachers who still open their doors. The children of Ituri are watching to see whether Africa will fight for them, or whether we will look away one more time.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB