Armed Men and a Broken State Are Sabotaging Congo's Ebola Fight

Congolese nurses are being attacked for trying to save lives. Burial teams are being chased off with stones. Clinics are being burned by people who have been told that the needle in the nurse's hand is a weapon. In two months, from September to October 2026, forty-nine to eighty-one documented incidents hit the Ebola response in eastern Congo, and four people were killed. One of them was a nurse. He was killed in Bafwasende because someone had decided he was spreading the disease.

We have to ask what kind of country lets its health workers die for doing their jobs.

The figures come from the Crisis Analysis Team's monitoring of incidents tied to the Ebola response, covering September and October 2026. Across those two months the team recorded 130 incidents: 81 in September and 49 in October. The drop of 40 percent from one month to the next looks like progress until you read the rest. September's weekly pace, at 18.9 incidents, was higher than August's 16.5. The decline only appears in October, and even then it is a decline from a bad base. Thirty-one people were hurt, four fatally and twenty-seven with injuries. Nobody was abducted. Those numbers are a floor, not a ceiling. The team's own caveat is that its list reflects what reached it. Where reporting is thin, violence is invisible, and in eastern Congo it is almost always thin.

Look at where the violence is going. Attacks and tensions aimed at treatment centres, hospitals, dispensaries and transit sites became the single largest category of the period, with twenty-one incidents, or 16 percent of the total. Thirteen buildings were destroyed or damaged, nine of them by fire. The mob is no longer chasing the team that drives out to collect the dead. It is burning the building where the sick are supposed to go. Opposition is arriving before the facilities do. Drodro, Mandima, Mutwanga and Bafwasende have all seen communities turn against a clinic before its first patient was admitted.

Then there is the rumour. Sixteen incidents disrupted schools across ten health zones in Ituri and North Kivu. Parents stormed classrooms, pulled children out, threw objects and halted lessons. Fourteen of those incidents were triggered by a claim that children were being forced to take a vaccine, very often when no vaccination campaign had been scheduled. A rumour that did not exist in August has now emptied classrooms in a matter of weeks. Anyone who has watched a fear spread through a village knows how fast that happens and how hard it is to undo.

Some of the danger comes from people with guns. Twenty-five incidents involved an armed actor or a security force, nearly one in five. In one case an official was killed by police fire during a safe burial in Beni. In another, a response worker was shot during an armed robbery at a checkpoint. In Butembo a local political figure was killed after a public awareness broadcast. Four deaths, four different stories, and the common thread is that the state's presence in these places arrives armed, unpaid or distrusted.

Consider the unpaid workers. Arrears in bonuses have become a recognised driver of internal protest inside the response itself. Health workers who have not been paid for months are not going to walk into a village with a clean conscience and a full tank of motivation. A government that owes its own doctors and nurses their wages, while asking them to risk their lives in the front line of a deadly outbreak, has already failed the first test of governance: keep your promises to the people who keep you alive.

Now the uncomfortable part, which we will not soften. Much of this is happening in provinces where the state has been fighting for its survival against armed groups for years. In North Kivu, where Goma and Bukavu fell to the M23 rebels in early 2025, the health system has been wrecked by a war that UN Group of Experts reports have repeatedly linked to Rwanda, whose army has fought alongside M23 and whose soldiers have operated on Congolese soil. We will keep saying it because it is true: Rwanda's Defence Force has been at the heart of this war, and a country that sends its army across a border to occupy another country's territory does not get to be surprised when that territory cannot run a safe burial. When soldiers, rebels and police all carry guns through the same villages, ordinary people stop trusting every uniform. A nurse with a syringe looks like one more armed man. That fear is manufactured by war, and war is a policy choice made in Kigali and Kinshasa, not in the villages.

The continent has seen this movie before, and it has seen the better ending. In 2014 Senegal faced an imported Ebola case and contained it. Nigeria did the same in Lagos after its own scare, through rapid contact tracing, transparent communication and a local health system that knew its neighbourhoods. Sierra Leone and Liberia, after their devastating outbreak, rebuilt trust by putting community leaders, religious figures and local health workers at the centre of the response rather than treating them as obstacles. The lesson is not complicated. Outbreaks are beaten by trust, and trust is built by honest institutions that pay their workers, protect their facilities and tell the truth before the rumour does.

Revvmark's position is clear and it does not bend to any faction. The Congolese government must treat the arrears as a first-order operational risk, pay its health workers on time, and publish the payment schedule so workers and families can see it. Before any vaccination campaign reaches a school or a village, the public must hear about it from local teachers, parents and health officials in the local language, with the schedule, the purpose and the safeguards spelled out. Clinics must be sited through consultation with the communities that will use them, not dropped in from a planning office. Families who lose someone to Ebola deserve a mediated, dignified burial that they are part of, not a process that takes their dead by force. And armed men, whether soldiers, police or militia, should be trained and held accountable for every health-related checkpoint, every gunshot and every robbery that turns a response team into a casualty.

International partners and regional bodies have their part too. The African Union and the East African Community should stop issuing communiqués about sovereignty while the Congolese people die on both sides of a war they did not start. The UN Security Council should demand that every armed force operating in eastern Congo, including Rwanda's army and the M23 forces it backs, withdraw and permit humanitarian access. Donors who fund Ebola response should tie their money to transparent payroll data and independent monitoring. And civil society groups, from the Congolese press to the churches and youth associations of Beni and Butembo, should keep reporting every incident, because what gets counted gets acted on.

So here is what we demand, and what you should demand from your own government. Pay the nurses. Protect the clinics. Hold armed men to account. Tell the truth about vaccines before the rumours do. Stop letting foreign armies make war on a neighbour and then act shocked when the neighbour's health system collapses.

Congo is not short of courage. Its nurses keep showing up. Its burial teams keep going back out. The question is whether the people who hold guns, the leaders who hold budgets and the regional powers who hold the border will finally do their jobs. Every life lost to a burning clinic or a rumour-driven riot is a verdict on them. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB