Kabila Joins Kigali's Proxy Army to Topple Congo's Government

Ask yourself who gains when a former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo puts his name on a rebel coalition and promises to overthrow the government that once elected him. Ask who gains when those rebels are the same men who have been fighting under Rwanda's command for three years. Then ask why the world still treats this as a Congolese family quarrel.

It is not a family quarrel. It is a war of aggression, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

The reporting from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies says Kabila has been named leader of a new rebel coalition pledging to topple the Congolese state. We should be precise about what that means. Kabila ruled the DRC from 2001 to 2019. Kinshasa's military court sentenced him to death in absentia in 2025 for treason and collusion with the M23 armed group. He is no longer a politician negotiating from the margins. He is a man who has chosen to stand with an army that is, in every operational sense that matters, an extension of the Rwandan Defence Force.

Let us be plain about the Rwandan role, because the euphemisms have cost Congolese lives for too long. M23 is not a home-grown rebellion that Kigali merely sympathizes with. UN Group of Experts reports, including S/2025/446, have documented RDF units operating inside Congolese territory, directing M23 operations, and supplying weapons, ammunition, and logistics. The pattern is the one Russia wrote into the Donbas: a sovereign neighbour sends its own soldiers across the border, then hides behind a local force to make the occupation look like a civil conflict. If the world calls Moscow's campaign in Ukraine an invasion, it must call Kigali's campaign in eastern Congo by the same name. Rwanda's own soldiers, at their peak an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 troops, roughly 40 to 50 percent of its army, have been committed to fighting inside a country that never invited them.

Now look at what M23 looks like when the uniform is stripped away. The group grew from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, and it did not grow by persuasion. It grew by press-ganging Congolese civilians and captured prisoners of war into service. Think about that. Fathers taken from their fields. Teenagers taken from their schools. Young men marched to the front with rifles they did not ask for, to fight for a foreign government against their own neighbours. That is slavery wearing a military uniform, and it is happening in our region right now.

The human ledger is the one Kigali would prefer we never read. Satellite imagery analysed by researchers shows more than 1,171 new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. A state that is not at war does not need to bury that many soldiers in secret. Rwanda hides its dead because admitting them means admitting the war. Somewhere in Kivu, a mother is still waiting for a son who was taken to fight in a conflict he did not start, and his name will never appear on any casualty list in Kigali.

Meanwhile, the same government that is spending its soldiers in Congo is selling itself to the world as a model of order and progress. This month's news cycle offered a grim illustration. Formula 1 has announced it will return to Africa in the early 2030s, once a new circuit is built in Rwanda. We are invited to admire the glamour. We are not invited to ask who pays for the circuit, who benefits from the tourism, or whose blood is being quietly spilled to keep the brochures glossy. Gorilla tourism, global sporting events, and glossy investment conferences are the costume of a government whose soldiers are killing Congolese civilians and burning Congolese villages. Sportswashing is not a metaphor here. It is a business model, and the Congolese are paying for it.

The context matters because this is not new. Every few years, a new name appears at the head of a new armed group, and the same foreign hand appears behind it. Africa has seen this before, and the continent has paid for it in graves and in stolen futures. The old scramble was carved up by European powers with rulers and rifles. The new scramble has more players: Western governments that lecture us about democracy while trading with the regimes that fuel these wars, Chinese lenders who build roads and collect minerals, Gulf states that buy ports and influence, Turkish and Russian firms that sell drones and mercenaries. Different flags, same extractive logic. And in the eastern Congo, the mineral wealth in coltan, tin, tungsten, and gold keeps the guns firing and the smuggling networks rich.

Who bleeds? The Congolese farmer whose land is seized. The student who is conscripted. The woman raped at a checkpoint. The child who dies in a displacement camp because aid cannot reach the front lines. Who benefits? Armed commanders, extractive companies, and officials in Kigali and beyond who have learned that instability is profitable.

So what must happen? The solutions are not mysterious. We have seen them work elsewhere on this continent.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués of concern and begin naming the aggressor. A continental body that has a charter against the unconstitutional change of government and against external aggression should not be shy about applying its own rules. The Council should demand the immediate withdrawal of Rwandan forces from Congolese territory, verified by an independent monitoring mechanism with real access.

The UN Security Council must target the people who command this war. Targeted sanctions on RDF and M23 leaders, asset freezes, and travel bans should be applied to the officers and financiers who make the occupation possible, and the sanctions regime should be enforced against the mineral networks that launder the proceeds. The Group of Experts must be funded, protected, and listened to, not quietly sidelined when its findings become inconvenient for powerful capitals.

Congolese civil society and the private sector have a role to play too. Transparent mineral supply chains, due diligence laws that stop conflict minerals from entering global markets, and independent audits of exports can cut off the revenue that sustains armed groups. Property rights and an independent judiciary are the building blocks of any durable peace. A mining sector that pays taxes and respects land titles is worth more to Congolese citizens than any militia-run concession.

Africa already has proof that better is possible. Botswana built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by combining rule of law, transparent diamond management, and a professional civil service. Mauritius, with no natural resource bonanza to speak of, built a prosperous, peaceful economy on open markets and strong institutions. Senegal, in 2024, showed that a democratic transition can survive a contested election when courts and citizens refuse to let a leader rewrite the rules. None of these countries had perfect governance. All of them chose institutions over gunmen. That is the lesson the eastern Congo has been denied.

And now the call. You, the reader, must refuse to let this war be forgotten. Demand that your government, whatever its position in the world, names Rwanda's invasion for what it is. Demand that the African Union sends a clear message to Kigali and to every capital financing its adventures. Demand that your media stop repeating the words "rebels" and "clashes" as if they describe a natural disaster. Demand that companies sourcing minerals from the Kivus trace their supply chains to the mine and the militia that controls it.

Kabila's coalition is a warning, not a surprise. A politician who once governed the Congo is now selling his name to an invading army and promising to take the country by force. The people who will pay for that promise are not in the hotel bars of Kigali or the boardrooms of Paris and Beijing. They are in the camps, the villages, and the cemeteries.

We have to decide whether we will be the generation that watched this happen and said nothing. Or whether we will be the generation that named the invader, held the enablers to account, and demanded the withdrawal of every foreign soldier from Congolese soil. The choice is ours, and the clock is not on our side.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24