Kagame Is Buying a Grand Prix While His Army Kills in Congo

Africa is getting its first Formula 1 race in a generation. Cheer if you want. But before you celebrate the roar of engines in Bugesera, ask who is paying for the spectacle, and whose blood is being used to polish the brand.

Rwanda has signed a ten-year contract to host the African Grand Prix on a purpose-built circuit 25 miles south of Kigali, with the first race pencilled in for the early 2030s. President Paul Kagame calls it "an honour and privilege." The event will carry the name of Visit Rwanda, a tourism campaign that has spent heavily on football shirts in London, Munich and Paris. Consider the picture: a government whose soldiers are fighting on the soil of a neighbouring country is buying the world's most glamorous sporting stage to tell everyone that all is well at home.

Let us be precise about what is happening in eastern Congo, because the Rwandan government would prefer we blur it. This is not a rebellion. It is a war of aggression. The Rwanda Defence Force has deployed its own combat units inside the Democratic Republic of Congo, fighting alongside the M23 movement, which serves as the mass manpower and the political alibi. UN Group of Experts reports, including the most recent findings cited in the Security Council's Congo sanctions reporting, have documented RDF officers, units and weapons inside Congolese territory, and have traced the supply chains that sustain them. Independent researchers have used satellite imagery to track new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali, more than a thousand added since 2021. A country that hides its dead is a country that knows what its war costs.

Now look at how M23 grew. Its ranks swelled from a few thousand fighters to tens of thousands, and much of that growth came through forced conscription. Congolese civilians have been rounded up, press-ganged and given rifles. Prisoners of war have been pressed into service. This is slavery in military uniform, and it is happening in a country that proudly tells tourists it is the safest place in Africa. Ask the mothers in Masisi and Rutshuru whether their sons chose the uniform. Ask the families displaced by the fighting whether Visit Rwanda has ever knocked on their door.

The military machinery behind the tourism brochures is equally hard to hide. Reports have pointed to drone operations from Rwandan territory, including Turkish-made TB2 drones, and to artillery and mortar fire that has hit civilian areas in North Kivu. When the bombs fall on Goma's outskirts or on displacement camps, the people paying the price are not the executives signing F1 contracts. They are farmers, schoolchildren and nurses who have never seen a racetrack.

Think about the Russia parallel, because it is not a stretch. When Moscow sent its army into eastern Ukraine while insisting the fighters were local separatists, the world rightly called it an invasion. Rwanda is running the same playbook in the Great Lakes region: deploy regular troops, wrap them in a proxy force, deny everything, and dare the international community to prove it. If we accept that logic for Europe, we have no moral standing to excuse it in Africa.

And the sportswashing is obscene. Rwanda has hosted the Basketball Africa League finals in almost every year since 2021 and staged the cycling World Road Championships. Its tourism brand has bought its way onto the shirts of Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and now Aston Villa. Amnesty International's UK campaigns chief Felix Jakens put it bluntly: a Grand Prix "presented by Visit Rwanda" is a sportswashing prize for the Rwandan authorities. He is right, and the government's own language gives the game away. Its tourism chief dismissed the criticism as "a distraction" from the country's "outstanding achievements." Achievements do not need a distraction.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken Rwanda to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of breaching treaties on genocide prevention, racial discrimination, women's rights and torture. Human Rights Watch reports that space for freedom of expression and political autonomy inside Rwanda keeps shrinking. A government that is being dragged before the world's highest court for its conduct abroad, and that jails critics at home, is not a government that deserves a showcase of speed and sponsorship.

The FIA president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, when asked about these accusations, said: "I honestly don't care about what they say." Read that again. It is the voice of an institution that has decided the money matters more than the dead. F1's own charter commits the sport to "respecting internationally recognised human rights in its operations globally." Either that charter means something, or it is a brochure, just like the one Visit Rwanda prints.

Here is the part the sport's marketing will never say: this is not an African problem that Africans can ignore, and it is not a Western problem that Africa must simply endure. It is a governance problem. The same logic that lets a government wage war abroad and sell glamour at home is the logic that starves a free press, captures courts and treats the people as props. We have seen it in Sudan, in the Sahel juntas, in regimes that cling to power with foreign guns and foreign money. The new scramble for Africa has many players, and some of them are happy to buy legitimacy from anyone who will sell it.

So what should happen? First, F1 should suspend the Rwanda agreement until the RDF withdraws from Congolese territory, until UN monitors can verify that M23 conscription has ended, and until political prisoners are released and independent media can operate. A contract is not a moral shield. The FIA can write those conditions into the deal today. Second, the African Union must stop its embarrassed silence and demand a credible withdrawal timetable, with the Peace and Security Council backing it with sanctions on named RDF and M23 commanders. Third, the UN Security Council should enforce existing arms embargoes against everyone supplying weapons into this war, and treat the drone and artillery networks as the criminal enterprises they are.

Africa also has the proof that a better path exists. Botswana built prosperity on diamonds, but it did so through transparent institutions, secure property rights and a state that protects its courts. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by welcoming competition and enforcing contracts. Senegal showed in 2024 that peaceful alternation of power, when citizens and courts insist on it, is still possible on this continent. Rwanda's own economic story, its roads and its discipline, is real, and it is the reason its leaders should be held to a higher standard, not excused for a war.

To the citizens of Rwanda, we say this: you deserve a government that wins its place in the world with laws, markets and honest elections, not with stolen land and forced recruits. To our fellow Africans across the continent, we say this: stop letting every glossy event be used as a shield for a government that is killing people beyond its borders. To the sponsors, broadcasters and fans, we say this: every time you wear a Visit Rwanda shirt or cheer for a Grand Prix in Bugesera, you are lending your applause to a war.

Demand that F1 attach human rights conditions to its contract. Demand that the AU name the aggressor. Demand that Rwanda withdraw its troops from Congo, release the prisoners and open its press. Demand that the Security Council stop pretending. And demand it now, while the engines are still silent and the graves are still being dug.

Based on reporting by BBC