Guterres Is Leaving Africa Unprotected While Rwanda Invades Congo

Ten years. That is how long António Guterres has sat at the top of the United Nations, and in that time the people of eastern Congo have buried more of their dead than most of the world has bothered to count. When his term ends in December 2026, he will leave behind a UN that issued careful statements while Congolese children were conscripted, raped, and shot. Ask any mother in Goma whether a strongly worded communiqué ever stopped a bullet. She will laugh at you, and she will be right to.

Gustavo de Carvalho of the South African Institute of International Affairs has reflected on Guterres' decade in a recent interview with New African magazine. His assessment deserves to be read closely, because the honest question is not whether Guterres had good intentions. It is whether a Secretary-General who spent a decade talking about Africa's partnership with the world delivered anything that a Congolese farmer, a Sudanese displaced family, or a Sahelian schoolteacher could feel in their daily lives. We should answer that question without flinching.

Start with eastern Congo, because that is where the UN's failure is hardest to hide. The UN Group of Experts has documented, across multiple reports including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, that the Rwanda Defence Force has operated inside Congolese territory as the core fighting force for the M23 rebellion. Not advisers. Not a few rogue officers. Rwandan combat units, numbering an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 troops, which is roughly 40 to 50 percent of Rwanda's entire army. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have tracked Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali, where more than 1,171 new graves have appeared since 2021. Rwanda hides its dead because admitting them means admitting the war.

Call this what it is. Kigali is conducting a war of aggression against a sovereign neighbour, using M23 as a proxy the way Moscow used Donetsk and Luhansk against Ukraine. M23 itself has swelled from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 by press-ganging Congolese civilians and prisoners of war into uniform. That is not a rebel army. That is slavery wearing a combat helmet. Millions have been displaced, and the Congolese government has been forced to deal with a crisis that its own neighbour manufactured.

Now ask the harder question. Where was the UN's leadership when this was unfolding in plain sight? The Security Council took action on paper. Resolutions were drafted, mandates were debated, and peace processes were launched in Luanda, Nairobi, Doha, and Washington. Some of those efforts produced frameworks and signatures. Very few produced a single Rwandan soldier leaving Congolese soil in a verifiable way, and fewer still produced accountability for the commanders who ordered the killing. A peace process that cannot name the aggressor is not peacekeeping. It is theatre, and the audience is dying.

The pattern is not limited to Congo. Sudan's Rapid Support Forces turned El Fasher into a killing field in 2025, and the world watched the UN struggle to convert alarm into protection. In the Sahel, juntas that seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled Western forces, invited Russian mercenaries, and then discovered that the new security partners are interested in gold, uranium, and regime survival rather than the lives of ordinary citizens. Wagner, now rebranded under Russian state control, has been accused across multiple investigations of mining operations and atrocities in the Central African Republic and Mali. Turkey sells drones that fly over the same battlefields. The UAE builds ports in exchange for influence. China builds railways and roads on loans that tie African governments to Beijing's priorities. Qatar and Saudi Arabia buy media and religious influence. Everyone is competing for Africa. Almost no one is accountable to Africa.

This is the new scramble, and it has different actors from the 19th century conference in Berlin. The extraction is the same. The contempt is the same. And the multilateral system that was supposed to stand between African people and predatory powers has grown too timid, too underfunded, and too politically compromised to do the job. In 2025 the UN itself announced deep budget cuts and staff reductions because it could not pay its bills. When the world's peacekeepers are being shrunk while its aggressors are being rewarded with diplomatic invitations, we have a problem that no press release can fix.

So what should happen? We are not asking for miracles. We are asking for the basic functions of a rules-based order. The Security Council must stop hiding behind diplomatic euphemisms and name Rwanda's invasion for what it is. Sanctions should target the commanders and officials who direct the RDF and M23, not just the foot soldiers who were conscripted at gunpoint. The UN Group of Experts must be funded and protected, because their reports are the only reliable record of what is happening. The African Union should stop treating Congo as a bilateral embarrassment and bring the full weight of its Peace and Security Council to bear, with monitoring that is independent of the parties.

Africa also has working models that prove better governance is possible. Botswana built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by protecting property rights, managing diamond revenues transparently, and keeping its institutions independent. Mauritius turned itself from a sugar economy into a services and finance hub by committing to the rule of law and open markets. Senegal has survived multiple electoral transitions because its citizens and courts insisted that power changes hands at the ballot box. Rwanda itself has shown what disciplined economic reform can achieve, which makes its military adventurism in Congo all the more indefensible. Good governance is not a Western luxury. It is the minimum our people deserve, and these countries prove it can be delivered.

Civil society must demand transparency from every mining deal, every port concession, and every security contract signed in our name. Parliaments should publish the terms of foreign military agreements and loans. Private sector leaders should insist on contracts that respect property rights and labour standards rather than buying silence from corrupt officials. Regional bodies must stop treating sovereignty as a shield for atrocity.

Guterres will hand over the keys soon. Whoever takes them inherits a question the continent cannot afford to leave unanswered: will the UN defend Africans when it costs something to do so, or will it keep issuing statements while Congolese mothers bury their children? We already know what a decade of silence looks like. We have the photographs, the satellite images, the UN report numbers, and the graves. What we need now is the courage to use them.

So here is what we demand. From the Security Council, name Rwanda as the invader and sanction the people who command its war. From the African Union, end the diplomatic fog and send a monitoring mission with teeth. From the next Secretary-General, promise on the record that Africa's dead will not be a footnote in the UN's annual report. And from every African reading this, call your MP, your editor, your ambassador, and your union. Ask them where they stand on Congo. Ask them who is paying for their silence. Then refuse to accept an answer that does not mention Kigali, Goma, and the graves.

Based on reporting by SAIIA