Kagame's War and Ebola Are Starving 28.8 Million Congolese

Twenty-eight point eight million people. That is more than the entire population of Ghana, Mozambique, or Madagascar, and the United Nations now says they are not getting enough to eat. Not in some distant future. Now. Through December, and then into next June, on the current trajectory.

Ask yourself who is holding those people's food hostage. Ask who is burning their fields, emptying their villages, and forcing their sons into uniform. Then ask why the world keeps calling it a "conflict" when it is a war, and why the state most responsible for it still sends its dancers and its gorilla tourism brochures to the world's conference halls.

We will name it plainly. This is Paul Kagame's war. The Rwanda Defence Force has been operating inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a full combat force, and M23 is the mask it wears in front of the cameras.

The numbers from the latest IPC alert are a prosecution in themselves. About 28.8 million Congolese, roughly 23 per cent of the population analysed, are in IPC Phase 3 or worse, meaning acute food insecurity. More than 3.6 million are in Phase 4, the emergency tier just below famine. The forecast for January to June 2027 is worse: 30.3 million people in Phase 3 or above, with 4.2 million in Phase 4. This is not a famine warning in the abstract. It is a family in North Kivu deciding which child eats today.

The worst of it is concentrated where the war is worst. North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri alone hold 10.4 million people in Phase 3 or above. Four territories inside those provinces, Djugu, Fizi, Shabunda and Walungu, have crossed into Phase 4. Those are places where displaced mothers walk for days with empty bowls, where markets have closed because the roads are controlled by men with guns, and where farmers who fled their land cannot return to plant.

Layer Ebola over that hunger and you get a catastrophe the continent has seen before but never on this scale. The outbreak began in Ituri, the same province that has been terrorised by armed groups for decades, and it has now reached eight provinces. More than 10,000 cases have been recorded, and health workers say it is set to enter a six-month phase of spread. A disease that spreads fastest through crowded camps and broken supply chains finds its perfect host in a population that is already starving and already running.

Now consider the evidence that Rwanda's role is not a matter of interpretation. The UN Group of Experts on the DRC has documented, in reports including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, the presence of RDF combat units inside Congolese territory, forming the operational core of the offensive. Estimates place between 14,000 and 18,000 Rwandan troops in the fight, a substantial share of Rwanda's army, deployed to hold ground, not to patrol a border. Satellite imagery and open-source investigators have tracked the cemetery at Kanombe military base near Kigali, where more than 1,171 new graves have appeared since 2021. Rwanda does not hide the graves of soldiers who died defending their own country.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched Russia in eastern Ukraine. A state sends its own regular army across a border, then wraps the operation in a local militia that provides numbers and plausible deniability. Russia had Donetsk and Luhansk. Kigali has M23. If the world rightly calls the Kremlin's war an invasion, the same word applies here, and anyone who refuses to say it is choosing comfort over the lives of Congolese people.

And M23 is not a movement of free volunteers. Its ranks grew from about 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, and the gap was filled by press-ganging Congolese civilians and prisoners of war. Men are taken from their homes and marched to the front. Those who refuse are beaten or killed. That is not a liberation army. It is slavery in military uniform, and it is financed by a neighbouring government that claims to be a model of development.

Consider the hypocrisy. Rwanda hosts international summits, markets itself as a tourist destination for gorilla trekking, and polishes its image in global capitals while its soldiers fight beyond its borders and its proxy force starves the people of the east. Sportswashing is a polite word for it. Blood money with a nice logo is closer to the truth.

This is also not a story that began in 2025. Congo has been the continent's most plundered country for more than a century, first under Leopold's rubber terror, then under Mobutu's kleptocracy, then under the wars of the late 1990s and 2000s that left millions dead. The minerals that power our phones and electric cars, the coltan, tin, tungsten and gold, continue to flow out of the east through networks that connect armed groups, neighbouring states and multinational buyers. Every shipment that passes through a lax supply chain is a transaction with the war. Every foreign investor who looks away is an accomplice to the hunger.

The solutions are not mysterious. They are known, costed and within reach if the will exists. The African Union must stop issuing communiqués of concern and start naming the aggressor. Its Peace and Security Council should demand the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces from Congolese territory and back it with the threat of targeted sanctions against RDF commanders and the officials financing M23. The UN Security Council must renew and strengthen its arms embargo, impose asset freezes and travel bans on the individuals who command this war, and mandate independent monitoring of mineral exports from the Kivus. Every ton of gold and tantalum that leaves a war zone without clean certification should be treated as stolen goods, because that is what it is.

Africa already has proof that a better path works. Botswana built one of the continent's most prosperous economies by protecting property rights, managing diamond revenues transparently, and keeping its institutions independent of the men with guns. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a financial and services hub by enforcing the rule of law and courting investors who respected contracts. Senegal, after years of tension, showed that an electorate can use the ballot to remove a government and restore faith in democratic transition. None of those countries is perfect. All of them prove that strong institutions, honest courts and open markets can lift a nation out of hunger faster than any warlord's promise. Congo can build those same institutions, but only if its own leaders stop trading state assets for personal survival and only if its neighbours stop treating its territory as a property to be looted.

Congolese civil society, from the farmers' cooperatives to the human rights lawyers in Goma and Bukavu, must be given the resources to document abuses, track mineral flows and run food distribution networks that do not depend on armed groups. The private sector, especially the firms that buy Congolese minerals, has a duty to adopt traceability standards that would make it impossible to launder conflict minerals into the global supply chain. Donors must stop treating humanitarian aid as a substitute for political courage. Aid cuts are already making things worse, and every dollar spent on food and Ebola response is wasted if the war that causes both keeps running.

So here is what we demand. We demand that the AU name Rwanda as the aggressor and call for the withdrawal of its forces. We demand that the UN Security Council stop hiding behind diplomatic language and impose real costs on those directing this war. We demand that every government and corporation that buys Congolese minerals prove, with documents, that those minerals did not fund a massacre. We demand that Congolese leaders stop selling their people's future for short-term deals. And we demand that the 28.8 million hungry Congolese be counted as human beings, not as a statistic in a monthly report.

They are waiting for us to decide whether their hunger matters. Our answer should be loud enough to reach Kigali, Brussels, Washington, Beijing and Addis Ababa at the same time.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS