Joseph Kabila Has Joined Kagame's Proxy War Against Congo

Joseph Kabila spent eighteen years as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He now leads an armed front that is fighting to take that country by force. Let that sink in. A man who once held the constitution in his hands now waves a gun at it, and the people who will bleed for his comeback are the same ones who were promised, in 2001 and again in 2018, that the era of guns was over.

We have seen this script before. A president who fails to deliver peace, a rival who clings to power past his term, a neighbour who never stops meddling, and a population left to count the dead. Congo has lived this cycle for three decades. What is new is how openly it now wears a uniform.

Let us be precise about who is fighting whom. In late 2025, Kabila was named leader of the Front for the Refoundation of the Nation, a coalition built around M23, the group that took Goma and Bukavu in 2025 and holds much of North and South Kivu. Kabila's deputy is Corneille Nangaa, the former electoral chief who announced Félix Tshisekedi the winner of the 2018 vote. Nangaa has since admitted that he helped draft a backroom deal between Kabila and Tshisekedi before the results were announced. Read that again. The men now shelling Congolese towns were once the architects of a stolen election.

Now look at who holds the guns. M23 is not an organic uprising of aggrieved Tutsi villagers, however much its propagandists wrap it in that language. Since 2022, UN Group of Experts reports, including the 2025 report S/2025/446, have documented the Rwandan Defence Force operating inside Congo as the core of the offensive. Rwandan units fight alongside M23 with artillery, drones and command structures, while M23 supplies the mass manpower and the political cover. This is the Donbas model, carried out in Central Africa. If the world calls Russia's actions in Ukraine an invasion, then the same name applies here. This is Paul Kagame's war of aggression, fought through a proxy because Kigali wants the deniability.

The evidence keeps piling up. Researchers analysing satellite imagery have counted more than 1,100 new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. Those are Rwandan soldiers, buried in the capital, where the state can hide them from its own people. A government that hides its dead is a government that knows exactly what it is doing. Independent reporting and UN findings also describe forced conscription of Congolese civilians and captured prisoners into M23 ranks, swelling a force from a few thousand fighters to tens of thousands. Mothers in Masisi and Rutshuru are being told that their sons have been taken to "serve." Many of those sons will never come home. That is slavery in military uniform, and it is happening on our continent in our lifetime.

And while this happens, Kigali polishes its image. Rwanda hosts international conferences, markets its clean streets, and sells gorilla trekking to Western tourists, while its soldiers help burn villages across the border. Kagame's government has become a master of sportswashing and reputation management, and too many Western capitals have been happy to look away. Every time a Rwandan official is photographed smiling at a summit, a displaced Congolese family in a camp near Goma is wondering whether they will eat tonight. Let us stop pretending these two realities are separate.

Tshisekedi is no innocent. He is reportedly preparing to amend the constitution to seek a third term, a move that would make a mockery of the very democracy he claims to defend. He has reinstated the death penalty, which Kabila's own government had kept under a moratorium, and he has used the state to crush opponents. Kabila invokes Article 64 of the constitution, which calls on citizens to resist anyone who seizes power unlawfully, and he is right that Tshisekedi is bending the law. But a man who seeks power through a rebel army has no moral right to lecture anyone about the constitution. Article 64 was written to protect citizens from tyrants, not to arm warlords who want to become the next one.

Africa has seen where this road leads. Mobutu ruled Zaire for more than thirty years as his personal property, and Congo has never fully recovered from that theft. The minerals that power your phone and the batteries in electric cars are dug out of Congolese soil by children and families who earn a few dollars a day, while the profits flow to foreign refiners and armed groups. The United States has signed agreements to access those minerals. Chinese firms, Gulf investors and Western traders all have their own stakes in the scramble. Every one of them talks about partnership. Not one of them has made the protection of Congolese civilians a condition of its deals.

So what must change? First, the African Union must stop issuing statements and start enforcing its own Constitutive Act, which prohibits the use of force to seize power and calls for the protection of civilians. The AU Peace and Security Council should impose targeted sanctions and travel bans on Rwandan military commanders responsible for cross-border operations, and it should send an independent verification mission to confirm troop withdrawals. Second, the UN Security Council must back that verification with real teeth. That means a robust MONUSCO mandate, an enforced arms embargo on all non-state groups and any foreign forces operating in Congo, and a public accounting of who supplies the drones and mortars that are killing civilians. Third, Kinshasa must put its own house in order. Tshisekedi should publicly rule out any constitutional change to extend his term, and he should fund an independent electoral commission whose results cannot be overturned in a backroom.

The region already has proof that another path works. Botswana has built one of Africa's most stable economies on diamonds and cattle by keeping its institutions independent and its elections credible. Mauritius shows what happens when property rights and rule of law are treated as sacred. Senegal, in 2024, saw a sitting government attempt to delay an election, only for its courts and its citizens to force a peaceful transfer of power. Those are the models Congo's politicians should be studying, not the Mobutu playbook. Rwanda's development story is real in some respects, but no economic progress justifies an invasion of a neighbour, and any investor who ignores that is buying into a stolen future.

Congo also needs a clean minerals regime. Mandatory traceability for cobalt, coltan, tin and gold, verified at the mine and not just at the port, would cut the financial oxygen flowing to armed groups. Enforce OECD due diligence standards, publish mining contracts, and give local communities a real share of revenue. Free markets and transparent institutions are not Western luxuries. They are the only proven way to stop warlords from taking what does not belong to them.

And now, to you. To the Congolese reader in Kinshasa, Goma and Lubumbashi, demand that your leaders choose the constitution over the gun, whether they wear the uniform of the state or the uniform of a rebel front. Demand that the Rwandan army leave your soil. Demand that your elections be counted in the open. To the Rwandan reader, ask your government why its soldiers are buried in secret graves across the border and why your country's name is being dragged through the mud of someone else's war. To every African reader, ask your own governments and regional bodies what they are doing about a war that is killing your neighbours, and do not accept silence as an answer. Share this story, call your parliamentarian, write to your ambassador, and refuse to let this become one more conflict the world forgets. Congo's children did not choose this war. The least we can do is refuse to let it be normal.

Based on reporting by BBC