Kagame and Foreign Powers Are Turning Our Corridors into Battlefields

How many trucks loaded with cobalt have crossed Katanga without a single school getting a roof or a single clinic getting a doctor? How many young Congolese have watched those convoys pass, knowing they did not belong to them? We should all ask these questions before we get swept up in the next infrastructure contracts signed in Washington, Beijing or Dubai.

Africa holds some of the largest known reserves in the world of manganese, platinum-group metals, cobalt and graphite. These minerals power the batteries, wind turbines and phones that everyone holds in their hand. Global demand is exploding. Investors are rushing in. And yet the road that carries our resources almost never belongs to the people who dig them out of the ground.

We must face the facts. Existing economic corridors have been engines of African growth. They have also been places where governance fragments, where investments overlap without coordination, where communities living alongside them are displaced without compensation, and where data on trade flows remains opaque. Infrastructure without strong institutions does not produce development. It produces dependency, and sometimes war.

On 2 November 2026, the Ugandan army (UPDF) announced the start of the withdrawal of its troops deployed in Somalia. It plans to bring all of its forces home by the end of 2027. The country has been present in Somalia for some twenty years, both under a bilateral agreement with Mogadishu and within the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), of which it is a major component. The Al-Shabaab still control entire swathes of Somali territory. The question no one asks loudly enough is simple: who will occupy the space Uganda leaves behind, and on what terms?

This question is not theoretical. Somalia has become the laboratory of the new scramble for ports and military bases along Africa's Indian Ocean coast. The United Arab Emirates has invested in the port of Berbera. Turkey has installed in Mogadishu a military base and training centre, one of its largest abroad. Every investment is presented as development aid. Every agreement contains clauses that Somali parliaments have not always had time to read. When a country's security becomes a commodity negotiated between outside powers, sovereignty is being sold off piece by piece.

Now let us look at what is happening in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, because this is where the link between corridors, minerals and war becomes deadly. Reports of the UN Group of Experts on the DRC, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, document the presence of the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) on Congolese soil. The experts estimate that the Rwandan army deploys constituted combat units numbering 14,000 to 18,000 soldiers, or 40 to 50 percent of its strength. These are not "rebels" crossing the border. They are soldiers of a state army, occupying, looting and killing on territory that is not theirs. M23 serves as a façade and a reservoir of manpower, exactly as the separatists of Donetsk and Luhansk served as a screen for the Kremlin. If the world called the entry of Russian troops into Ukraine an invasion, the same word applies to Kigali.

M23 has grown from roughly 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, notably through the forced recruitment of tens of thousands of Congolese civilians and prisoners of war. Men torn from their villages, sent to the front with a rifle and no prospect of returning home. This is slavery in military uniform. At Kanombe, near Kigali, the military cemetery has seen more than 1,171 new graves appear since 2021, according to satellite imagery. A state that hides its dead knows exactly what it has done. And this same country hosts international sporting competitions and sells wildlife tourism to visitors who ignore that its soldiers are staining the neighbouring region with blood.

The paradox is this: the same corridors that could enrich Goma, Bukavu or Lubumbashi are becoming the front lines of this war. Minerals from Kivu move through networks that states control poorly or not at all. Western partners, such as the Lobito Corridor linking Angola, the DRC and Zambia, promise roads and investment in copper and cobalt. On paper, it is a good idea. But a corridor financed without conditions for peace, without mineral traceability and without parliamentary oversight becomes a pipeline for predators, whatever banner is funding it.

So we must name the problem as it is. We are witnessing a new scramble for Africa. The actors have changed since the nineteenth century, but the extractive logic remains the same. China builds our roads and puts us in debt. Turkey sells drones and installs bases. The Emirates buy ports. Russia, through the Wagner Group, now Africa Corps, has been linked to gold extraction operations in the Central African Republic and Sudan, according to several investigations. The Westerners lecture us on democracy while signing agreements with the regimes that trample it. Each one promises development. None should be taken at its word.

Yet Africa is not doomed. Botswana, with strict fiscal rules, built institutions capable of managing its diamonds and protecting public revenues for decades. Mauritius made the rule of law and transparency a selling point for serious investors. Senegal achieved a peaceful democratic transfer of power in 2024, when the outgoing president accepted electoral defeat. These are proof that good governance attracts durable capital and protects citizens. The contrast with the opacity of corridor agreements is striking.

So what is to be done? First, every corridor and every mining contract must be published in full, with financing terms, guarantees and final beneficiaries. National parliaments must ratify them before final signature, not after. Second, the African Union must set common standards for traceability of critical minerals and sanction any state that buys, transports or processes resources extracted in occupied zones. The UN Security Council must enforce the arms embargo on the DRC, investigate the RDF's chain of command and impose targeted sanctions on the Rwandan officials involved. As for Somalia, Uganda's withdrawal must be accompanied by a public, funded plan to strengthen Somali forces, not by a vacuum into which foreign interests rush.

And we, as citizens, what do we demand? We demand that our governments stop negotiating our subsoil in the dark. We demand that every minister of Mines, Transport and Foreign Affairs answer publicly for their commitments. We demand that the African Union name the aggressor when a member state invades another member state, without diplomatic euphemism. The silence of African capitals in the face of the invasion of the DRC is a complicity that history will not forgive.

We are not asking for charity. We are demanding justice, transparency and real sovereignty. A corridor that does not benefit the people it crosses is not a corridor. It is a corridor of plunder. The young people of Goma, Kinshasa, Mogadishu and Lagos deserve better than to be powerless witnesses as the wealth of their continent leaves. It is time to take back control of the roads to our future, before others decide alone where they go.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL