Internally displaced civilians from the camps in Munigi and Kibati, carry their belongings as they flee following the fight between M23 rebels and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, January 26, 2025.
On Monday, Kenyan President William Ruto, who chairs the East African Community, announced that he had convened an Extraordinary Summit mid-week to discuss the security crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This summit follows the capture on Monday of the strategic eastern DRC city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, by the March 23 (M23) rebels, which Kinshasa claims are backed by Rwanda, a charge Rwanda denies.
Ruto said both Rwandan President Paul Kagame and DRC’s leader Felix Tshisekedi had agreed to attend.
For Kenya, the DRC problem has become akin to the South Sudan crisis; an issue that has spanned two administrations (Ruto’s and Uhuru Kenyatta’s).
The South Sudan question preoccupied the Daniel arap Moi government and the presidency of Mwai Kibaki.
The Congo problem, however, has had a much longer shelf life. On another platform, I wrote about this longevity, which was illustrated to me by a leading African writer and political economist.
He told me about his conversation with then-Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2002. Obasanjo, now 87, was a young officer in the United Nations’ first peacekeeping mission in Africa - Opération des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC), from July 1960 until June 1964. Another prominent Nigerian who also served on that mission was former president Muhammadu Buhari, now 82.
Both men went on to serve as Nigerian military rulers and elected civilian leaders after retirement – and Congo followed them decades later.
Obasanjo, who was a key figure in diplomatic efforts to end the “First Congo War”, told the writer that thinking about the Congo problem when he was an officer there in the 1960s and as president in 2002, he thought it needed a “Nigerian solution” – federalism. On reading Obasanjo’s prescription, a veteran East African diplomat agreed.
He wrote in to say he was a senior UN diplomat in DRC when M23 took Goma for the first time in November 2012 and travelled as part of a delegation to assess the situation in the eastern city. He worked on the issue for several years thereafter.
“I have always been of the view that the diagnosis of both the Congolese government and the international community of the situation in eastern DRC was wrong,” he said.
“I consider it overdone to accuse Rwanda of all evils in eastern Congo. Of course, Rwanda has an immediate security interest at its border with the DRC, but I think the real source of the conflict lies in the fact that the political system in the DRC, with very centralised power in Kinshasa - a distance of over 2,600 kilometres from Goma - is very dysfunctional and not adapted to the immensity of the country,” he added.
He explained that every tax collected in any department or far-flung region in the DRC is mandatorily sent to the national Treasury in Kinshasa, which will take its quota before sending the rest back to the regions.
This wouldn’t be a problem in a country the size of Rwanda or Kenya, but the long chain of sending money back makes the administrative management of provincial cities, towns, and villages a near-impossible task.
He noted that in his interactions with policymakers and decision-makers in Kinshasa, about 70 per cent of them had never travelled to either the North Kivu or the South Kivu provinces, so they were making decisions while ignoring the realities on the ground.
He also highlighted an inconvenient fact: “Anyone who has been travelling within the DRC would have noticed that Goma is not just one of the most developed cities but also the most well-run at the local level.
This is due to the proximity with Rwanda, for peoples from either side of the border share the same approaches. So, it's a pipe dream to think that one could sever the ties between these twin populations.”
He also said one can’t ignore the regional dimension of this conflict, for it’s not “that Rwanda, Uganda, or even Tanzania, are bent on destabilising the DRC per se, contrary to what Tshisekedi believes, it’s simply that people in eastern Congo prefer to commercialise their goods via these countries because they are just more reliable and secure than their own”.
His solution? Very bold and audacious. Instead of Kinshasa obsessing about “territorial integrity” they are barely capable of defending, the political elite in Kinshasa should be honest and courageous enough with themselves and explore the possibility of a post-World War II arrangement like the German-French agreement on steel and coal, which pooled coal and steel production from France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Under this arrangement, the DRC would “mutualise the management of resources with neighbouring countries in a sharing deal. Such a deal would have the potential to tame the security and instability in eastern Congo,” he argued.
He concluded that Africa’s second largest country is too vast for a single and centralised administration, “mostly incompetent and kleptomaniac, to manage it alone. This is where I fully agree with Obasanjo that the DRC needs federalism if it wants to survive as a state.”
The author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the "Wall of Great Africans." @cobbo3
