The failure of Congo and Africa’s moral reckoning

Why East and Southern Africa Must Choose Justice Over Silence, and Regional Truth Over Convenient Sovereignty

COMMENT | ANDREW PI BESI |   On July 4, 1876, American Congressman James A. Garfield declared, “The people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If it is corrupt, it is because the people tolerate corruption.”

Garfield—a Civil War hero and a man of uncommon moral clarity—believed that leadership was not merely about power, but about truth and responsibility. His assassination in 1881 silenced a voice that might have challenged some of the most destructive hypocrisies of his age. Those hypocrisies did not die with him. Instead, they were globalised.

Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, offered legitimacy to King Leopold II’s fraudulent International Association of the Congo (IAC) over what eventually became the Congo Free State. That recognition, reinforced by European complicity at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, enabled one of history’s most violent systems of extraction. The Congo Free State was not a nation; it was a crime scene masquerading as sovereignty. Millions perished so that foreign powers could enrich themselves behind legal fictions and moral evasions.

The Congo’s tragedy did not end with colonialism. It merely changed custodians.

Today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains trapped in a cycle of violence, exclusion, and plunder. President Félix Tshisekedi’s government, like all before it, invokes sovereignty while practising dispossession—auctioning mineral wealth to foreign interests while failing to secure the dignity and safety of its own people. Most gravely, it continues to marginalise ethnic Congolese Tutsis – the Banyamulege, treating them as perpetual outsiders in the very lands around Kivu’s mountains that are the only home they have ever known.

This is not merely a Congolese failure. It is a regional one.

For decades, the eastern DRC has harboured the FDLR—an armed group composed in significant part of perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. These genocidaires did not vanish with time; they reorganised, rearmed, and embedded themselves within Congolese territory, often with the tacit tolerance—or active collaboration—of state and local actors. Their continued presence is a moral abomination and a strategic threat, not only to Rwanda, but to the entire Great Lakes region.

It is here that President Paul Kagame’s insistence on accountability must be understood—not caricatured. One need not romanticise power to recognise moral clarity. No state can be expected to accept, indefinitely, an armed genocidal force on its border, protected by the very neighbour that claims victimhood. Demanding that the DRC dismantle the FDLR and end the persecution of Congolese Tutsis is not aggression; it is a demand for historical responsibility and basic justice.

East and Southern Africa must say this plainly, even when it is uncomfortable.

The reflex to excuse Congolese state failure under the language of sovereignty is precisely the same moral evasion that once excused Leopold II. It privileges borders over people, legalism over life. As Walter Rodney warned in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, we have been trained to see ourselves through foreign lenses—judging African crises not by truth, but by how well they fit external narratives.

This must end.

Africa is not poor in culture, history, or coherence. It is extraordinarily rich. From the Great Lakes to the Zambezi, our societies share deep cultural continuities: extended kinship systems, reverence for land, consensus-based governance traditions, and a moral economy that places community above individual accumulation. These are not weaknesses. They are civilisational assets.

Yet we remain fragmented—politically, diplomatically, and morally.

East and Southern Africa, in particular, must begin to coalesce around shared principles rather than inherited divisions. This does not require uniformity of politics, nor blind allegiance to any leader. It requires something more difficult: the courage to reject bad faith leadership wherever it appears, including in Kinshasa. Leaders who weaponise ethnicity, tolerate genocidal militias, and trade national wealth for personal survival must no longer be indulged under the guise of non-interference.

Non-interference is not neutrality when crimes persist.

The marginalisation of Congolese Tutsis is not an internal Congolese issue alone. It is a regional moral failure. The continued existence of the FDLR is not a Rwandan obsession; it is a standing indictment of African unwillingness to confront evil when it wears familiar faces. Silence, in such circumstances, is not prudence. It is complicity.

Africa’s future will not be secured by repeating the slogans of Pan-Africanism while tolerating injustice. It will be secured by recovering its ethical spine—by insisting that sovereignty must serve people, not protect predators; that diversity is a strength, not a pretext for exclusion; and that leadership, to be legitimate, must be anchored in moral clarity.

Garfield understood that corruption persists because it is tolerated. Africa must now understand the same. The Congo’s suffering is not inevitable. It is maintained by bad leaders, by regional timidity, and by an international system content to extract while preaching restraint.

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By Andrew “Pi” Besi | On X: @BesiAndrew

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