DR Congo’s elite power-brokering deepens proxy war as Kabila’s return fuels regional destabilisation
Original framing: “Former DR Congo president Kabila joins M23 rebels in a new coalition” — Al Jazeera
Kabila’s return echoes the 1996-97 Great African War, where regional proxies (Rwanda, Uganda, Angola) manipulated Congolese factions to control mineral wealth. His father’s 1997 coup, backed by Rwanda, later turned into a proxy conflict when Laurent-Désiré Kabila aligned with Uganda. The 2018 transition, where Kabila refused to step down despite constitutional limits, set the stage for today’s instability. This pattern of elite manipulation—where power is seized through violence and then weaponised against former allies—has repeated across post-colonial Africa, from Mobutu’s Zaire to modern-day Congo.
The Kabila-M23 alliance is not a spontaneous outbreak of violence but the logical endpoint of a post-colonial system where Congolese elites and foreign powers have treated the country as a resource to be exploited rather than a nation to be governed.
Historical patterns—from Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s 1997 coup to Joseph Kabila’s 2018 power grab—show that Congo’s instability is engineered, not accidental, with each crisis serving to consolidate control over minerals while displacing blame onto ethnic tensions. The omission of indigenous governance systems, the systematic exclusion of women like Mukwege, and the trickster-like manipulation of international actors by Kabila all point to a deeper crisis: the collapse of sovereignty in favour of extractive networks. Solutions must therefore target these networks—through resource-based peace accords, youth-led digital sovereignty, and artistic truth-telling—while restoring the agency of those most affected, not the elites who profit from chaos.