Last week Bintou Keita bid farewell to Theresa Kayikwamba Wagner, DRC’s foreign affairs Minister, closing almost five years of her tenure as the Head of MONUSCO. The five years that left the DRC more torn than the way she found it.
When she arrived in 2021, she came with diplomatic charm, thick briefing folders and the familiar UN promise to “stabilize” a country that has not known stability since independence. She leaves behind a landscape soaked in violence, a mission stripped of credibility, and a population that long stopped believing UN capability in handling their issues.
Her mandate looked clear on paper, it was to support Congolese security forces, consolidate state authority, protect civilians, assist the transition. In practice, none of this materialized. Eastern DRC sank deeper into bloodshed. Civilians remained unprotected and the transition became a slogan repeated in conferences, not something people felt on the ground.
Yet, the biggest tragedy under Keita’s watch was that the mission which was supposed to demobilize, dismantle, and reintegrate armed groups somehow presided over the single largest multiplication of militias in recent African history. DRC’s insecurity is not a coincidence. It has been cultivated, whether by negligence, incompetence, or a system that profits from chaos.
Nothing exposes Keita’s failure better than the FDLR. This group, born from the remnants of those who carried out the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, not only survived under MONUSCO but flourished. They reorganized, they rearmed, and at some point they were stronger than FARDC itself. They issued threats against Rwanda, marched freely across Congolese territory, and MONUSCO’s response remained predictable: deaf, mute, blind.
Meanwhile, the numbers tell their own story. Over $10 billion spent by MONUSCO since its deployment, enough to build modern highways from Goma to Kinshasa, enough to build the best intelligence services in Central Africa, enough to train a proper national army, no results is there yet.
A reminder that under Keita’s leadership, insecurity doubled, civilians fled in record numbers, and the East remained a permanent war zone. However, the moment foreign military forces were pushed aside and M23 took control of large parts of Eastern DRC, order returned. Movement resumed. Civilians breathed. Suddenly, the “hopeless” areas MONUSCO claimed were unmanageable became peaceful under local actors.
On the other hand, here is the real message for Keita’s successor: go back to the drawing board, overhaul everything, tear down the old manuals, stop repeating diplomatic poetry, and design strategies that actually work on African soil.
But if they cling to business as usual, then the ridicule is theirs to carry. Because Africans have already had enough of these costly, empty UN adventures that fix nothing and explain everything. The region is moving on, the UN has not and that is the whole problem.
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