Ndayishimiye’s Ghost Airline: How Burundi’s fake carrier loots Congo

Burundi’s despot, Evariste Ndayishimiye, has just appointed a CEO for Burundi Airlines, a planeless and pilotless smuggling tool. Inspired by his predecessor Pierre Nkurunziza, who robbed the country blind while propagating genocidal ideology to distract from his grift, Ndayishimiye uses the entire state apparatus to enrich himself. For almost a decade now, Burundi’s successive rulers have appointed the CEO of Burundi Airlines, the national airline carrier, despite the fact that the country owns no planes.

At face value, the appointment to lead a fictitious airline might seem comical and laughable, yet it serves a critical purpose in the extortion racket run by the Burundian junta. Our sources reveal that the fictitious airline is actually in charge of exporting smuggled goods from Burundi and Congo. It is a classic offshore shell company.

Under Evariste Ndayishimiye, Burundi, a failed state by all metrics, is actively engaged in a genocidal war in the eastern provinces of Congo, in alliance with Tshisekedi and the FDLR genocidal group. They aim to decimate Tutsis from their homeland and loot natural resources. Ndayishimiye has secretly and illegally deployed more than 20,000 soldiers and generously offered the country’s capital city as a logistical base for the genocidal alliance to attack Congolese Tutsi villages in South Kivu.

So, despite the fact that Burundi Airlines has no pilots and no planes, it receives a huge budget dedicated to “maintenance.” In reality, this budget is used to rent huge cargo planes to smuggle looted natural resources from Eastern Congo. Proceeds from the loot are wired to Ndayishimiye. In other words, the Ndayishimiye–Tshisekedi mafia literally charge Burundian taxpayers the cost of smuggling. The fictitious airline completes the circle.

Consider this: Ndayishimiye rents out Burundi’s soldiers to Tshisekedi, and then dips into the public treasury to pay a shell company for hauling the looted ore. And the entire operation is for one man’s enrichment.

If that is not treason, nothing is!