Editor,

Allow meto react to the article, "New mandate for Monusco is inconsequential – experts” (The New Times, March 30).

The most surreal justification used by Monusco to argue for more time from the UN Security Council was the continued danger represented by the FDLR.

As if that menace does not persist precisely because Monusco has not refused very deliberately from its inception to do anything about it—nay, it has, in fact, seemingly done all in its power to shield the FDLR from any threat to its existence.

What Monusco and its overseers at the UN in New York are doing—using the continued existence of the FDLR (which they pointedly refuse to fight at every chance) to justify their own extension after extension, is the very illustration of the Yiddish word "chutzpah”, reflecting the gall of the boy who, charged with the murder of his own parents, begged the court for mercy because he was an orphan.

And a complicit UN continues to wave through Monusco’s renewed mandates with hardly any question to what the world is really getting for its US$1.5 billion a year from global taxpayers who have yet to recover fully from the 2008 global financial crisis (some even many times worse off than before that crisis).

What really are the real (as opposed to the declared) objectives of Monusco’s sponsors so that they would be happy to continue to spend that amount of money for an operation that has failed so miserably in achieving the advertised goals for it for all these years?

Mwene Kalinda