As world leaders convened last week in New York for the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, what preoccupied many of them were the necessary steps they need to take to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which are enshrined in the 17 goals that countries need to achieve by 2030. The achievement of these goals has been significantly affected by COVID-19 pandemic, which for close to three years rattled economies and generally destabilised the global order which makes the attainment of these Global Goals even more complicated and yet an obligatory undertaking. For many leaders therefore, it was an opportunity to caucus with strategic partners – including state and non-state actors – to collectively look at how they can help their countries attain these goals, or at least make a significant headway towards the same. This was however not the case for President Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo. For him, the New York sojourn was rather an opportunity to advance his long-held ambition of causing regime change in Kigali, by meeting a group of Rwandan renegades to devise means of removing the dully-elected government of Rwanda. He has previously stated in a public speech that he would back anyone with an ambition to unseat the Kigali government. Far from being achievable an objective as it may, it is important to look at the intention itself especially from the context of the challenges faced by the DR Congo as a country and the spillover effects of their internal conflicts to the entire Great Lakes Region, including Rwanda. For the past two years, the region has been grappling with efforts to pacify DR Congo, including through mechanisms like the Nairobi and Luanda processes and subsequent series of other meeting to the same effect but with little success. All these efforts have been for all intents and purposes frustrated by Tshisekedi and his acolytes, who without any evidence, choose to instead deflect, selling to the world an unsubstantiated narrative that the problems in his country come from elsewhere rather than from within. Ironically, the West has instead of backing the regional-led peace efforts chosen to buy into Tshisekedi’s lame excuses for reasons only known to themselves, yet he uses those same countries to host meetings that plot against his own neighbours without any consequence. The West, starting from the US, if they want to indeed see the end of suffering of Congolese, must therefore look directly in the eyes of the leadership in Kinshasa and ask them the hard questions, instead of conveniently buying into their gimmicks.
