Kinshasa Accused of Blurring Diplomatic Lines with Kigali to Dodge Political Accountability

In the Congolese political arena, there exist figures whose rhetoric, lacking ethical backbone, morphs into a mere tool of convenience driven by shifting moods and political expediency.

For these actors, fidelity to their words dissolves the moment it demands consistency. Their speech, detached from any moral rigor, aims less to clarify and more to confuse. Laden with exaggerated expressions yet void of substance, their language twists and turns to exhaustion, reduced to a floating rhetoric where condemnation replaces principle and calculation overrides authority.

Such Congolese leaders do not govern they drift, like rudderless vessels, favoring posturing over doctrinal coherence, evasion over commitment, and spectacle over vision. Their only consistency lies in their unpredictability. Their words, worn thin by contradiction, inspire little more than disbelief or ridicule. Their discourse ceases to command it becomes a fractured mirror, reflecting power in murky and unstable images.

It is in this atmosphere of verbal dissonance and strategic obfuscation that the latest diplomatic clash between Kigali and Kinshasa unfolds. On Sunday, Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Olivier Nduhungirehe, issued a strong rebuke to recent comments by Congolese government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya, delivered on Top Congo FM. Nduhungirehe condemned what he called a “flagrant disinformation campaign” regarding the nature of the M23’s withdrawal.

Muyaya had suggested the M23’s pullback aligned with the objectives of the Joint Security Coordination Mechanism (JSCM), an initiative emerging from the Washington Agreement signed on June 27, 2025. Kigali strongly refuted a, clarifying that the JSCM is strictly bilateral focused solely on neutralizing the FDLR and progressively lifting Rwanda’s defensive measures. The AFC/M23, Rwanda emphasized, falls entirely outside the scope of this mechanism.

Instead, Kigali reiterated that matters relating to the M23 are governed by the Doha Declaration of Principles negotiated under Qatari mediation, which outlines a separate political process aimed at addressing the root causes of recurring crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Rwanda’s clarification reveals more than a diplomatic misunderstanding it exposes a deliberate narrative distortion by Congolese authorities, possibly aimed at concealing their own policy inconsistencies beneath artificial conflations.

This deliberate blurring of lines between the bilateral security accord and the political dialogue with the AFC/M23 reveals a fundamentally incoherent political strategy. At times, it even seems cynically calculated.

What we are witnessing is not a pragmatic adjustment, but a symptomatic display of a regime that treats ambiguity as strategy and denial as method. In this fractured architecture of speech, truth wavers, credibility erodes, and government communication becomes little more than an empty echo, filling the void of contradictions.