On May 27, Amb Fred Gateretse Ngoga, a senior adviser in the African Union’s Office of the Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, posted something simple and devastating on X. "Unfortunately in Burundi, I wish I was wrong, but discrimination against Tutsi communities still exists.”

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He prefaced his next sentence with a deliberate bracing of himself: I expect insults. He was right to brace. The post drew immediate pushback. A senior AU official, a Burundian, naming the thing plainly and the first instinct of the regional discourse was to reach for the mute button.

This has always been the pattern.

Naming targeted anti-Tutsi violence in our region does not make you a propagandist. It does not make you an agent of Kigali. It makes you a reader of evidence. And the evidence is so densely documented that the refusal to engage can only be called what it is: a deliberate political choice.

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In Burundi, the 2000 Arusha Peace Agreement enshrined mandatory ethnic power-sharing: a minimum 40% Tutsi representation across government ministries, the judiciary and security services, and parity in the Senate, national defence forces and intelligence services. By 2023, Ligue Iteka surveys show Tutsi representation at the Presidency had collapsed to 8%. In the National Intelligence Service, it stood at zero. In education, 9%. In health sector appointments, between 7 and 9%. Every institution shows the same trajectory: systematic, accelerating, fused with CNDD-FDD in a country where 90 to 100% of public appointees belong to the same ruling party.

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Between January 2024 and May 2025, Burundian civil society documented 605 extrajudicial killings, 892 arbitrary detentions, over 200 cases of sexual violence, 58 enforced disappearances, and 62 cases of torture attributed to state agents or actors with state complicity. The former chair of the National Human Rights Commission fled in April 2025, days after publishing a report on serious violations. Two Truth and Reconciliation Commission members went into exile. In September 2023, the ruling party’s Secretary General called on supporters to eliminate "wolves.” Language that in this region, with this history, requires no translation. None of them has ever been prosecuted.

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Now that violence has a regional vector. Burundian troops deployed in eastern DR Congo since 2022 fight alongside the Kinshasa-backed FDLR – a genocidal militia - and Congolese Wazalendo militia. In late 2025, coalition forces blockaded Minembwe in South Kivu, cutting off food, medicine and humanitarian access to Banyamulenge communities. Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Rapporteur documented that throughout 2025. Tutsi individuals were targeted on suspicion of links to Rwanda or AFC/M23, and ethnicity collapsed into geopolitics, identity into alleged allegiance. Genocide Watch noted legal marginalisation, unchecked hate speech, and militia deployment reflected early-stage mass atrocity warning indicators.

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This is not one country’s problem. It is a regional pattern allowed to calcify because the political discomfort of naming anti-Tutsi violence always outweighs, in our regional bodies, the human cost of ignoring it. Amb Gateretse understood that cost. He named it anyway.

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The AU’s own framework is clear: no ethnic group may monopolise the apparatus of the state; inclusion must be institutional, not symbolic; independent oversight is a foundation, not a feature. Every one of those principles is being violated in Burundi. The gap between framework and reality is not an abstraction. It is a body count and a growing list of exiles.

What is required is political will to restore independent monitoring, to condition AU engagement on Arusha compliance, to name hate speech as a precursor and to disaggregate violence data so targeting patterns cannot be buried. Arusha was always transitional, not a destination. The goal should be a society so grounded in fairness that quotas become unnecessary, replaced by merit, where exclusion no longer needs compensating because it has been dismantled.

The most stable societies are not those without diversity, but those that govern it through fairness, equality, and accountability. The Great Lakes region has the frameworks and evidence. What it appears to lack is the courage to act on the same courage it took one diplomat—bracing for insults—to simply state the truth.

The writer is a communication specialist and strategist.