It was a small but interesting news item. But being on social media meant that none could take it at face value as accurate. For sure, it was a video of a mudslide. Still, whether it was part of a hill that flowed across River Rusizi to fill it up and connect two hills, one in Rwanda and the other in DR Congo, that could not immediately be ascertained. Whatever the case, though, whether or not the news item was genuine does not matter. What matters is that it can happen any time in the future. Which is a powerful message to leaders of the two countries: their countries cannot avoid living together. Which renders laughable accusations by DR Congo leaders that Rwanda is stealing their minerals. It’d mean that minerals listened to some Western leaders around a map in 1884/5, at the balkanisation of Africa, and stopped where they determined one country should end and the other start. Apart from minerals not listening to those colonial kingpins, there is the fact of these landmasses around the borders being fluid and likely to flow from one side to the other, without leaving their minerals behind. It’s then that you see the futility of Congolese leaders trying to stretch the world’s imagination. Absurd doesn’t begin to describe these leaders’ utterances! However, you haven’t heard the half of it. When these ‘Balkanists’ were chopping up swathes of territories to divide them among themselves, they did not give a hoot about which community belonged to which part of the land. The map reflected the land, not the community. So, it’s only a primitive killer government authority who’d dare, in this civilised age, evict compatriot communities from their ancestral land and send them to a foreign country because their mother tongue is similar to that of the foreign country’s community. ALSO READ: DR Congo’s Rwandophone question: What US govt, SA, Tanzanian leaders have said So, if those authorities have the callousness to evict a people, they should have the grace to accompany them with their land – with all its minerals. Anyway, we shouldn’t rack our brains over these leaders’ shadowy processes of thought and rash decisions of action. Their thought and action, and their head President Felix Tshisekedi’s, are obscurities few have the power to understand. We can only tell Tshisekedi to beware. There have been canny similarities with the president of another country not so far from DR Congo and not in the so distant past. And his end wasn’t anything to lament about, in his case. ALSO READ: Habyarimana's role in planning, implementing 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi Like him, when in the 1990s Juvenal Habyarimana (Kinani) saw his compatriots who had been denied their citizen rights rise to claim them, he externalised the problem by crying to the world that he was being attacked by Uganda. Forces bigger than Tshisekedi’s local coterie of rebels; than imported terrorists; than his mercenaries; than the Burundi army; than some elements from SADC armies all gathered to lend support. But then, like now, they all received bloody noses and left him high and dry. The rebellious group triumphed, in the end. However, unlike Tshisekedi, Kinani didn’t draft into his army a Ugandan genocidal force, when it was duly recognised by the UN as a terrorist group, the way FDLR is. Their bent to genocide commission is the same, of course, though we haven’t seen the consummation or, hopefully, the interruption of the former’s. Another better one for Kinani? He had had the presence of mind to swallow his pride and, even if in fits and starts, agree to the small group’s demands for dialogue. He didn’t request to talk to Uganda. Looks like among evils there can be a bigger evil and it’s a ‘thumbs up’ for the Congolese president! The whole of the above disgraceful acts and behaviours and other similar ones apart, however, it’s good that Tshisekedi has moved from threatening hell for Rwanda to mouthing noises about peace. Only, he veers towards President Paul Kagame as usual, instead of his aggrieved countrymen and women. Doubtless, to deflect scrutiny from his culpability. He has finally given in to Angolan President Joao Lourenço’s request to talk peace but on condition: the Rwandan president must ask M23 to “stop fighting, leave their occupied areas and return to where they came from.” M23 is on their ancestral soil and so where they’ll return to, search me! ALSO READ: DR Congo crisis: Tshisekedi, Lourenço meet in Angola Anyway, the way I see it, President Kagame can only succeed in convincing M23 to cease fire and move from their strongholds if he is allowed to address their complaints. That means punishing the expellers, harassers, choppers, burners, eaters, rapists, killers, et cetera, of their people, cattle and other property: Congolese leaders who incited citizens! Rwanda has ever dealt with more complex problems and I am sure she can clinch this, too. But back to the landslide. When it happens, it’ll be a message to President Tshisekedi that none of his citizens are foreigner to their motherland. It’ll be a message to him, too, that as neighbours forever, DR Congo and Rwanda are joined at the hip. They are sister countries and posterity demands that they start living thus. Congolese leaders must be seized of the cry of this region’s land.
