The drama of the absurd at the United Nations

When it comes to politicians from the Democratic Republic of Congo, one would be hard-pressed to find a ceiling to their appetite for embarrassment. They will always manage to turn moments of diplomacy into festivals of disgrace. If the world needed a reminder that reckless rhetoric still finds a comfortable seat in high places, it came crashing down on April 16, 2025, at the 9,899th meeting of the United Nations Security Council. Standing before the most powerful diplomatic body in the world, Therese Kayikwamba Wagner, the Congolese foreign minister delivered a jaw-dropping statement: there was a genocide against the Hutu in 1994. This wasn’t some fringe Twitter (now X) conspiracy or the rant of a YouTube keyboard historian. This was a top most diplomat of a sovereign state—one sitting on a continent still reeling from the scars of real genocide—speaking in the most consequential diplomatic chamber in the world. The shamelessness is overwhelming. The implications, deeply disturbing. Yes. She said that. In the very chamber that should be the world’s pinnacle of historical integrity, a top diplomat of a UN member state stood up and rewrote one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in modern history. Not a slip of the tongue. Not a misinterpretation. A full-throated, unapologetic revision of history. Kayikwamba chose to trample on established historical fact, echoing one of the most toxic talking points of genocide deniers and ideologues who have long sought to rewrite the past and shift blame onto the victims. It was a calculated move, the kind that feeds into the twisted narrative of those who continue to defend or justify the 1994 genocide and its perpetrators. It’s not just that her statement was a lie — it was a dangerous, reckless, and deeply offensive one. A ludicrous erasure of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, which was recognized by the UN itself and in which over a million people were slaughtered in just 100 days. There is no ambiguity. No scholarly controversy. No nuance to hide behind. And yet, here we are, with a Congolese minister pontificating as though history were a tabula rasa upon which she could scrawl whatever ideological graffiti she pleases. And yet, no gavel dropped. No stern rebuke came from the UN Secretary-General. No member of the Council demanded a retraction. Silence. Deafening silence. Because apparently, when it comes to the DR Congo and its officials, even the most insulting, historically revisionist fabrications can pass as legitimate political speech. It has now become a morbid tradition: Congolese officials never disappoint when it comes to saying anything—no matter how shameful, embarrassing, or grotesquely false. Not all is craziness and interruptions Two days later, sanity made a brief appearance on the X platform. Burundian diplomat Fred Ngoga took issue with Kayikwamba’s grotesque distortion of the truth and called her out publicly: My sister @RDCongoMAE this is factually wrong. Our President at the time was Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, a Hutu. On the other hand, read the U.N. report. There was no genocide against our Hutu population in Burundi, period. Are you trying to mount our communities one against the other? Please withdraw this statement! Ngoga’s post was dignified, precise, and rooted in historical accuracy. He did not mince words. He upheld the truth in a region that has bled far too long because of political lies and ethnic incitement. But then came the real theatre of the absurd. In swooped Burundi’s Ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union, Willy Nyamitwe, not to applaud his compatriot’s defence of truth and regional harmony — but to rebuke him. Yes, rebuke him. Mr @NgogaFred is serving at the @_AfricanUnion’s Political Affairs, Peace & Security Department (@AUC_PAPS). He should stand for the AU’s impartiality and dedication to diplomacy and conflict prevention. His duty is not to fuel political rhetoric against a sovereign Member State. So here we are. A seasoned diplomat is told off not for lying, but for telling the truth. According to Nyamitwe, truth has now become political rhetoric, and sovereignty — that convenient shield — is the fig leaf behind which impunity and dishonesty should be protected. One is left wondering: is the AU now an altar where facts are sacrificed to protect incompetence? What should have triggered immediate reprimand from the Security Council Chair or a statement of correction from the UN Secretary-General was met with nothing. No clarification. No rebuke. No concern. When the DR Congo is the actor, it seems that the world gives mediocrity a free pass. Trying to understand the absurd What we’re witnessing here may be a textbook case of dissociative delusion compounded with ideological psychosis. According to Robert J. Lifton and Eric Markusen’s studies on genocidal mentality, such delusion is often accompanied by ‘psychic numbing,’ where the perpetrator or sympathizer becomes desensitized to facts, replaces trauma with myth, and substitutes real history with fantasy in order to justify hatred. The minister's assertion suggests she’s operating not in a fact-based reality, but in a parallel Congo-verse. From what I have observed for a while, we must recognize DR Congo foreign policy as a masterclass in the weaponisation of nonsense. Under President Félix Tshisekedi, the foreign ministry has evolved into a linguistic war machine, designed to distract from national failures by assaulting basic truths. If roads are impassable, if the economy is burning, and the east of the country is held hostage by militias, then blame Rwanda. And if Rwanda’s response is too grounded in reality, then invent a historical genocide in Burundi to balance the moral scorecard. Because nothing screams ‘regional credibility’ like historical fabrication. A friend of mine who is an International Lawyer observed: “Genocide denial is a crime under international law. So is genocide trivialization. What Madame Wagner did was attempt the diplomatic equivalent of arson — tossing a Molotov cocktail into a region already plagued by ethnic wounds. She didn't merely misspeak. She violated the 1948 Genocide Convention’s very spirit by equalizing the perpetrator and victim in the Genocide Against the Tutsi. This should alarm every UN official who still thinks Kinshasa is just quirky and not dangerously unhinged.” Let me be as clear as history allows. In 1994, there was a genocide in Rwanda. The victims were Tutsis. It was planned, executed, and documented. In Burundi, there was no genocide against Hutus in 1994. The President of Burundi at the time was Sylvestre Ntibantunganya — a Hutu. To claim otherwise is not merely mistaken. It’s historical vandalism. If someone stood up at the UN and said there was a genocide against Germans in World War II, they’d be escorted out and referred to a psychiatrist. Why is it different in Africa? What minister Kayikwamba said, is what happens when foreign policy is outsourced to Twitter populism and genocidaire sympathizers. It’s not about Burundi. It’s not even about Hutus. It’s about demonizing Tutsis — particularly Rwandan Tutsis — and constructing a moral equivalence between Rwanda’s liberation and genocidal violence. Some Congolese elite have bought into the delusion that if you yell ‘Rwanda!’ enough times, the world will forget about the FDLR, the corruption, the mass rape, and the stolen billions. It worked for a while. Now they’ve turned to historical hallucination. Indeed, even an amateur Googler would find that the Genocide Against the Tutsi is well-documented by the United Nations, human rights organizations, academic institutions, and post-genocide courts. It has memorials. Survivors. Convicted perpetrators. It is not a contested event — unless you happen to be Charles Onana or the DR Congo Foreign Ministry. But Therese Kayikwamba Wagner is not an average Facebook troll. She is a Harvard graduate and chief diplomat of a country with over 100 million people. And she had the gall — no, the strategic gall — to invent a genocide in the name of diplomacy. So, we must ask the question: what possessed her? Was it a psychotic break? Did the spirit of conspiracy rise up through the presidential palace like a bad stench and infect every cabinet member with an anti-Rwandan hysteria? No! This a coordinated campaign to normalize the denial of the Genocide Against the Tutsi by equalizing it with fictitious crimes. In any other country, this kind of statement would spark resignations, corrections, even parliamentary inquiries. But in Congo, the silence that followed was deafening. Not a single correction from her president. No official statement to blame Russian or Chinese hackers or malfunctioning AI. Not even the usual scapegoat performance about Rwanda hijacking the microphone via WiFi. No. What followed was a slow, suffocating silence. As if the whole DR Congolese state had taken a collective oath: when we lie, we lie as one. Ngugi’s lessons What’s worse, is Nyamitwe’s intervention which gave credence to Kayikwamba’s fabrications. He didn’t simply ask for institutional neutrality — he endorsed the kind of silence that emboldens falsehood. In his post, one can almost hear the echoes of complicity whispering from the pages of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's book Devil on the Cross, where he warned: “The Devil, who would lead us into the blindness of the heart and into the deafness of the mind, should be crucified, and care should be taken that his acolytes do not lift him down from the Cross to pursue the task of building Hell for the people on Earth.” That is precisely what these diplomats are doing: unfastening the Devil from the Cross, dressing him up in diplomatic suits, and letting him loose to turn international institutions into carnival grounds of hellish deceit. This isn’t neutrality. It’s not diplomacy. It’s not sovereignty. It’s the abdication of moral responsibility in favor of tribal solidarity and political cowardice. It also raises a troubling question: if such blatant revisionism is tolerated in global institutions like the UN and the AU, what hope is there for justice or peace in the Great Lakes region? How can reconciliation take root in soil poisoned by lies? Kayikwamba’s statement isn’t just a historical insult — it is a dog whistle to genocidaires and hate-mongers everywhere. It is an invitation to those who want to weaponize ethnicity for political ends. And Nyamitwe’s response shows how little appetite there is among some African diplomats to defend truth when it challenges fellow political elites. The Congolese government, with its bloated roster of ineffective ministers and war-mongering rhetoric, has repeatedly used ethnic scapegoating to mask its own failures. Instead of solving domestic issues — insecurity, corruption, economic stagnation — its officials fabricate international crises, accuse neighbors, and deny established facts. It’s a dangerous political strategy wrapped in the language of victimhood and sovereignty. Burundi, for its part, has long suffered under the weight of internal contradictions and political impunity. But when its diplomats choose to shield mediocrity and criminality, they betray not just their people, but the entire region. They become enablers of Hell, builders of infernos where truth and justice are consumed. In the end, the sad spectacle at the Security Council and the performance that followed online was not just about one woman’s gaffe. It was about a continent still struggling with the demons of its past and the cowards of its present. It was about the Devil on the Cross being lifted down again, not by the hands of imperialism or foreign greed — but by African hands too eager to defend each other’s lies. A regional farce in full bloom What more can be said about Congolese and Burundian politicians, those masterful architects of embarrassment, who continue to treat statecraft like an improvised comedy show performed on the world stage? When one makes a fool of themselves in New York, another trips over decency in Addis Ababa. It’s almost as though mediocrity were a regional competition, DRC and Burundi reaching the final, and the grand prize is awarded to whoever can defend idiocy with the straightest face. Kayikwamba strolled into the UN Security Council like an amateur playwright crashing a Broadway show, rebranding genocide as a punchline for Pan-African sovereignty. Not to be outdone, Nyamitwe came swinging to protect her honor — not with facts or reason, but with a sermon on neutrality that could make Pontius Pilate blush. And all the while, the institutions meant to safeguard truth — the UN, the AU — politely looked away, as if hoping this absurd play would end before intermission. What are we to make of this double-act? Is this the quality of leadership that DRC and Burundi believe the region deserves? Leaders who revise history, dodge accountability, and applaud each other for doing so? Ngugi’s Devil must be laughing from the Cross as he watches his acolytes undo the nails with government seals and diplomatic immunity. Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t that Kayikwamba said something outrageous, or that Nyamitwe defended her. It’s that nobody is surprised. The bar is now so low that truth-telling seems revolutionary. In this political farce, it’s not the liar who is called to order — it’s the honest man. Welcome to the Great Lakes political circus: come for the falsehoods, stay for the applause. Hell isn’t coming — it’s already on the guest list. Fairly speaking, when it comes to irresponsible speech, ideological confusion, and the shameless abuse of international platforms, there are countries whose politicians are often in a league of their own. For example—on one side, we have DRC's Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, Foreign Minister by title, propagandist by practice, who marched into the UN Security Council and casually threw historical truth under the bus as if it were some minor diplomatic prop. On the other, we have Burundi's Ambassador Willy Nyamitwe, who, instead of congratulating a compatriot for daringly standing up for truth and regional sanity, chose to scold him for daring to correct a white lie. Together, they form a diplomatic vaudeville act, where reality is expendable and nonsense is protected under the sacred cloak of sovereignty. Here are diplomats who cannot tell genocidal fiction from documented fact, smartly dressed ambassadors who attack decency while defending denial, and a UN that nods along politely as history is rewritten by loud and proud incompetents. Maybe, we should start handing out awards. Kayikwamba can get the “Golden Gaffe for Historical Revisionism,” and Nyamitwe, the “Diplomatic Tap-Dance Trophy for Defending the Indefensible.” It’d be amusing if it weren’t so dangerous. Because what they do isn’t just shameful—it is harmful. It fuels hate, distorts memory, and undermines every honest effort at peace in the Great Lakes region. When your politics is so perverted that genocide denial becomes a policy position, and when your diplomacy is so broken that veracity itself is treated as a threat—you are not leading nations. You are curating chaos. And it is high time someone called it out for what it is: not statesmanship, but state-sponsored stupidity. A closing word If African leaders and international institutions do not have the spine to call out genocide trivialization when it happens in their own halls, they should not be surprised when those lies turn into future violence. To the DRC: stop playing games with genocide. Your people deserve better than a government that peddles fiction to hide its failures and crimes. To Minister Kayikwamba: history will remember your words—as a disgraceful betrayal of the facts and an affront to the victims of one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century. To Fred Ngoga: thank you for standing tall when others remained seated. To Willy Nyamitwe: diplomacy without principle is just cowardice in a suit. And to the UN and AU: if you won’t defend truth in your own house, don’t be surprised when lies burn it down.

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The drama of the absurd at the United Nations