In February 2025, the Democratic Republic of Congo's Prime Minister Judith Suminwa stood before the UN Human Rights Council with a grim announcement: over 7,000 people had been killed in eastern DRC since January. In Goma alone, at least 773 people died in a single week as Rwanda-backed M23 rebels captured the city. More than 2,500 corpses were buried without identification.

Yet beyond specialist Africa desks and humanitarian circles, the news barely registered. No viral hashtags. No emergency UN sessions broadcast live. No front-page outrage in Western capitals.

This is the paradox of the DRC war: since 1998, an estimated 5.4 million people have died, making it arguably the world's deadliest crisis since World War II. But unlike Ukraine or Palestine, the DRC conflict remains what aid workers call "the forgotten war"—a generational catastrophe hidden in plain sight.

The War That Won't End

In the hills above Goma, the sound of artillery fire has become as familiar as morning birdsong. Residents have learned to distinguish between incoming and outgoing rounds, to time their errands between bombardments, to sleep through distant explosions that no longer wake them. This is what normalization of conflict looks like—a generation that knows war not as an aberration but as a permanent condition of existence.

Origins: From Mobutu to the Kabilas

The current conflict's roots lie in the chaotic aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, when Hutu militias—many responsible for mass atrocities—fled across the border into eastern DRC, then called Zaire. They brought their weapons, their organization, and their ethnic grievances into a country already hollowed out by decades of kleptocratic rule under Mobutu Sese Seko.

Mobutu had governed Zaire for 32 years, transforming one of Africa's richest countries into a personal bank account. Roads crumbled. Hospitals operated without medicine. Teachers went unpaid for months. The state existed primarily as an extraction mechanism—for Mobutu, for his inner circle, for the Western powers who backed him as a Cold War ally.

In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda saw an opportunity. They backed Laurent Kabila, a longtime rebel, to overthrow Mobutu. Kabila marched across the country, facing little resistance from an army that hadn't been paid in years. Mobutu fled to Morocco, where he died in exile. Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But liberation quickly soured. On August 2, 1998—barely a year into his presidency—the Second Congo War erupted when Kabila ordered Rwandan forces out of the country. He had turned on his former backers. What followed was Africa's "World War," involving nine nations and approximately 25 armed groups fighting over territory, resources, and old ethnic scores.

In January 2001, Kabila was assassinated by his own bodyguard in his presidential palace. His son Joseph, then just 29 years old and with minimal political experience, was installed as president within days. The war officially ended in 2003 with peace agreements and promises of elections. But in eastern Congo, the violence never stopped—it merely fragmented into dozens of armed groups, each controlling territory, extracting resources, and perpetuating the cycle.

Joseph Kabila ruled until 2018, when Félix Tshisekedi was elected in a contested vote that many observers believe was negotiated rather than won. The Kabila dynasty may have ended, but the war machinery it presided over continues to function—funded by minerals, sustained by ethnic divisions, and largely ignored by the international community.

The Resource Curse: Cobalt, Blood, and Batteries

Deep beneath the red earth of southeastern Congo lies the answer to the modern world's energy transition—and the source of its perpetual misery. Cobalt, the silvery-blue metal that makes lithium-ion batteries possible, is dug from these mines by men, women, and children using bare hands, pickaxes, and improvised tools that would have been familiar to miners a century ago.

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on a geological goldmine. The country supplies more than 70 percent of the world's cobalt, essential for the batteries in electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones. It holds vast reserves of copper, gold, diamonds, and coltan—the mineral cocktail that powers the global technology revolution.

Yet walk through Kolwezi, the heart of Congo's cobalt belt, and the paradox becomes visceral. Children as young as six descend into hand-dug pits, some 20 meters deep, to extract ore that will eventually power luxury electric vehicles in California and Berlin. They earn less than two dollars a day. Many suffer from respiratory diseases. Some die in tunnel collapses that barely make local news, let alone international headlines.

Despite this dominance in a critical mineral, the DRC is the world's ninth-poorest country. Nearly three-quarters of its population lives under $2.15 per day. The State Department estimates DRC's mineral wealth at $24 trillion—a figure almost impossible to comprehend in a country where 25.6 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, face acute food insecurity.

This arrangement is not accidental. It is the product of a global supply chain designed to minimize cost and maximize profit, regardless of human or environmental consequences. Chinese companies control about 85 percent of global cobalt refining capacity, despite the DRC providing the vast majority of raw material. The World Bank's market analysis notes that "eight of the 14 largest cobalt miners in DRC are now Chinese-owned, accounting for almost half of the country's output."

The pattern repeats across commodities: Africa produces raw materials, other regions capture the value-added processes that generate employment, technology transfer, and wealth. Coffee grown in the highlands is roasted in Europe. Cocoa harvested in West Africa becomes chocolate in Switzerland. Crude oil pumped from Nigerian wells is refined in Houston.

This is the resource curse in its purest form—geological abundance creating economic poverty. The minerals that should fund schools, hospitals, and infrastructure instead finance armed groups, corrupt officials, and foreign corporations. According to UN experts, mining plays a substantial role in financing armed groups across eastern Congo. The market value for minerals controlled by these groups likely exceeds $1 billion annually—money that should build a nation instead fuels its destruction.

Africa's Fragmentation: A Continental Pattern

The DRC's chaos is not an isolated tragedy. It is emblematic of broader patterns across post-independence Africa—patterns of governance failure, resource mismanagement, and cycles of violence that repeat with grim regularity. To understand the DRC is to understand how institutional collapse can transform resource wealth into generational poverty.

The story is told differently in each country, but the underlying structure remains eerily similar: colonial powers extract resources and install compliant local elites; independence brings hope but little structural change; new leaders replicate old extraction patterns; economic mismanagement triggers crisis; crisis enables further extraction. The cycle continues.

Zimbabwe: When the Breadbasket Became a Basket Case

In 1980, Zimbabwe emerged from white minority rule as one of Africa's most promising nations. It had fertile land, a diversified economy, educated population, and a leader—Robert Mugabe—who spoke eloquently about reconciliation and development. Twenty years later, it had become a cautionary tale of how quickly prosperity can collapse when governance fails.

In the late 1990s, Mugabe's government instituted land reforms to evict white landowners and redistribute farms to Black Zimbabweans. The intent—correcting colonial land imbalances—was defensible. The execution was catastrophic. War veterans and political allies seized productive commercial farms, often with violence. Many new farmers had no experience in large-scale agriculture. Equipment was looted. Irrigation systems fell into disrepair. Farms that once fed the region became subsistence plots or abandoned bush.

The consequences cascaded through the economy. From 1999 to 2009, food output fell 45%, manufacturing output fell 29% in 2005 alone. Zimbabwe, once called the "breadbasket of Africa," began importing maize. Foreign investment fled. Unemployment soared.

Then came the hyperinflation—one of the most extreme economic collapses in recorded history. By November 2008, inflation reached 79.6 billion percent month-on-month and 89.7 sextillion percent year-on-year. The Reserve Bank printed Z$100 trillion bills that couldn't buy a loaf of bread. Prices doubled every 24 hours. People carried money in wheelbarrows. Savings evaporated overnight. The economy dollarized by necessity, abandoning the worthless Zimbabwean currency.

By 2017, nearly a third of Zimbabwe's population was food-insecure. Unemployment rose to 80%. The country that once exported food now depends on aid. Mugabe was finally ousted in 2017, but the economic devastation outlived him.

Uganda: The Cost of Expulsion

On August 4, 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin appeared on radio to announce that God had visited him in a dream. The divine message: Uganda's Asian population—approximately 80,000 people whose families had lived in the country for generations—had 90 days to leave.

Uganda's Asian community, though representing only a small minority, was responsible for around 90% of Uganda's tax revenues. They owned shops, ran businesses, operated banks, and managed much of the formal economy. They were also visible, successful, and—in Amin's calculation—politically vulnerable scapegoats for Uganda's economic problems.

The expulsion was brutal and swift. Families were given weeks to sell businesses built over generations. Assets were seized. Properties were looted. Many fled with little more than suitcases. Britain, Canada, and India absorbed most of the refugees. Uganda confiscated what remained.

The economic devastation was immediate and severe. GDP fell by 5% between 1972 and 1975. Manufacturing output tumbled from 740 million to 254 million Ugandan shillings by 1979. Shops closed. Supply chains collapsed. The businesses handed to Amin's supporters—army officers, party loyalists, political allies—were run into the ground within months. The real value of salaries plummeted by 90% in less than a decade.

The biggest losers from the expulsion were not the Asians—many of whom rebuilt successful lives abroad—but the Ugandan people who lost jobs, services, and economic opportunity. In 1986, President Yoweri Museveni, who had overthrown Amin's successors, invited the expelled Asians to return. Many did, bringing capital and expertise. It was an implicit admission: the expulsion had been an act of economic self-harm disguised as nationalism.

South Africa: Inequality's Long Shadow

In 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Nelson Mandela became president. The world celebrated the "rainbow nation" as proof that peaceful transition from apartheid was possible. Three decades later, South Africa remains the most economically unequal country in the world—a damning indictment of how political liberation without economic transformation can leave structural injustice intact.

According to the World Inequality Lab, there is no evidence that wealth inequality has decreased since 1994. The numbers are staggering: the richest 10% of the population own more than 85% of household wealth. Over half the population have more liabilities than assets—they owe more than they own. Just 3,500 adults own more wealth than the poorest 32 million people.

Walk through Johannesburg and the inequality is visible in the landscape. Sandton, the financial district, boasts Africa's tallest buildings, luxury shopping centers, and neighborhoods with private security that rivals military installations. Twenty kilometers away, townships lack basic services—running water, electricity, sanitation. The spatial segregation of apartheid persists in economic form.

The African National Congress government has faced criticism for failing to transform the economy fundamentally. Land remains concentrated in white hands. The financial sector is dominated by the same institutions that thrived under apartheid. Black Economic Empowerment policies enriched a small Black elite while leaving structural inequality untouched.

Unemployment stands at approximately 30%, higher among youth. Service delivery protests—communities demanding water, electricity, housing—occur weekly. The promise of 1994 has given way to widespread disillusionment. Political liberation proved insufficient to dismantle economic apartheid.

The Generational Question: Will Africa's Youth Inherit Ashes?

In the displacement camps surrounding Goma, children play among tents that have become permanent homes. They attend makeshift schools where lessons are interrupted by gunfire. They know the names of armed groups the way children elsewhere know sports teams. They speak casually about relatives killed, villages burned, families scattered. This is not trauma—at least not in the clinical sense of an abnormal response to abnormal events. This is normality for a generation born into war.

Africa is the world's youngest continent. The median age is 19 years old. By 2050, one in four people globally will be African. This demographic reality is often presented as a "youth dividend"—a massive pool of potential workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators who could drive economic growth. But demographics are not destiny. A young population can be an asset or a powder keg, depending on whether those young people have education, employment, and hope.

The DRC alone has a population of 112 million, with a median age below 18. Before the latest escalation, 21 million people already needed humanitarian aid—the highest figure globally. Now, nearly 780,000 people were forced to flee their homes between November 2024 and January 2025 alone. Since January 1, 2025, more than 100,000 refugees have crossed into neighboring countries, many of them children who will grow up in exile.

This generation is being raised in displacement camps, educated in trauma, fluent in survival. They have never known peace. They have no memory of functioning institutions, reliable electricity, or schools with roofs. When they hear about "development" and "progress," these are abstract concepts divorced from lived experience.

The question facing Africa is not just economic—it is existential. Will this generation inherit systems that provide opportunity, or will they inherit the same extractive arrangements that kept their parents poor? Will they have countries with functioning institutions, or fragmented territories controlled by armed groups? Will they be citizens with rights, or subjects of whoever controls the guns and minerals?

The answers will determine not just Africa's future but the world's. Climate change will hit Africa hardest. Migration pressures will increase. Political instability will spread. The international community can continue treating African poverty as a natural condition requiring charity, or it can confront the structural arrangements that create and maintain that poverty.

But time is running out. Every year of conflict creates another cohort of children who know only violence. Every displaced family becomes another statistic. Every mine that enriches foreign corporations while impoverishing local communities entrenches the system further. The generation born into this war deserves better than inheriting ashes.

Conclusion: Wealth Below, Poverty Above

There is a particular cruelty to the DRC's predicament. Stand in Kolwezi and look down into the cobalt mines, then look up at the children hawking water and bread on dusty streets. The contradiction is almost unbearable: unimaginable wealth beneath, grinding poverty above.

The paradox of the DRC—and much of Africa—is that the continent holds wealth beyond imagination below ground while poverty persists above it. The State Department estimates the DRC's mineral wealth at $24 trillion. To put that in perspective: that's roughly equivalent to the GDP of the United States and China combined. Yet by the end of 2024, 25.6 million people—nearly a quarter of the population—were in acute food insecurity.

This is not an accident of geography or culture. It is not the result of natural disasters or bad luck. It is structural, systematic, and engineered. Colonial powers drew borders to extract resources, not build nations. Independence leaders often perpetuated the same extractive relationships, enriching themselves while leaving institutions to rot. Foreign powers—whether Cold War superpowers or modern-day China—continue the pattern: invest in mines, not schools; arm governments, not reform them; extract wealth, not build capacity.

The DRC war is deadlier than Ukraine and Palestine combined, yet it generates a fraction of the international attention or aid. This is not just media bias—it is a reflection of how little the international system values African lives. A European city under siege mobilizes global response. An African city falls to rebels and the world checks commodity prices.

The violence in eastern Congo is not "tribal conflict" or "ancient hatreds"—the lazy explanations often deployed to avoid confronting structural causes. It is a resource war funded by global demand for minerals, enabled by weak governance, and perpetuated by an international system that profits from the chaos.

Until governance changes—until resource wealth flows to citizens rather than warlords, until regional bodies enforce their own rules, until a generation of leaders emerges who build institutions instead of ethnic patronage networks—the next generation will indeed inherit ashes.

The international community faces a choice. It can continue treating African poverty as a development problem requiring aid and technical assistance. Or it can confront the extraction mechanisms that create African poverty while enriching others—the transfer pricing, the commodity markets designed offshore, the investment treaties that prioritize corporate profits over domestic policy, the aid architecture that reinforces dependency.

The former approach is politically safe and morally comfortable. The latter requires acknowledging complicity in systems that maintain African poverty as a business model.

Seven thousand dead in two months. Five million displaced. A war the world forgot is still being fought. And in the mines of Kolwezi, children still dig cobalt with their bare hands.

The next time you charge your phone, remember: the cobalt that powers it was likely dug by a child in a country that has known nothing but war for 27 years.

That is not a tragedy. It is a choice—made by markets, governments, and international institutions that prioritize profit over people. And choices can be unmade.

All data verified through primary sources: UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Human Rights Watch, International Rescue Committee, World Bank, World Inequality Lab, Al Jazeera, Reuters, AFP, Democratic Republic of Congo Government, Council on Foreign Relations, Wilson Center.

Vayu Putra · Investigative Correspondent
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