During his state visit to Ituri, in June 2021, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi deplored the high levels of corruption within the Congolese army.  He considered it a major obstacle to existing security provision and pacification efforts. Located in the east of the DRC, Ituri is one of two provinces that have been under a state of siege since 6 May 2021 with the aim of putting an end to the proliferation of armed groups. Such groups have been operating for over twenty years in the area. According to the Congolese President: “In fact, there are many shenanigans that undermine our security forces. The same mafia has developed in the army as well as in our institutions. It’s not just the army and the police. We saw it, look, in the Senate recently. It’s all this law of omerta“.  The Congolese president was referring to the Senate’s refusal to lift the senatorial immunity of a former prime minister of Joseph Kabila, Senator Matata Ponyo, suspected of embezzling several hundred million euros.

(Photo credit: Présidence RDC)

Corruption in the Congolese Army: Three Lessons for Modern Democracies

During his state visit to Ituri, in June 2021, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi deplored the high levels of corruption within the Congolese army.  He considered it a major obstacle to existing security provision and pacification efforts. Located in the east of the DRC, Ituri is one of two provinces that have been under a state of siege since 6 May 2021 with the aim of putting an end to the proliferation of armed groups. Such groups have been operating for over twenty years in the area. According to the Congolese President: “In fact, there are many shenanigans that undermine our security forces. The same mafia has developed in the army as well as in our institutions. It’s not just the army and the police. We saw it, look, in the Senate recently. It’s all this law of omerta“.  The Congolese president was referring to the Senate’s refusal to lift the senatorial immunity of a former prime minister of Joseph Kabila, Senator Matata Ponyo, suspected of embezzling several hundred million euros.

Th assumption of the Congolese president was confirmed by an inspection of the DRC’s armed forces. The army’s General Inspection was tasked, in July 2021, with carrying out a series of checks on the funds allocated to the army under the current state of siege. As a result, eight army officers and one police officer suspected of misappropriating funds allocated to military operations were arrested. According to the spokesperson of the inspection team: “After control and verification (…) it is proven that there is (…) evidence of embezzlement and misappropriation” (…) “The perpetrators of this embezzlement (…) must be detained in prison to answer for their acts“. For an elected representative of the Ituri province, this whole story was only further proof that the DRC has “a good army, but its commanders are bad. They build houses (…) and roll around in their carriages while the soldiers are deprived of everything they need in the areas of military operation. (…) How do you explain that money that should be kept in a bank, in reality is placed in a safe? Whatever a given justification; high ranking generals should be jailed”.

This incident, which is still making the headlines in the DRC, again shows how corruption is corroding the Congolese army to the point of affecting national security and territorial integrity. There is not much new about this observation, given the numerous earlier accounts of it. It is perhaps also not even the most important conclusion.

Caution is needed about the often-simplistic framing of the phenomenon of corruption, which unfortunately we have been observing again in accounts trying to explain President Tshisekedi’s renewed fight against it. It is regularly suggested that such corruption is so consubstantial and typical to the DRC, that it has no equal examples elsewhere in the world. Such claim is obscuring its real dynamics and complexities. If the aim is to understand the depth of the phenomenon of corruption in the DRC, it is necessary to deculturalise and historicise it. This not only will teach us something about the relationship between national security and liberal democracy, but we believe would also offer a much-needed corrective to international state-building efforts, which too often misinterpret the logics behind corruption and see it as a stand-alone phenomenon to be fixed by transparency measures and justice responses. And it will eventually help us to respond to the question why the Congolese President turns his attention to the army and brings the issue of corruption back to the centre of debate.

Many of the comments by academics, donors, NGOs and others on the high levels of corruption within the Congolese army are based on several misconceptions. First, they seem to imply that corruption is something more serious when it happens within the army than in other state institutions. Certainly, the consequences of such acts in the military can affect national sovereignty and security. But corruption also happens within other state institutions and can involve equally destabilising effects. These same commentaries seem to suggest that the army should be the most disciplined institution of all in a democracy yet the case of the DRC shows us that the army’s conduct is not that different from other state institutions. Finally, the idea that in a democracy, an army can be good but its leaders cannot, does not make much sense either. The two cannot be separated, especially not in a very hierarchical institution where orders are not supposed to be discussed. All these elements tell us that the army, like other state institutions, cannot and should not be distinguished from the larger institutional context it is part of and that its conduct is largely inspired by the same structural logics of governance that guide other state institutions.

Secondly, the responses to the problem of corruption in the Congolese army raise the issue of how peacebuilding and statebuilding theories and policies look at corruption as an evil instead of seeing it as a symptom of larger dynamics. It is often proposed to fight corruption through justice measures, yet this view ignores the structural factors that make it possible and that help to explain the high levels of corruption, even within the justice system itself. The rich literature on patrimonialism, clientelism and more recently the political marketplace has hinted at corruption as a guiding logic of politics and state-society relations. The Congolese case indeed teaches us that practices of corruption in several public sectors end up creating a system supported by actions and logics that tend to become generalised and continuously adapted. The often proposed and limited technical responses as part of statebuilding support do not suffice to break this cycle. Even more, an essentialisation of corruption as something natural or cultural is counterproductive because it prevents us from understanding the historicity in which it is rooted, the structure in which it is integrated, the daily strategies that maintain it and the vicious circle that perpetuates it.

Thirdly, the Congolese case teaches us a lot about the blurred nature of the relationship between national security services and transparency, which is a crucial component of any democratic state. As all his predecessors, at the start of his presidency, Tshisekedi has been trying to boost his control over the army with the dual aim of strengthening his legitimacy as head of the armed forces and of consolidating his power. To this end, he not only introduced several army reforms but also mobilised the army for a new security policy in the east of the country, which enhanced a combined approach of maintaining military operations to fragilise armed groups, while supporting demobilisation efforts. One reason why Tshisekedi’s predecessors succeeded in controlling the security services was the fact that these services tend to escape democratic control. This creates the necessary space for informal networks within the army to operate, under the auspices of the President. Such lack of democratic control also allowed Tshisekedi’s predecessors, usually under the banner of security or national interest, to abuse power and use it for their own ends. This is not unique to the DRC, as numerous examples have shown elsewhere. Yet, what matters in the case of the DRC is that it also comes at a price.

Whenever the President manages to consolidate control over the army, he must turn away from existing issues (such as corruption) affecting its functioning, and instead depend on informal networks of support. Only when things go wrong (in this case a further worsening of security conditions in parts of the east despite a strong military presence), or when control over the security forces is no longer guaranteed (because informal networks increasingly escape control from the political center), a discourse of the army being a corrupt institution that needs to be disciplined, takes over. Such discourse is usually followed by the arrest of some of the army generals or by a reshuffling of its command structure, all being part of attempts to regain control. In other words, the fight against corruption does not serve the larger ambition to improve the army’s conduct per se but is often a strategy to safeguard power when it risks being fragilised by what is happening on the ground. Today, it are the rising levels of insecurity in parts of Ituri and around Beni and a lack of response from a totally ineffective and corrupt national army, that are provoking renewed popular protest and risk fragilizing the President’s position.

This is what explains President Tshisekedi’s growing frustration with his army’s conduct. Being himself a former opponent of Kabila’s regime, it is certainly not today that President Tshisekedi magically became aware of the problems of corruption within the Congolese army. Its historical continuity, which has contributed to the end of several regimes in the DRC since independence, is well known to most Congolese. Beyond his rhetoric, his commitment against corruption seems to indicate a political momentum and clear-cut strategy. At the same time as he continues to invest in extending his regime’s control over state institutions, corruption within the army is taking him further and further away from his most prominent campaign promise of 2018, which most likely will also be repeated in 2023: that of curbing the insecurity that has been undermining the east of the DRC for more than twenty years already and providing a more secure environment to its inhabitants.

Prof Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka is an assistant professor at the University of Mons and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Ghent. He is a lawyer and political scientist and works on the African Great Lakes Region on the access to natural resources, governance and conflict and the afro-critical perspective in social sciences. Bisoka has taught in recent years at the Rift Valley Institute and several other universities in the DRC, Burundi, and Belgium. Before moving into research, he worked for ten years on development cooperation in Africa and Europe and continues to collaborate in this sector on issues of development, governance, and security.

Prof Koen Vlassenroot is professor in political and social sciences at the Department for Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University (Belgium), where he leads the Conflict Research Group. He is an expert in the analysis of conflict in Central Africa, with specific attention to governance, armed groups, access to justice and security, and the management of natural resources.