I wrote last month that US President Donald Trump’s neo-imperialism could significantly destabilise the African continent – especially where colonial boundaries sit uncomfortably on language lines and jar with the continent’s precolonial kingdoms. I suggested that militarily stronger States like Rwanda might seize the opportunity to extend their borders – because they can.

Barely into Week 5 of Trump’s second term, with the world distracted by his threats to Greenland, Canada and Mexico, his demands for 50% of Ukraine’s mineral rights, and “Ukraine peace talks” in a bilateral with Russia’s Vladmir Putin, Rwanda-backed M23 rebels marched into and took control of the strategic provincial capital of Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) mineral-rich South Kivu province.

All eyes have been off the ball. Africa’s leaders were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, behind closed doors, voting in a new African Union (AU) leadership team. The countries that defined ‘the West’ for 80 years were rushing about as the US transmogrified into an unreliable partner, into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s rogue member. That’s when M23 launched its final push. Djibouti’s candidate for AU Commission chair, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, emerged from the AU’s electoral conclave to the news that Bukavu had fallen.

Unfettered by international restraint by either the AU or the crumbling Western alliance, or by the hopelessly inadequate Southern African Development Community (SADC) Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (SAMIDRC), of which the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is a member, the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) has emerged as the most powerful, well-equipped military on the continent – giving rise to another realignment in Africa’s power dynamics. Rwanda has emerged as the regional military power – at the expense of South Africa, which held the mantle for decades.

In taking Bukavu, M23 wholly ignores the pleas of February’s joint sitting of the East African Community (EAC) and SADC. SADC-EAC called for the withdrawal of “uninvited foreign armed forces from the territory of the DRC”. The “uninvited” force is a reference to the RDF, which is accused of training, arming and fighting alongside the M23. In late January, RDF-hardened M23 fighters outmanoeuvred, overpowered and outgunned the South Africa-led SAMIDRC to take Goma, North Kivu province’s capital – during which conflict 14 SANDF soldiers were killed. For South Africa, it was a humiliation. Not for the first time, it has created a fissure between South Africa and Rwanda.

Local analysts decry the fact that the humiliation was avoidable. The SANDF had a mandate to deploy 5 000 troops but deployed only 1 300. The RDF augmented the M23 forces with as many as 4 000 troops.

How did the SANDF not know this? Analysts particularly bemoan the intelligence failure. Why was the SANDF so unprepared when it was known locally for over a year that M23 has access to highly sophisticated weaponry like GPS-guided mortars and anti-aircraft weaponry? South Africa’s budget cuts meant that the SANDF’s equipment was in a parlous state and its troops were left to face unfamiliar jungle terrain with outdated equipment unsuitable for the terrain. South African air support was nonexistent and troops ran out of ammunition. How and why? The questions hang.

Other questions remain. How far will the Rwanda-backed group go? What will be the consequences? I witnessed first-hand in 1998 when Rwanda previously controlled Bukavu. Then, as now, Rwandans presented a highly disciplined, well-trained force that crossed into the then Zaire’s eastern-most borders to hunt down the Interahamwe – those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide who took refuge in the Kivus. Then, Rwanda’s wellington-booted troops did not stop at Bukavu but marched on to Lubumbashi, Kasai and then Kinshasa, where they ousted the ailing dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. Then, as now, they scattered the DRC’s hopelessly ineffectual national army before them and in their wake.

The new age of “might is right” that Trump, Putin, Rwanda and M23 appear to have unleashed has seen Rwanda’s neighbours join in. The chief of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and President Yoweri Museveni’s son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has said that Uganda will attack the town of Bunia, in Ituri province, north of the Kivus, “unless all forces there surrender their arms within 24 hours”. Meanwhile, the increasingly exhausted UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, has warned that fighting in South Kivu threatens to drag the region into a fresh war.

Angola’s last-minute intervention and subsequent role in 1998 prevented Rwanda from controlling the then DRC transition. This time, Rwanda may curb its ambitions to create a proxy buffer administration to its benefit. We may soon see Rwanda become a leading exporter of critical minerals – just as post-1998 Rwanda became a significant gold exporter.

As for analysts, we will be left with the question that has aged us all – whether these interventions will lead to the breakup of the DRC as we know it. Surely, this unwieldy carve-up of its once ‘owner’, Belgium’s King Leopold II (1865–1909), cannot survive this latest onslaught, the thinking goes. Its lack of internal functioning infrastructure continues to militate against internal cohesion.

Despite a new Constitution, the first multiparty elections in 40 years in 2006, then in 2011 and 2018 and an attempt at coherence – the DRC is still not really the sum of all its parts. Surely, the story goes, it should be split into three independent nations. Then, as now, the Congolese disagree. I remember asking the question of anyone and everyone I met in the Kivus, including people of historical Rwandan heritage. “We are Congolese” was the near universal answer.