Antoine Roger Lokongo

The logic of foreign powers’ competing interests in Africa denotes a colonial mentality still prevailing toward Africa! What Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit to Africa uncovered is a clear plan that Japan and Western powers have: To “contain” China’s influence in Africa.

By the end of 2013, ‘the White man’s burden’ was proving too heavy to bear for France.

The Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), as the Congolese armed forces are known in French, and the Rwanda- and Uganda-backed M23 rebel movement made up of Rwandan and Ugandan demobilized soldiers, other Tutsi and Hutu insurgents and some Congolese, had not clashed since

The above headline of mine is surprisingly very civilized compared to ‘Umurabyo’ newspaper’s independent journalist Saidati Mukakibibi’s. She is now languishing in jail in Rwanda for having quite rightly compared President Paul Kagame with the Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler.

The euphoria that greeted President Barack Obama’s second holiday tour of Africa, especially by African youth, was as high as when the first Black America President, in fact, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, rose to power.

What was inconceivable just a few days ago is now becoming a reality.

Is the coup d’état which ushered President Francois Bozizé of Central African Republic’s overthrow yet another Libya or Ivory Coast? All signs point to a ‘Yes’ answer to this question.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF?

With 8 million people killed, thousands of women raped, strategic minerals looted, land occupied by an implanted population from Rwanda and hundreds of people forced out of their land into internally displaced people’s camps or fleeing to neighbouring countries in the last 15 years - as a result

Despite the fact that Pan-Africanism is considered by France as a “threat to Western interests in Africa”, as a French defense report indicated in October 2012, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is Patrice Lumumba’s land of birth, will always remain a “hotbed” of Pan-Africanism whose

Patrice Lumumba was Congolese national hero of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He united all the ethnic groups and snatched independence from Belgium and became Congo’s first democratically elected leader.