Why Trump's DRC peace deal raises questions about African agency

WHY should it take the likes of Donald Trump to conclude a deal between Kigali and Kinshasa? The spectacle of a US president showing off a peace agreement in Washington while bombs continue to fall in Eastern Congo is not merely an awkward irony, it is a symptom of seriously deep fractures in African agency, global political economy and the architecture of peace itself.

- SESONA MDLOKOVANA

The Washington peace performance amid ongoing war

At the beginning of December of 2025, President Trump hosted Paul Kagame and Félix Tshisekedi for what the White House labelled as a historic accord, regardless of the fighting continuing in towns held by the M23 rebel group, and civilians reported bombed homes and rising death tolls. The signing, staged at a White House-branded peace institute, happened to be accompanied by an explicit economic hook: closer access of the US to DRC’s strategic minerals, more especially cobalt and copper, essential ingredients for batteries and the green transition. The timing of it, the optics and the substance of the deal deserve close scrutiny.

Institutional vacuums and the failure of regional mechanisms

First, there is what we can perceive as the institutional vacuum. For decades, African regional bodies and multilateral missions have been carrying the heavy burden of responding to crises on the continent. Yet the DRC experience has shown how poorly resourced, politicised or undermined these mechanisms can sometimes be.

MONUSCO, the UN mission in the DRC, was repeatedly under scrutiny for failing to protect civilians and for exhibiting the limits of conventional peacekeeping against fragmented, locally embedded armed groups; its failures have fed public disillusionment and a dire hunger for outside patrons who claim swift solutions.

External actors step in not necessarily because Africans have lack of talent or courage, but because regional and international institutions are structurally weakened, underfunded, or suffer from paralysis when geopolitics intrudes.