President Félix Tshisekedi has made a stunning admission about the state of the Congolese armed forces, revealing that the military he inherited was deeply infiltrated by enemy agents, poorly equipped, and in a state of near-total collapse when the conflict in eastern Congo escalated.
Speaking publicly, Tshisekedi did not mince his words. “Our soldiers were truly in the state of vagrants,” he said, reiterating a characterization he had made months earlier that had drawn sharp criticism from some quarters.
He stood by the remark, insisting it was an accurate reflection of what he had found.
The president painted a stark picture of an army in disarray. Soldiers summoned to the front, he said, were unable to deploy without bringing their civilian families along — wives, children, sometimes minors — because leaving them behind meant losing their housing in military camps.
Many fighters lacked uniforms, weapons, or ammunition. “How do you call that?” he asked. “Can you imagine waging a war in such a situation? I don’t think so.”
But the most striking revelation was what Tshisekedi described as a deliberate and long-running infiltration of the armed forces by enemy agents.
He said that through successive mixing and integration processes carried out in the name of peace agreements over the years, hostile elements had embedded themselves deep within the military structure, working quietly to destroy it from within.
“There were Machiavellian plans aimed at seizing part of our national territory,” he said. “That is the truth.”
Despite these revelations, the president sought to project confidence, arguing that his government had managed to rebuild and strengthen the military even as fighting raged.
“We no longer have an army of capitulators,” he declared, acknowledging that much work remains but insisting that battles have now been won.
Tshisekedi also made a vigorous defense of diplomacy as a legitimate instrument of war, urging his audience not to underestimate its power.
“Diplomacy is also a weapon,” he said. “You must not fear it.”
The remarks offer the most candid assessment yet from the Congolese head of state about the structural failures that allowed armed groups to make sweeping territorial gains in North Kivu, including the fall of Goma and Bukavu to the AFC/M23 alliance earlier last year.