Congolese government is to blame for Ebola crisis

The Ebola outbreak that erupted in the eastern Congo should be a wake-up call for the State Department. Partisans might lay blame on the Trump administration’s dissolution of the U.S. Agency for International Development, but this navel-gazing is arrogant. Not everything revolves around the United States. Ebola outbreaks occur periodically, and USAID has always been poorly equipped to handle them. In 2014, it was the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and not USAID that built field hospitals and took charge of the counter-Ebola fight in Liberia.

Regional officials say the reason the eastern Congo outbreak is so severe is that Congolese officials neither recognized it nor sought to counter it initially. Corruption and lack of capacity carry a high cost.

This is a bad look for a country on which President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have gambled so much. The Congo has an estimated $24 trillion in rare earths and other commodities, if it could get its act together, it could be to the 21st-century economy what Saudi Arabia and its vast oil reserves were to the 20th-century economy. With Trump prioritizing deals over democracy, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi hints at constitutional revisions to allow himself a third term. Tshisekedi wants to remain in office to be the deal-maker, especially as Trump is less likely to ask questions about where the money goes than his predecessors.

Trump’s tilt toward Tshisekedi and his transactional desire to win deals have turned Central African diplomacy on its head. Rubio has repeatedly sanctioned Rwanda, accusing it of fueling insurgency in the Congo and looting its resources.

This was always lazy. The M23 insurgency erupted to force Kinshasa to abide by earlier agreements and make good on reforms. For all the talk of M23 being a Rwandan movement, the Congolese government has not been able to produce a single Rwandan soldier dead or alive. In 2024, I spent time in M23 territory after having visited areas under the Congolese government, and the juxtaposition was sharp: In M23 areas, there was security. People drove cars and motorcycles through rural areas without escorts or weapons. There was a surplus of food because M23 neither forcibly conscripted farmers nor taxed them into oblivion. Just a mile away across the front line, Congolese people scrambled to feed themselves.

The notion that Rwanda or Uganda loots the eastern Congo is equally lazy. As a businessman, Trump should understand that traders go where their expenses are least. Over glasses of banana beer, traders explained that it was far cheaper to trade with Rwanda and Uganda because the internal checkpoints, embezzlement, and lack of infrastructure in the Congo proper made it impossible to work productively with Kinshasa.

Order and competence matter. Today, as Ebola claims more than 1,000 lives in the eastern Congo, with fear that the epidemic could grow even more, Rwanda has exactly zero cases. This should not surprise. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rwanda was perhaps Africa’s safest country because it took a no-nonsense approach to public health.

Rwanda is tiny, roughly the size of Maryland. The Congo, meanwhile, is equivalent in size to the entire U.S. east of the Mississippi River. Size is not important, nor does mineral wealth matter when governments lack the capacity to develop and export it. While Rwanda is equivalent to Singapore in terms of making a booming economy out of almost nothing, the Congo is akin to Afghanistan.

For the State Department to sanction Rwanda repeatedly, then, is bizarre. It punishes success and embraces the demonstrably incompetent.

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Nor is the Ebola crisis the only time a medical or climate disaster showed competence versus incompetence unequivocally. While drought struck the Horn of Africa in 2011, Somalia fell into famine and Somaliland weathered the crisis with few deaths. The only difference between the two was government capacity. This did not stop the Obama administration from doubling down on Mogadishu’s corrupt leaders.

Resources matter, but competence matters more in allies. Rather than allow the State Department bureaucracy to lead, Rubio should step back and consider what Washington can learn from Africa’s Ebola response.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.