Nkrumah, Congo and the unfinished question of what political power must do for the people.
I was supposed to conclude my reflections on Nyansa Futures this weekend. Part III will have to wait another week. The situation in Congo demands attention, and what I experienced in Cape Coast this week sharpened my analysis of the moment confronting my country.
The timing carries particular significance. Monday, September 21, Nkrumah’s birthday, is observed in Ghana as Founder’s Day. For those of us in the Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG), that designation has historical meaning. The Ghana that emerged at independence was shaped through the struggle led by Nkrumah and brought together territories that had previously held different constitutional statuses. There is much more to say about that history and Nkrumah’s role in founding modern Ghana, which I will return to another time.
In the days leading to Founder’s Day, Cde Kwesi Pratt Jnr., General Secretary of SMG, delivered the 15th Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures at the University of Cape Coast. Members of SMG travelled from Accra for the two-day occasion, which concluded with the University conferring an honorary Doctor of Letters on our General Secretary. We went to honour a comrade who has devoted his life to Ghana, Africa and humanity, and to hear him tell the true history of Nkrumah and examine its relevance to our struggles today. I encourage you to watch the livestream of the lectures (Day 1 and Day 2); Cde Kwesi’s reflections on constitutionalism, development and Pan-Africanism provide important context for what I am exploring here.
On the road from Accra to Cape Coast, a comrade travelling with us asked me about Congo. He had seen reports of demonstrations against President Félix Tshisekedi and the proposed constitutional changes that opponents fear could open a path toward a third term. I explained what was happening and mentioned the Ebola outbreak. When I told him over three thousand Congolese had died of Ebola, he was shocked and did not understand why there was little attention to the outbreak. By the time we arrived in Cape Coast, I was carrying that conversation with me. Then Cde Kwesi began talking about Nkrumah, political power and what Africans were supposed to do once they acquired it.
Seek Ye First the Political Kingdom
“Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all other things shall be added unto you.”
It remains one of Nkrumah’s most powerful political formulations. Cde Kwesi returned those words to their material foundation. A colonised people required sovereign political power because control of the state would give them the capacity to reorganise production, education, healthcare and infrastructure and determine their relationship with the world.
His discussion of scientific socialism was equally important. Political strategy must grow from the concrete realities confronting the people. Nkrumah’s Positive Action organised workers, farmers, market women, students, youth and trade unionists. Political education, strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation developed the organised power of the masses and made colonial administration increasingly untenable. Nkrumah’s use of disciplined non-violence in the Gold Coast reflected those conditions. His support for armed liberation movements elsewhere on the continent responded to different conditions.
The political kingdom had a purpose: the transformation of African society.
I thought about Congo.
For thirty years, ordinary Congolese have lived through one of the great human catastrophes of our time. The conflicts that began in 1996 have been associated with approximately six million deaths, although mortality estimates vary. The International Rescue Committee’s major mortality studies estimated 5.4 million excess deaths between 1998 and 2007 alone. I have emphasized for years that we may never know the full number of Congolese who have died. The conflict did not end in 2007, and no comparable mortality study has since been conducted to establish the toll over the nearly two decades that followed. The real number has certainly moved far beyond six million.
I have long understood the Congo crisis through the forces acting against the Congolese people. Rwanda and Uganda have repeatedly intervened militarily and supported armed forces on Congolese territory. Armed groups and proxy forces terrorise communities and control territory and trade routes. Multinational corporations and financial interests profit from Congo’s resources, while Western powers provide the diplomatic, military and economic architecture sustaining this extraction. The World Bank, IMF and international humanitarian industry also shape Congo’s economic choices and the narratives through which its crisis is understood, often within systems financed by states, foundations and corporations with interests in Congo’s extractive economy.
And there is the Congolese ruling class and the state it controls.
This force must be named because solidarity with Congo cannot mean solidarity with the Congolese government. Our solidarity is with the Congolese people. In the context of class struggle, the state does not stand with the oppressed simply because it carries the Congolese flag. Congolese political elites have accumulated wealth and power within this extractive system and collaborated with foreign interests while ordinary Congolese bear its consequences.
Congolese formally acquired the political kingdom on June 30, 1960. Patrice Lumumba understood independence as an opportunity to place Congo’s sovereignty and wealth in the service of its people. His assassination revealed the forces prepared to prevent that project.
When the Opposition Inherits the State
The constitutional question carries a particular historical irony because of the political tradition Félix Tshisekedi inherited.
His father, Étienne Tshisekedi, was one of the most important constitutional figures in post-independence Congo. The first Congolese to earn a doctorate in law, he participated in drafting the 1967 Constitution and served within Mobutu’s government. His eventual rupture with Mobutu grew as presidential power became increasingly concentrated. In 1980, he joined twelve other parliamentarians in an open letter denouncing Mobutu’s authoritarian rule. Two years later, he helped found the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS – Union for Democracy and Social Progress in English) and spent much of his remaining political life confronting concentrated presidential power.
That struggle continued under Joseph Kabila. The UDPS opposed Kabila remaining in office after his second constitutional term. In 2016, the United Nations documented the UDPS position that the political process had to prevent Kabila from obtaining a third term. Congolese people marched, organised, faced repression and died defending constitutional limits on presidential power.
Félix Tshisekedi inherited this political history. Today, he controls the state his movement once confronted. His government is pursuing constitutional reform while Tshisekedi has left open the possibility of remaining beyond his current term if the population supports him. Police dispersed demonstrations against the proposed changes this week.
The irony deserves attention. Mobutu progressively concentrated political authority around the presidency. Étienne Tshisekedi spent decades confronting what that concentration produced. His son now risks travelling a road his father eventually fought.
Cde Kwesi made an observation at Cape Coast that speaks directly to this moment: “No Constitution enforces itself.” Constitutionalism depends upon institutions, political culture and organised social forces capable of holding political power accountable.
There is another dimension to this struggle: who controls the story Congolese people are told about their country.
We already know how powerful this weapon can become. In 2024, researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub uncovered an AI-enabled influence network supporting Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front. At least 464 accounts produced more than 650,000 messages, using ChatGPT-generated text, synthetic images and coordinated hashtags. Remarkably, 52 percent of the network’s content concerned Congo. AI allowed operators to rapidly generate different versions of the same political message, flood discussions and make coordinated propaganda more difficult to recognise. This built on an older practice: in 2014, the Washington Post reported on evidence suggesting that someone with access to Kagame’s Twitter account may also have operated an anonymous account attacking journalists and critics. The Rwandan presidency denied the connection.
Now we see another side of this information war. Days before I travelled to Cape Coast, Anthropic exposed a commercial influence operation run by a France-based digital advertising agency called LKM Company. Its network included roughly 70 fabricated news websites and more than 250 inauthentic social media accounts. Anthropic identified 318 articles about Congo that typically supported the Congolese government’s positions, particularly around Rwanda and regional mineral agreements.
We do not know who paid for this Congo campaign. Anthropic found indications of customers with interests in the DRC-Rwanda conflict but no evidence that any government directed the operation. What we do know is that someone commissioned an operation that made coordinated political messaging favourable to Kinshasa appear as independent journalism and organic public opinion.
That should concern us as Tshisekedi moves to change the Constitution. Congo’s constitutional struggle will unfold in an information environment where AI can manufacture political narratives, flood criticism and create synthetic voices at enormous scale. Cde Kwesi’s warning therefore acquires another dimension: “No Constitution enforces itself.” The people defending it must also be able to recognise who is trying to shape their understanding of reality.
“Seek ye first the political kingdom” therefore raises a class question: who possesses the political kingdom, and in whose interests is its power exercised?
From Kinshasa to Jerusalem
The contradictions of the Tshisekedi government extend into foreign policy. On 1 September, Tshisekedi met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Their governments subsequently announced continued consultations toward relocating Congo’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and establishing a resident Israeli embassy in Kinshasa.
This deepening relationship raises a fundamental question about the principles guiding Congolese foreign policy. Congo is living through the occupation of parts of its territory, the displacement of millions of its people and the persistent intervention of external powers in its affairs. A country carrying this history should understand the struggle against occupation as part of its own political experience. Our demand for Congolese sovereignty acquires greater moral and political force when it is connected to the right of other peoples, including Palestinians, to land, dignity and self-determination.
Nkrumah understood African sovereignty in precisely this wider field of liberation. Ghana’s independence carried responsibilities toward people still struggling against colonialism and domination, which is why Accra became a centre for liberation movements from across the continent. That tradition offers Congo a different foundation for foreign policy: one rooted in sovereignty, anti-imperialism and solidarity with oppressed peoples.
For a country still struggling to make its own independence meaningful, those principles should matter in determining the alliances it builds and the struggles with which it chooses to stand.
Pan-Africanism Has an Obligation to Congo
“The troubles of the Congo are our troubles and her struggles are those of the independent states of Africa.”
Nkrumah wrote those words in his 1967 book, Challenge of the Congo. Congo was central to his understanding of the vulnerability of African independence and the necessity of Pan-Africanism.
He had watched our crisis unfold from its beginning. As Belgian troops intervened and Katanga moved toward secession, Nkrumah insisted on Congo’s territorial integrity. In an August 1960 letter to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, he demanded the withdrawal of Belgian troops from the entire country, including Katanga, and warned against attempts to detach the mineral-rich province. A month later, speaking at the United Nations, he declared that “The Congo, including Katanga and Kasai, is one and indivisible.”
Lumumba’s assassination and the crisis that followed gave Nkrumah further evidence of how vulnerable newly independent African states remained to external power. Congo helped shape the analysis he would develop around neocolonialism and African unity. Political independence needed the economic, military and institutional capacity to defend itself.
This history gives Cde Kwesi’s lectures a particular meaning for me. When he spoke about Nkrumah’s insistence on “real sovereignty, not flag-and-anthem independence,” he was describing a problem that Congo itself helped expose at the beginning of African independence.
Sixty-six years later, Nkrumah’s words still confront us: “The troubles of the Congo are our troubles.” Pan-Africanism therefore places an obligation on Africans to treat the sovereignty of Congo as part of the sovereignty of Africa.
Cde Kwesi’s closing lecture also reminded us where that Pan-Africanism must be built. It cannot reside only among presidents and governments. It must involve workers, farmers, women, youth, intellectuals, artists, movements and the diaspora. This matters particularly for Congo, where African governments have themselves participated in our destabilisation.
The forces confronting the Congolese people operate across national borders and through global systems of political and economic power. The solidarity required to confront them must therefore be organised across borders as well. Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism gives us a language for that task: building the collective power of African people to defend sovereignty and complete the unfinished work of liberation.
Congo Week: Organising for Sovereignty
Cde Kwesi spent two days returning us to organisation. Nkrumah’s politics required studying concrete conditions, organising people and building the political force capable of transforming them. Congo Week is one place where that Pan-African solidarity can become organised action.
Every third week of October since 2008, people around the world have participated in Breaking the Silence Congo Week. Congo Week began with students and community organisers responding to the silence surrounding millions of Congolese deaths. This year, the 19th annual Congo Week will take place October 18–24, with sovereignty at the centre of the conversation. I invite you to sign up and organise wherever you are.
Sovereignty must become material in the lives of Congolese people. It must give communities control over their land and resources, build institutions accountable to ordinary people, protect life, develop productive capacity and secure the conditions in which Congolese workers, farmers, women and young people can determine their future.
At Cape Coast, Cde Kwesi returned us to Nkrumah’s injunction: “Seek ye first the political kingdom.” The Congolese people formally won that kingdom on June 30, 1960. The struggle before us is to make it ours.
That struggle continues!
