Congolese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege has sharply criticised the United States-brokered peace agreement for the Democratic Republic of Congo, saying it has prioritised access to the country's vast mineral wealth over delivering genuine security to its people. Speaking to AFP during a visit to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, Mukwege described the deal as having moved beyond a transactional arrangement into something far more troubling. "It looks more like predation. We give, but in return we don't receive the desired security," he said, adding that mineral shipments were already leaving the country while the promised security guarantees remained unfulfilled.

The DRC, a vast country in central Africa rich in strategic minerals including cobalt and coltan, has endured decades of conflict in its eastern provinces, where multiple armed groups compete for control of resource-rich territory. Washington brokered an agreement between the DRC government and Rwanda in December, at the insistence of President Donald Trump, with an explicit economic component designed to secure US business access to those reserves. The Rwanda-backed M23 rebel movement had seized large parts of eastern DRC in the preceding months, and the deal was intended to halt the fighting — though clashes have continued since it was signed. A report released Thursday by Human Rights Watch documented more than 50 summary executions, at least eight rapes and 12 enforced disappearances during a month-long M23 and Rwandan forces occupation of Uvira, a city in eastern DRC, between December 2025 and January 2026, deepening concerns about accountability on the ground.

Mukwege, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for his decades of work as a surgeon treating female survivors of sexual violence in eastern DRC, cautioned that resource deals struck with foreign powers are not inherently wrong, but must be fair and serve the common good. "Unfortunately, sometimes these deals are struck with a focus on individual power rather than the common good. And that is where Africans lose out," he said, warning that exploitative arrangements risked returning the continent to "the era of slavery and colonisation." His comments came as French President Emmanuel Macron, also in Nairobi to co-host a France-Africa summit, insisted that European former colonial powers were not "the predators of this century," pointing instead at China — a remark that reflects a broader competition among global powers for influence and resources across Africa.

Beyond the peace deal, Mukwege — who ran unsuccessfully for the Congolese presidency in 2023 and has since become a prominent opposition voice — also raised alarm about domestic politics. He called it "not acceptable" that President Félix Tshisekedi was reportedly considering constitutional changes that would allow him to stand for a third term. Mukwege warned that a referendum to achieve this would likely exclude some 12 million people in areas of the east not firmly under government control, and could ultimately lead to the "balkanisation" — fragmentation — of the country. The combination of an unresolved armed conflict, disputed resource agreements and a fragile constitutional order, he suggested, poses an existential challenge to the Congolese state and its people.