DRC: Major General Sylvain Ekenge reinstated as army spokesman, ending the pause for a insulting parrot
Kinshasa could not do without a mouthpiece to spread its ideological line faithfully: one of inciting discrimination against ethnic minorities and of denying and distorting history. The reinstatement of General Sylvain Ekenge is the logical next step.
Major General Sylvain Ekenge, spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC), was suspended on 29 December 2025.
The suspension was ordered by the FARDC General Staff after remarks deemed discriminatory and stigmatising towards the Tutsi community.
He had told the state broadcaster RTNC:
“When you marry a Tutsi woman, you have to be careful. When you are a senior figure, a great customary chief, you are given a wife. A member of her family will come to stay with you, introduced as a cousin or a nephew, when in fact he is the one who will come and father children with your wife at home, and you will be told the children are born Tutsi because the Tutsi race is superior”
It is worth stressing, however, that since 2021 Félix Tshisekedi's government in Kinshasa has cultivated, funded, spread and encouraged hate speech and discrimination against the Congolese Tutsi community in eastern DRC.
Regime dignitaries, journalists and influencers close to the government spend their days making remarks inciting hatred and murder against Tutsis.
As might have been expected, the Kinshasa authorities have quietly reinstated the notorious general accused of stoking ethnic hatred.
A statement announcing, among other things, the deaths of Lieutenant General Joseph Mutombo Katalayi and Lieutenant General Lucien-René Likulia Bakumi is signed by Major General Sylvain Ekenge in his capacity as FARDC spokesman.
Given the ideological line of the Tshisekedi government, which is marked by the promotion of ethnic and tribal hatred, his return comes as no surprise but as a logical next step, since Kinshasa needs his talent for spreading hatred.
The Rwandan government, through its Foreign Minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe, nonetheless responded on the social network X:
This reinstatement sounds like the end of an insulting parrot's pause.
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