Why must Africa wait for Trump? The deeper crisis of African agency in peacebuilding

Why should it take the likes of Donald Trump to conclude a deal between Kigali and Kinshasa? The spectacle of a U.S. president showing off a peace agreement in Washington while bombs continue to fall in Eastern Congo is not merely an awkward irony, it is a symptom of seriously deep fractures in African agency, global political economy and the architecture of peace itself. 

The Washington peace performance amid ongoing war 

At the beginning of December of 2025, President Trump hosted Paul Kagame and Félix Tshisekedi for what the White House labelled as a historic accord, regardless of the fighting continuing in towns held by the M23 rebel group, and civilians reported bombed homes and rising death tolls. The signing, staged at a White House-branded peace institute, happened to be accompanied by an explicit economic hook: closer access of the U.S to DRC’s strategic minerals, more especially cobalt and copper, essential ingredients for batteries and the green transition. The timing of it, the optics and the substance of the deal deserve close scrutiny. 

Institutional vacuums and the failure of regional mechanisms 

First, there is what we can perceive as the institutional vacuum. For decades, African regional bodies and multilateral missions have been carrying the heavy burden of responding to crises on the continent. Yet the DRC experience has shown how poorly resourced, politicised or undermined these mechanisms can sometimes be. MONUSCO, the UN mission in the DRC, was repeatedly under scrutiny for failing to protect civilians and for exhibiting the limits of conventional peacekeeping against fragmented, locally embedded armed groups; its failures have fed public disillusionment and a dire hunger for outside patrons who claim swift solutions. External actors step in not necessarily because Africans have lack of talent or courage, but because regional and international institutions are structurally weakened, underfunded, or suffer from paralysis when geopolitics intrudes. 

The geopolitics of minerals and transactional peace 

Second, there is the political economy: the DRC’s minerals are not neutral levers for prosperity; they are massive stakes in a global contest. Washington’s interest in securing mineral supply chains that might otherwise flow to China turns peace-making into a geopolitical transaction. This actually, makes mediation transactional rather than emancipatory: peace becomes the conditioned set-piece that aims to clear space for foreign

investment rather than the messy, long-term process of addressing land grievances, political exclusion, and local governance breakdowns. Many scholarly and policy analyses have long warned that mineral deals without robust local safeguards reproduce extractive, rent-seeking dynamics and exacerbate insecurity rather than resolve it and it is safe to say this is hard to disagree with. 

Power asymmetry behind Western-brokered peace 

Third, the theatricality of Western-brokered summits masks asymmetric bargaining power. African leaders who walk inside the Oval Office do so with constrained options: international legitimacy, development finance, or migration deals are more often than not on the table. For small and medium powers like the DRC, which faces state capacity crises, and Rwanda, which seeks security guarantees and regional legitimacy, signing under the auspices of a U.S. president is less a victory of diplomacy than a strategic survival choice. That calculativeness does not absolve African leaders from responsibility; this just merely explains why they sometimes prefer external patronage to messy regional bargaining that could expose some domestic political fault-lines. 

A colonial pattern repeating itself 

Fourth, there is a serious historical pattern we cannot ignore : post-colonial interventions grafted to commercial interests. From the scramble for uranium to Cold War alignments to contemporary semiconductor and battery-materials geopolitics, the majority of foreign powers have repeatedly used “peace” as a pretext for access. Framing today’s deal as a neutral peace initiative is ignorant of a precedent: when external mediation is coupled with resource access, local suspicion and spoilers proliferate. The M23’s denial of direct links to Rwanda, reciprocal accusations from Kinshasa together with the continued fighting despite signed accords, shows exactly how brittle externally brokered deals can be when they do not transform local power relations. 

What genuine African agency should look like 

So, what would genuine African agency look like? It would be one that is lived, incremental, and often unglamorous: strengthened regional mediation led by the African Union and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, properly resourced regional peace enforcement tools with democratic oversight, transparent mineral governance frameworks that bind foreign investors to local development standards, and highly credible transitional justice and disarmament programs that aim to address the roots of insecurity. Above all, it means making peace less a press photo opportunity and much more of a sustained, accountable process that privileges affected communities. 

We cannot outsource peace 

This is not an argument that is against external help. Diplomacy, finance and technical support from global partners can truly be valuable. However, when the scale tips so decisively that peace becomes the entrée to mineral access or the domestic political theatre of a foreign leader, the result is not sovereignty restored but it is plainly leverage

redistributed. If African leaders want peace that is durable, they must build institutions that cannot be bought at a presidential summit; if external powers seek stability, they have to accept that long-term legitimacy is not granted in the Oval Office, it is earned here at home.

Written By: 

*Sesona Mdlokovana

Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group 

Africa Specialist

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