Martin Fayulu’s rejection of (former South African president) Thabo Mbeki’s offer to mediate peace in the unending Congolese conflicts only confirms, once again, his political immaturity and his knack for cornering himself into irrelevance. This isn’t an accident; it’s a pattern.
The pattern was clearest during Fayulu’s second presidential bid in 2018. His message was essentially twofold: once in power, he would jail then-President Joseph Kabila, ignite conflict with Rwanda, and hunt down those he branded as “Rwandan infiltrators” in the Congolese army, by which he meant Congolese Tutsi. Exploiting anti-Kabila and anti-Rwanda sentiment, Fayulu’s message played less to Congolese realities than to Western backers intent on pushing term limits across the region as an ideological crusade rather than a fact-based assessement of governance. Fayulu may have won the vote, but he lost where it mattered: regional geopolitics.
Kabila, ever shrewd, struck a deal with the power-hungry yet agreement-averse Tshisekedi, who had broke away from the opposition coalition Fayulu was leading. Kabila then secured SADC’s backing, underscored by Cyril Ramaphosa’s presence at the deal’s signing, with SADC becoming the first regional body to congratulate “president-elect” Tshisekedi. Kabila also pulled in Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, giving the arrangement broad continental support. The deal may have backfired on Kabila later, but it succeeded in sidelining Fayulu, leaving him pleading with his Western backers, who couldn’t intervene without appearing to overstep. Meanwhile, his anti-Rwanda stance and open hostility toward Tutsi ensured Kigali would never support him, making him look like a worse option than the compromise Kabila had engineered.
Fayulu’s third bid for the presidency in 2023 was no different. The momentum of 2019 was gone. Though he styled himself as Congo’s “true president,” nobody took him seriously. His main ally, Moïse Katumbi, effectively left the Lamuka coalition and ran on his own ticket. In short, Fayulu lost yet another key partner, and with Tshisekedi’s UDPS co-opting his anti-Rwanda rhetoric, he was left exposed, with no real ideological grounding to offer.
Now he has rejected Thabo Mbeki’s invitation to participate meaningfully in Congo’s politics, betting instead on being included in Tshisekedi’s proposed internal dialogue. That, too, is a mistake. By now, Fayulu should know that Tshisekedi uses dialogue merely as a tactic to ease internal pressure over the war in the east, with no real intention of following through. Fayulu was absent from the Nairobi and Luanda processes. He wasn’t consulted in the Washington or Qatar initiatives either.
By excluding himself from Mbeki’s initiative, the only one that still treated him as a relevant actor, he has shut the last meaningful door left open to him. His only hope is that the AFC/M23 doesn’t suffer a total defeat, because if they do, Tshisekedi will move quickly to consolidate power and change the constitution, leaving Fayulu with nothing but the prospect of exile.
Martin Fayulu is the eternal third wheel. He just doesn’t seem to realize it.