When US President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on African affairs, Massad Boulos, spoke to France 24, Tshisekedi regime loyalists scrambled to dissect every word. They were hunting for a diplomatic “win”, to celebrate after the military disasters their genocidal coalition has suffered.
They’re still looking.
The truth? Far less dramatic, and far more inconvenient.
There was absolutely nothing new in Boulos’ statements. No policy shift. No hardening of tone. No earth-shattering revelation.
He repeated, almost verbatim, what U.S. officials had already said at the UN after Uvira fell, and what the State Department had stated during congressional hearings. If this was meant to be a diplomatic earthquake, it felt more like last week’s weather report.
What the regime loyalists prefer to ignore is this: in both the France 24 interview and his most recent X post, Boulos emphasized that the Doha track is the missing puzzle piece for any comprehensive peace agreement.
On X, while cautiously welcoming Kinshasa’s potential acceptance of the Luanda-proposed ceasefire, he insisted: “The priority now is operationalizing the Ceasefire Oversight and Verification Mechanism agreed to in Doha.”
In plain terms: the job is unfinished. The Washington framework is incomplete. “It was only a launchpad,” he told France 24. And the missing piece is exactly the process Kinshasa has been trying to sideline.
There was, however, one subtle but important novelty in his recent statements. In the X post, Boulos called for an end to drone attacks on civilians — an unmistakable reference to the barbaric strikes against Banyamulenge communities by Tshisekedi’s coalition.
And during the France 24 interview, he acknowledged gestures of goodwill by AFC/M23 in withdrawing from Uvira and Fizi territories. Not exactly headlines that fit the regime’s preferred narrative.
The uncomfortable reality is that threats of sanctions against Rwanda won’t fix Congo’s internal political and security failures. Boulos knows it. That’s why he keeps returning to Doha — a fact that frustrates Kinshasa’s most ardent defenders.
They cannot simply brush aside AFC/M23 legitimate cause, or bury the demands of millions of Congolese who have had enough of the looters destroying our country.