When Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi established FONAREV in 2022, the institution was supposed to compensate the victims of decades of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Four years later, the fund has collected more than $200 million. Yet the victims it was created to serve have received only about $5 million in reparations.
The overwhelming majority of the money has disappeared into a system controlled by political elites.
Tshisekedi’s wife, Denise Nyakeru Tshisekedi, is one of the main beneficiaries of this system. Her foundation received $15 million from FONAREV, but only distributed around 612 tons of food and basic necessities valued at roughly $500,000. The remaining $14.5 million remains unaccounted for.
This is not an isolated incident. Reports indicate that FONAREV spent over $1.6 million on a single “Genocost” commemoration event, while administrative costs consumed more than half of the $61 million recovered in the second quarter of 2025. One official reportedly mocked the situation, saying FONAREV “spends more on its photocopiers than on its victims”.
These revelations were first uncovered by La Libre Afrique and have since been corroborated by independent investigators. The pattern is clear: an institution created to deliver justice has instead become a vehicle for elite enrichment.
Behind the scenes, FONAREV serves another purpose: funding the regime’s propaganda fantasy known as “Genocost,” a concept defined as “economic genocide” and designed to conceal the responsibility of Congolese elites in the DRC’s long-running instability.
FONAREV has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting this fiction, relying on emotional manipulation rather than facts. The concept has been rejected by international legal bodies, and for good reason: it has no basis in international law.
In essence, the Tshisekedi regime is running a massive embezzlement operation under the guise of helping victims. The Genocost campaign is a crude political trick, one that might fool the uninformed but crumbles under the weight of evidence. As one civil society organisation noted, peace cannot be built on “a memory that is selective and instrumentalized”.
The people of Congo deserve justice, not a propaganda machine. They deserve reparations, not a system that channels public funds into the pockets of the president’s inner circle. And they deserve the truth about an institution that has betrayed its founding mission.
