‘DON’T OUTSOURCE SECURITY TO THOSE WHO WANT OUR MINERAL RICHES!’

Why buy weapons or other ‘security solutions’ from the very people who have an interest in destabilising your country so that they can carry on exploiting it? That, essentially, is the question put to a recent security symposium in Kigali, Rwanda by Zimbabwean Pan-African activist Brian Kagoro. Likewise, guns-for-minerals swaps ought to be abandoned, he argues. As he elaborates in this clip, we should instead be guided by the freedom fighters who brought us independence - whose ideals focused on bringing about and protecting a better society. Given what was (and is) going on in neighbouring DRC - whose east is in an ongoing crisis of violence amid a battle for control of resources, fuelled, it’s widely believed, by Rwandan backed rebels - did his words strike a chord at the symposium? What do think of them?