By Ann Garrison – The Gray Zone
John Legend’s concert in Rwanda signaled global elite support for Paul Kagame amid his bloody invasion of the DRC. The event was organized by Global Citizen, a pseudo-activist NGO backed by corporations hungry for Africa’s resource wealth.
On February 21st, as the Rwandan army deepened its invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), John Legend took the stage in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. There, the superstar singer-songwriter headlined a Move Afrika concert produced by Global Citizen, the international NGO front for global elites, NATO, and a corporate world order which bills itself as “the movement changing the world.”
The future that Global Citizen heralds is a borderless network of public-private partnerships in which oligarchs, global corporations, and the World Trade Organization profitably manage the world in the name of equity, sustainability, and climate defense. It’s the future promised in the Davos Agenda and the UN Pact for the Future passed by the UN General Assembly in 2024. (Russia, Belarus, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria opposed the pact as a threat to national sovereignty.)
Global Citizen doesn’t raise and disburse funds; it conducts global “awareness” campaigns to manufacture global consent – in this case, for the West’s decades-long proxy war for DRC’s unparalleled resource wealth, which has left millions of Congolese dead, and the rest of the country’s population with one of the world’s lowest per capita annual incomes.
The NGO’s corporate “partners” include tech giants PayPal, Cisco, WorldWide Technology, Verizon, and YouTube (Alphabet/Google), all of which depend to a large extent on minerals extracted from the DRC. Others, including Citibank, are hardly known for commitment to human rights; Citibank is, in fact, implicated in the 2001 UN investigators’ report on illegal resource traffic in DRC.
Global Citizen’s Global Board of Directors includes executives from Citibank, Cisco, Delta, and a long list of global asset managers, along with the former prime ministers of Norway and Sweden, top UN agency officials, and officers of closely allied billionaire-backed NGOs like the Open Society Foundations of George Soros, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Its Country and Regional Boards evince a special interest in Africa, the world’s most resource rich continent. Elites from Europe, Canada, Australia, and Africa are well represented there, but figures from Latin America and Asia are not, despite Global Citizen’s growing presence on those continents. In November 2025, the NGO will head to Brazil with “Global Citizen: Amazonia, the World’s First Impact Concert in the Amazon” at the UN’s 2025 COP.
An impact concert? What kind of impact? So far, participants have been promised a collection of “global and local artists” who will “celebrate major COP commitments, spotlight Indigenous leaders, and amplify campaigns for climate action.” Beyond that, the details are vague. “More info coming soon,” Global Citizen declares.
The consummately bland and meaningless language that fills the NGO’s website is clearly intended to gloss over any conflict or contradiction. But the blood-spattered backdrop to Global Citizen’s Kigali concert was impossible to ignore.
The “Global Citizen” as elite frontman
It should come as no surprise that John Legend performed in Kigali as Rwandan troops advanced in DRC, continuing the 30-year genocide against Congolese people. Like Kagame, the singer has been cultivated for over a decade as a top-tier frontman for the neoliberal global elite. Back in 2012, the Davos-based World Economic Forum appointed Legend to its Forum of Young Global Leaders in 2012. This February, Global Citizen announced on its Instagram page that it was “joined on the ground at Davos by three incredible artists” including John Legend.
Though he has at times spoken out in support of Palestinian human rights, Legend elected to perform at the August 2024 Democratic National Convention in support of then-Vice President Kamala Harris as she took ownership of the Biden administration’s genocidal policy toward the besieged Gaza Strip.
During his February 22 visit to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, Legend decried man’s inhumanity to man, likening the Rwandan Genocide to the Holocaust and the genocide of Native Americans, but omitted any mention of Gaza or Congo, genocides not granted the official status established by criminal indictments and Western-controlled international courts.
Legend has lent his status to numerous milquetoast productions by Global Citizen. In 2020 he hosted and performed for the second year in a row at the Global Citizen Prize for Activism, which honored Black Lives Matter, billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett, and Sesame Street’s Sesame Workshop. What more could any organization do to support the status quo?
Confronted with criticism of his performance in Kigali, Legend insisted that he did not want to limit any country’s economic opportunity because he disagreed with its government. However, back in 2019, he supported a proposed Hollywood boycott of US states which had enacted limits on abortion rights. As a loyal Democrat, he has actively campaigned for Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and many of the party’s down-ballot candidates, while severing his personal ties with his former artistic collaborator, Kanye West, over his support for Donald Trump. “Money talks,” Legend said of his boycott of states with anti-abortion GOP leaders.
Deploying his talents in support of NATO at the 2022 Grammy Awards, Legend debuted his slave liberation anthem, “Free”, in a choreographed spectacle that featured Ukrainian musicians and President Volodymyr Zelensky pleading for military support on a larger-than-life background screen.
On the Grammy’s official website, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Science trumpeted Global Citizen’s concurrent Stand Up for Ukraine extravaganza, which urged its million followers to join “one of the largest digital campaigns on social media by sharing why you support Ukraine and refugees everywhere.”
Several days after the awards ceremony, Global Citizen hosted an online propaganda rally for the Ukraine proxy war, presenting a series of online video messages from a long list of celebrities, including Julian Lennon performing his fathers pacifist anthem, “Imagine,” in a room full of candles in service of the NATO military machine.
One day after the social media rally, Global Citizen capped off this propaganda extravaganza with a real-life rally in Poland, one the most ardent supporters of the US war for Western capital and global corporations.
Convened by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it concluded in a grand “global pledging summit” that saw governments and corporations promise $4.6 billion in grants and $5.5 billion in loans to aid Ukrainian refugees and IDPs. Contributors included the European Commission, Canada, and a list of European nations. Lenders included the European Investment Bank and the Council of Europe Development Bank. It wasn’t clear who the loans would go to, who would pay them back, or how.
Coca Cola, Nestle, Cisco, Google, and Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, were among the global corporations which contributed to demonstrate that they could be good global citizens too.
For all this, Global Citizen won an Anthem Award, a self-styled global do-gooder NGO whose mission is “amplifying the voices that spark global change” in support of “a purpose-driven society.”
Of course, there could be no better way to advance such a lofty mission than standing up for a NATO proxy war in Ukraine that has left a country in ruin, while music-washing a resource war in the heart of Africa – one that has left millions dead and a nation in chaos while its prime instigator danced to the crooning of John Legend, bathed in red and blue light, with “Global Citizen” emblazoned on his chest.
“Global Citizen” Paul Kagame manages lab for Western elite
Rwandan President Paul Kagame is a darling of the global elite. He hobnobs with them annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, though he kept clear of the neoliberal confab this year, presumably to manage the latest phase of his war in the DRC. Under Kagame’s management, Rwanda has become a veritable laboratory for technocratic, Davos-driven experiments in global governance, from digital IDs and “sustainable cities” to mandatory or even forced vaccination. In 2022, one Rwandan told Deutsche Welle that he was handcuffed in order to receive the jab. Others fled the country to escape being injected against their will.
In 2022, Kagame began negotiating with UK Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and then Rishi Sunak, to outsource migrants from war-ravaged areas of the Middle East to Rwanda for processing, asylum, and resettlement, demonstrating his readiness to volunteer his country as a dumping ground for the West’s human surplus. In 2023, after two years of outcry and legal struggle, a UK court ruled that Rwanda was not a safe place to remove asylum seekers to, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer then declared the plan “dead and buried” on his first day in office.
Kagame has also offered the Rwandan Defense Force in the service of Western military objectives on the African continent, most visibly now as an armed enforcer of the interests of France’s TOTAL Energies in Mozambique.
In 2017, Zionist influencer and sex toy salesman “Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach’s World Values Network presented Kagame with a prize for Outstanding Friendship with the Jewish Peoplei in the name of casino baron and pro-Netanyahu financier Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam. A year later Israel opened an embassy in Rwanda, with the Times of Israel heralding it as “a bid to strengthen its diplomatic foothold in Africa.” Israel and Rwanda have intertwined and reinforced their victims’ narratives since 1995.
Like Israel’s cutouts, the Davos set ignores decades worth of documentation of Kagame’s crimes in the DRC as long as he advances their agenda. Their infatuation also survives countless reports of his repressive extremes within Rwanda, including use of Israel’s Pegasus surveillance software, his transnational repression, his assassinations of critics at home and abroad, and his wholly implausible electoral victories, such as his 99%+ win in 2024.
In contrast, Vladimir Putin was banned from the annual Davos gathering in 2022, and Russia’s de facto Davos embassy was shut down after the World Economic Forum banned Russian officials and businessmen from participation.
The International Criminal Court slapped Putin with a dubious indictment, targeting him for evacuating thousands of almost exclusively Russian-speaking children from the eastern Ukrainian war zone to territory inside the Russian Federation, but has never gone near Kagame.
Rwanda’s War in DRC
John Legend said he’s “aware of what’s happening” in DRC, but what does he know about the conflict? Why aren’t he and Global Citizen as concerned by Rwandan troops in DRC as they are by Russian troops in Ukraine?
Have they bothered to consider UN investigators’ abundant documentation of Rwanda’s invasion, occupation, massacres, and atrocities in DRC, much of which has been summarized by the legacy press?
On the day before Legend’s Kigali concert, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Rwanda’s M23 militia immediately cease hostilities, withdraw from all areas that it controls, “and fully reverse the establishment of illegitimate parallel administrations in the DRC territory.” It also called on Rwanda to withdraw all Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) from DRC and stop “supporting” M23.
President Kagame continues to deny that Rwandan troops are in DRC, but Rwanda’s invading and occupying army is in direct command of M23. Further, the May 2024 UN Group of Experts Report on the DRC documented the presence of 4,000 Rwandan troops inside Congo, more than M23. That report also stated:
“RDF military interventions and operations in Rutshuru, Masisi and Nyiragongo territories extended beyond mere support for M23 operations to direct and decisive involvement, allowing RDF and M23 to achieve military dominance in Petit Nord and rapid territorial expansion to the shores of Lake Edward. The deployment of advanced military technology and equipment bolstered joint M23-RDF operations, altering conflict dynamics, including by grounding all FARDC military air assets.”
The Group of Experts December 2024 report stated:
“M23 remained under the overall military command of ‘General’ Sultani Makenga, who continued to receive instructions and support from RDF and Rwandan intelligence. . .
“Every M23 unit was supervised and supported by RDF special forces… The commanding of targeted operations and handling of high-tech weaponry by RDF were critical in conquering new territories. Systematic support by RDF to M23 and its de facto control over M23 operations continued.”
A continuous stream of RDF and M23 atrocity reports
Reports of M23 atrocities have emerged in continuous fashion since the militia first began rampaging across Congo in 2012-’13. The 2012 UN experts report stated that Rwandan Defense Chief James Kabarebe sat at the top of M23’s chain of command.
In 2014, a UN Security Council report stated that M23 had been responsible for mass killing civilians, raping, killing, and maiming women and children, forced displacement, and the forced recruitment of children..
On January 26th, Vivian van de Perre, Deputy Special Representative for Protection and Operations of the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, reported that M23 and the Rwanda Defence Forces had launched an attack on the strategically important city of Goma and that “these attacks continue to ravage the city, killing, injuring, traumatizing, and displacing civilians and exacerbating the crisis.”
During the first week of February 2025, the deputy head of the UN mission in DRC reported that nearly 3,000 people had been killed after M23 seized Goma, the capital of DRC’s North Kivu Province.
In mid-February 2025, after M23 seized Bukavu, the capital of DRC’s South Kivu Province, the UN human rights office accused it of summarily executing children, attacking hospitals and warehouses storing humanitarian aid, sexual violence, child and forced recruitment, and threatening journalists, human rights defenders, and members of civil society organizations.
This is just a short list of M23 atrocities, and they’re nothing new. UN investigators have documented atrocities and resource theft committed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops and their successive “Congolese” militias since Rwanda and Uganda invaded DRC, which was then Zaire, in 1996, then again in 1998.
Their reports include the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993 to 2003, the 1998 Garreton Report, the United Nations Reports on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the DRC, 2001, 2002, 2003, and other bi-annual reports produced between 2004 and 2024.
The 2010 UN Mapping Report stated that its documentation might be used by a competent court to try Rwanda for committing genocide against Hutu refugees in DRC.
In 2007, the International Rescue Commission estimated that there had been 5.4 million excess deaths since Rwanda and Uganda invaded in 1998, with most dying of displacement and disease.
In November 2024, the UN’s International Organization for Migration estimated a total of 6.9 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in DRC, with the vast majority languishing in the eastern provinces bordering Rwanda and Uganda. In mid-January, the UN refugee agency estimated that 230,000 more people had been displaced since the beginning of the year, and during the first week of February, the World Food Program reported 700,000 displaced in the City of Goma alone.
Tweet! Text! Post! Sign!
According to Global Citizen’s clicktivist vision, we are one big human family which can change the world by tweeting, texting, posting, and signing petitions. Those who download the NGO’s app or sign up for its emails receive action alerts when it’s time to tweet, text, post, and sign. And whether they know it or not, they have volunteered themselves as soldiers in the digital army of billionaire Bill Gates.
However, no alerts will arrive from Global Citizen calling on Rwanda to withdraw its troops from DRC or on global corporations to stop buying minerals stolen from DRC.
In one particularly galling crusade, Global Citizen asked followers to “tweet at world leaders and tell them: A fully funded Gavi means a healthier future for millions of children!” In other words, it pushed you to lobby your governments to hand your taxes over to the Gavi Vaccine Alliance of Bill Gates, who happens to be a top funder of Global Citizen.
Manufacturing consent for the public subsidization of private foundations, corporations, and undemocratic global institutions like the IMF and World Bank is one of Global Citizen’s main reasons to exist. In October 2024, it rounded up a list of its usual collaborators like Intel, Cisco, and Bridgewater Associates, along with Lawrence H. Summers, former Treasury Secretary, neoliberal financial hit man, and overseer of the 2009 bank bailout, to lobby G20 countries to sink $120 billion into the World Bank’s International Development Association.
How much has IMF and World Bank lending helped the Global South? As Jason Hickel reported that the per capita income gap between the North and South quadrupled in size between 1960 and 2020. “These institutions [the IMF and World Bank] were designed with colonial principles in mind,” he wrote, “and they remain largely colonial in character to this day.”
As Hickel explained, the leaders of the World Bank and IMF are not elected, but nominated by the US and Europe, and that voting power is skewed heavily in favour of the rich countries. For each vote that the average person in the global North enjoys in the Western-controlled financial system, the average person in the global South is granted just one-eighth of a vote.
These are precisely the kind of unelected global bodies that rely on Global Citizen for promotion and the channeling of capital.
Where will Global Citizen go next?
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Global Citizen to produce concerts in the revolutionary Alliance of Sahel States, where Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger are fighting to free themselves from the yoke of neocolonialism. These aren’t countries that consider themselves part of a “purpose-driven” global society changing the world one tweet, text, post, and petition signature at a time.
Their leaders don’t go to Davos. Since coming to power over the past three years, they have expelled French and US military installations, mining companies, and media outlets and have formed a federation committed to resisting neocolonialism and neoliberalism. They no longer belong to the Francophonie, France’s equivalent of the British Commonwealth of previously colonized, French-speaking nations.
The other stop on John Legend’s Global Citizen tour was in Lagos, Nigeria, on February 25th. Since 2023, Nigeria has been headed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a US-compliant billionaire committed to collaborating with the US Africa Command, and who threatened an invasion of neighboring Burkina Faso on behalf of the Western-backed ECOWAS military alliance.
As Kit Klarenberg and Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, Tinubu laundered millions for heroin dealers in Chicago, and has been mired in corruption scandals ever since.
According to a May 2024 Lloyd’s Bank report, nearly all Nigeria’s economic sectors are open to foreign investment, allowing for 100 percent foreign ownership, and its recent pro-market reforms led to a rise in “capital importation” to USD 1.1 billion.
Global Citizen’s reports on Nigeria are entirely aglow about citizen initiatives, with nothing about leadership’s corruption.
In September 2023, President Tinubu rang the closing bell at the NASDAQ exchange and announced that “Nigeria is open for business.”