by ANN GARRISON
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.
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