Kinshasa, April 9, 2025. While the rain drums on sheet metal roofs and urban rivers begin to swell, it is a word that resonates: gabionage. A technical term for a palpable emergency in Kinshasa, where the collapse of this bridge over the Lukaya river has made a disturbing truth visible. The promise of progress, of modern infrastructure, sometimes seems distant, as a dream frightened by the reality of everyday life.
Crispin Belengeli, engineer at Safrimex, talks about efficiency, but you can’t help but be struck by the tragic beauty of this disaster. This bridge, long symbol of connectivity between the districts of Lemba Imbu and Verleman, has become the reflection of an inventory: how can we build roads and bridges in a country where nature seems angry? How do these infrastructure find themselves at the mercy of a thunderstorm, when you know how much they were expensive to the population?
Beyond the Gabions, beyond the emergency dictated by the calendar, hides a more disturbing question: who really takes the time to analyze the deep causes of these collapses? After all, this bridge was not born in an urban void; His failure recalls the history of promises not held in a city where projects are often suspended in the limbo of the bureaucracy. Kinshasa is the story of a trompe-l’oeil development, where the infrastructure is built on support promises that we often invoke but which disappear with the first drop of rain.
A meeting between the Office of Roads and Drainage (OVD) and Safrimex, the optimistic tone, but why has this emergency become the norm after each natural disaster? Why are these gabionage plans not accompanied by a systemic approach to town planning, which takes into account narrow alleys, uncontrollable rivers, and galloping urbanization? The storm of this early April is only a reminder of what we already know: the infrastructure cannot be thought in isolation, it must be anchored in an ethics of environmental care.
Crispin Belengeli calls for union, solidarity. While the worker is on the ground, digging, reinforcements of stones to maintain chaos remotely, the question of the appropriation of urban space remains pending. We must not just “support” these projects, but “realize” them together, make sure that the voice of citizens is not only a whisper soothes their fears after the avalanche of destruction. What really do these voices say about their needs, their fears, their hopes in this period of permanent crisis?
Sanitation and construction are not only public works but also opportunities to redefine what it means to live together in a city as complex as Kinshasa. The road to the avenue de la Paix could be the symbol of a revival, if it makes us debate on the way in which we want to live in this city: at what price? And above all, with what shared visions?
The rain will continue to fall, the rivers to swell, and the bridges, alas, to collapse, as long as we continue to build in an emergency rather than to think about our choices, as long as pragmatism does not translate a sensitivity to urban experience. Far from being an end, this incident could become the starting point for a real conversation on the future of Kinshasa. In the meantime, there is only one shared feeling: a crack in concrete, a momentum in ineffectiveness, and the desperate call of a population to be built together, rather than under the weight of the collapse.