The would-be saint murdered ‘mafia-style’ for refusing bribes

Two days after he was kidnapped in July 2007, the bloodied and battered corpse of Floribert Bwana Chui Bin Kositi was dumped outside a university campus in the city of Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The newly graduated 26-year-old and devout Catholic was just three months into a job as a customs official – which he had taken on with his usual zeal, by refusing to be bribed.

He had stood up to people wanting to smuggle in rice from neighbouring Rwanda that had spoiled and could have proven poisonous if eaten. No-one has ever been arrested for his killing.

Fr Francesco Tedeschi, the man campaigning for Kositi to become a Catholic saint, told the BBC his “mafia-style” murder was meant to serve as a warning to anyone else who stood up to corruption – in a part of the world where guns tend to hold sway over the rule of law.

Goma is the capital of North Kivu Province, which is rich in covetable minerals – such as those that power mobile phones – and plentiful in rebel and militia groups.

But Fr Tedeschi believes the warning completely failed because of Kositi’s legacy of love and justice, saying the kindness he had shown through his short life lives on today.

His actions, in a place where corruption is the norm, were informed by his faith.

It had made him strong enough to resist repeated offers by the smugglers.

According to the Catholic Sant’Egidio community of which he was a member – Kositi was first offered $1,000 (£750), then $2,000 “and even more”, but consistently said no.

“He had received phone calls and pressure, even from public authorities, to turn a blind eye and take his fee as everyone had always done,” the Community of Sant’Egidio said.

Last year, the Catholic Church declared him a martyr – one of the steps to sainthood – as it felt his death was the result of his unwillingness to sacrifice his Christian values for money.

In the Catholic tradition, a saint serves as a model of Christian life and is regarded as a hero of the faith through their exceptional actions of courage.

Kositi has since been beatified – at a ceremony in Rome last month – meaning that once one miracle has been attributed to him, he will become a saint.

So far this has been a remarkably fast journey, as canonisation – the process to sainthood – can sometimes take decades or centuries – though this is speeded up if the Church decides someone died for their faith.

Born in Goma in 1981, Kositi was the eldest of three siblings and eight half-siblings, according to a biography written by Sant’Egidio, which described him as coming from a “well-off family”. His father was a bank clerk and his mother a border police officer.

“Floribert Bwana Chui was an intelligent and eloquent child from birth. He was a polite boy who respected us, his parents. I saw a bright future in him. I was expecting him to be a boy who would get married, have a wife and children,” his mother Gertrude Kamara Ntawiha told UN-sponsored Radio Okapi last month before travelling to Rome for her son’s beatification – which was also attended by Kositi’s two younger brothers.

Despite the challenges of living in eastern DR Congo, Kositi was always curious about the world, did well at school and went on to study law at university.

It was during his studies that he attended a regional student conference in Rwanda, in 2001, that changed the course of his life.

An Italian priest gave a talk at the gathering which had brought together people to discuss ways to find, and live in, peace in the restive Great Lakes region.

He was speaking on behalf of the Sant’Egidio community, a movement of both lay people and clergy, committed to social service – and the priest was encouraging the students to embrace a pastoral mission.

Fr Tedeschi had barely finished speaking at the auditorium in southern Rwanda’s leafy university town of Butare when Kositi approached him.

“That speech very much touched Floribert as well as his other friends who had come from Goma,” he told the BBC.

“He wanted to begin a community of Sant’Egidio in Goma. [He was] a young man full of joy with a wish to be useful to the world, with a wish to change what he saw around him that did not work.”

Kositi took up his mission – and in particular his efforts focused on helping street children, Fr Tedeschi said.

The region around Goma has known decades of conflict and is currently at the centre of a rebellion that has seen a powerful rebel group take over the city and swathes of territory surrounding it.

Kositi, “very affected” by the fate of children caught up in successive traumas, set up one of Sant’Egidio’s “Schools of Peace” – which offer food and other assistance to get children an education.

Today Goma’s School of Peace is named in honour of him and has become an actual school.

But in the early 2000s, the young undergraduate was often helping street children financially with school fees or food – or assisting them to become self-reliant in a city where almost everyone was struggling.

“What struck me,” said Fr Tedeschi, “was how Floribert was someone who took the life of others very seriously and more importantly, he would ask himself a lot of questions to understand what the roots of poverty were – the misfortunes of people.

“He liked talking, to confront these problems.”

Kositi’s reach went beyond DR Congo’s borders. In Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, some 100km (60 miles) east of Goma, Bernard Musana Segatagara, a Sant’Egidio fellow, also remembers him.

“Changing Africa and building peace was our shared dream as we observed a growing network of friendship. I think living in a region of tension was making our friendship even more special,” he told the BBC.

After graduating in 2006, Kositi began training as a customs official in the capital, Kinshasa, before taking up a senior post on the border between Rwanda and DR Congo in April 2007.

The rice dispute involved a consignment of around four or five tonnes – which he had tested as he was worried about its safety and then ordered that it be destroyed.

“At first that pushed the smugglers to try and bribe him, and later to threaten him. And Floribert always refused,” Fr Tedeschi said.

“He refused based on his Christian principles. At one point he asked a doctor – a nun working in Goma, who was a friend – so he could really understand the dangers this rice would have represented to the civilian population.

“And that’s what led him to think: ‘So me as a Christian, I can neither accept money nor that these people risk dying because of this poisoned food just because of corruption.'”

For the priest this is what showed his “loyalty to the gospel, Christian values of love for one’s neighbour [and] justice”.

Lawyer Jean Jacques Bakinahe, who studied with Kositi at the University of Goma and was also one of the leaders of Sant’Egidio in the city, agrees.

He told the Rwanda Catholic Church TV channel that his friend “profoundly followed the gospel of peace… [which] really helped him categorically reject that act of corruption”.

But it ultimately led to his death.

“[The smugglers] wanted to send a message… a mafia-style warning,” said Fr Tedeschi.

He acknowledged it might have scared some customs officials at the time but said it had “not succeeded in making [people] forget these testimonies of love and justice that Floribert gave us”.

When the late Pope Francis visited DR Congo in February 2023, he spoke to young people at the main stadium in Kinshasa – and urged them to follow Kositi’s example.

“A young person like yourselves, Floribert Bwana Chui… at only 26 years old, was killed in Goma for having blocked the passage of spoiled foodstuffs that would have been harmful for people’s health,” he said.

“Since he was a Christian, he prayed. He thought of others and he chose to be honest – saying no to the filth of corruption.

“If someone offers you a bribe, or promises you favours and lots of money, do not fall into the trap. Do not be deceived! Do not be sucked into the swamp of evil!” he said.

His successor, Pope Leo XIV, who presided over the beatification ceremony at the Papal Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in June, agreed a more promising future lay ahead for DR Congo’s young people.

“This African martyr, in a continent rich in youths, shows how young people can give rise to peace,” the pontiff said.

The Christian martyr, who now has the title of “blessed” before his name, was lauded in the basilica full of joyous Congolese faithful waving flags.

“May the long-awaited peace in Kivu, in Congo, and across all of Africa come soon – through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and Blessed Floribert,” said Pope Leo.

If peace were to be delivered to Goma, where two joint peace processes are currently under way, that would indeed be a miracle worthy of a saint – and would give hope to the entire region.

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