More than 60 people are missing after a boat capsized on the Aruwimi River in Banalia Territory, in Congo's Tshopo province, according to Radio Okapi. The incident took place on Tuesday, June 2, about 128 kilometres north of Kisangani, and the source says the provisional toll leaves only six survivors.
Witnesses described a motorized boat carrying many passengers and goods. The source says it was heavily overloaded, a detail that sits at the center of the local criticism. In river communities where boats do much of the work that roads do elsewhere, overloading is not just a technical problem. It is often the final visible sign of a transport system that has been left to improvise for too long.
The local security committee met urgently after the disaster and pointed to several failures. Among them were the lack of official checks before departure and what the source called the driver's irresponsibility. Officials say the operator will have to answer for his actions in court. That is an important step, but it is only part of the story. The anger reported from the community is aimed not only at the person behind the wheel but at the conditions that made such a voyage possible.
The report says the official ferry has been out of service for some time and that a new vessel has not yet been put into operation. That has left residents with little choice but to use makeshift boats for river crossings. In practice, that means the whole burden of safe transport falls onto fragile local arrangements, often without the controls, maintenance or capacity that a proper public crossing would require.
That infrastructure gap is what turns an avoidable accident into a recurring pattern. When a ferry is out of service and a new vessel sits unused, the pressure shifts to the cheapest available transport, even when the water is high and the load is heavy. Residents are left with risk baked into daily travel, and the river becomes a place where people accept danger because there is no safer option.
The missing-person count is especially painful because the search effort is still under way. The source says rescue operations continue on the Aruwimi while the water level remains high because of rainfall. High water can make search work slower and more dangerous, and it can also push debris and wreckage further downstream, complicating any effort to establish exactly what happened in the minutes after the boat overturned.
What makes the Banalia disaster resonate is the combination of immediate loss and structural neglect. Residents are not only asking where their relatives are. They are also asking why a route used by many people had to depend on an overloaded vessel in the first place. The report says the community wants answers from the provincial authorities in Tshopo and is demanding a secure, permanent crossing solution.
It also calls for stricter technical checks on motorized pirogues, a measure that would be routine if enforcement were consistent. Until that happens, the river remains both a transport artery and a source of recurring danger. In this case, the provisional toll - more than 60 missing and only six survivors - shows how quickly an everyday crossing can become a mass-casualty event when safety systems fail.
