Oly Ilunga Kalenga

Oly Ilunga Kalenga (born 24 June 1960)[1] is a Belgian–Congolese medical doctor who was the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Minister of Public Health from 2016 to 2019.

[1][4] He worked at the Cliniques de l'Europe (Europe Hospitals) in Brussels, specialising in internal medicine and intensive care, rising to head the intensive care unit, and then became the hospital's medical director and managing director (2013–16).

[1][4][5] Ilunga Kalenga began consulting for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) health ministry in 2000[1] and was appointed DRC's Minister of Public Health in December 2016.

[1][4][6] After two-and-a-half years, on 22 July 2019, Kalenga resigned after his mandate was curtailed to only non-Ebola public-health matters, attributing his departure to the Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi's decision to oversee the DRC's Ebola response personally, and to his desire to avoid "creating confusion" and to avert the "inevitable...predictable [public] outcry" such a sharing of oversight entailed.

[7] His tenure as public health minister was marked by two outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in the country, in Équateur in May–July 2018 and in Kivu and Ituri from August 2018 (ongoing as of April 2020).