Absolutely. Actually, since Kabila's refusal to leave office, it's gone from approximately 70 armed groups all the way to about 120. If you want a good source, there's the Kivu security tracker, an organization that is monitoring the security situation in the Kivus.
I agree with you, and for a variety of reasons. Some of these groups are remnants of groups that emerged in the 1990s following Rwanda's invasion of the DRC and emerged in the sense of a need to defend themselves from invaders. What's happened now is that it's become an economy. Being a fighter has become an economy, first, because during the 1990s and early 2000s, when they started negotiating, if you were in an armed group you had the potential of being integrated into the FARDC, the national army. For many of these groups, it became an imperative to swell their numbers in order to be considered an important player in the second Congo war.
However, you also had the fact that Kinshasa has always been very detached from eastern Congo. Mobutu had no interest in having a road that connects Kinshasa all the way to Goma. He wanted to maintain Kinshasa, and whatever was going on in eastern Congo was not really his priority. Subsequent governments have done very similar things, maintaining at arm's length whatever is going on in eastern Congo. That has led a lot of the local population to feel they have to turn to the local leaders. A lot of these local leaders who have ties to Kinshasa, unfortunately or fortunately, also have ties to mining companies, are trying to get their hands on mining concessions to make money on the side, and use armed groups sometimes to secure their financial interests, to gain territory from other people. These networks of governance at the local level are quite important. At one point you have some armed groups who will ally themselves for a particular purpose, to gain a particular political agenda, and that political alliance six months later is null and void, and these groups have realigned themselves with other politician-related armed groups.
It's something that is very, very important to note. In fact, if you followed what happened in the Kasai, with the assassination of two UN investigators, you would know that the investigation by RFI and other people who went to see what happened revealed their assassination was paid for by some of these local government people, who did not want the UN and westerners to know exactly what was going on. Often we point the finger at Kinshasa for some of this violence. Kinshasa has no interest in really securing the region, and it is to blame for a lot of the security concerns, but a lot of the root causes of these security dynamics are actually regionally born.