Kagame’s Rwanda

When Paul Kagame became Rwanda’s president in 2000, he inherited a country that had been torn apart by genocide. To rebuild it, he had to rely on mostly uneducated guerrilla fighters and a handful of ill-trained cadres. Even the most optimistic of analysts doubted his chances.

But 19 years later, the country is stable, prosperous, unified and, in large part, reconciled. Social services, such as education, healthcare, housing and livestock are provided to the needy, with no distinction of ethnicity or region of origin – two forms of discrimination that characterised the governments leading up to the genocide against the Tutsi, which Kagame, as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), brought to an end.

Outside of Africa, however, Kagame raises mixed feelings, with human rights groups classifying him as an authoritarian leader, who curtails press and political freedoms and presides over an undemocratic nation whose constitution he changed to remain president beyond his legal term.

While justified, the critics make one mistake: to imply that these freedoms were already existent in Rwanda and that Kagame simply took them away. They weren’t. Kagame and Rwandans have been working to establish them in a country that has never had them.

Born in southern Rwanda in 1957, Kagame’s parents fled the country during anti-Tutsi pogroms when he was two years old. He was raised in Rwandan communities in refugee camps in Uganda, where he observed and was a victim to the recurrent oppression visited upon his people. He later joined a Ugandan guerrilla movement, the National Resistance Army, that installed Yoweri Museveni as president of Uganda.

When he returned to Rwanda as leader of the RPF, the country’s coffers had been looted, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed, the survivors were traumatised, the killers fearful of retribution and the returnees destitute. Rwanda was a failed state by any measure.

Twenty-five years after the genocide, the wounds are slowly healing. Survivors still see Kagame as the guarantor of their existence. He pardoned the perpetrators and set the country on a journey to unity and reconciliation.

Kagame has been tough in his style of governance; intransigent on corruption, populism and divisive speech. Politicians with hate-charged rhetoric have consistently faced harsh sentences and lengthy prison terms. Speech is regulated to prohibit ethnic prejudice while democracy was trimmed and tailored to the peculiar predicament facing the Rwandan people. This was necessary to instal a new “governmentality”.

A new, unified country had somehow to be built with the same people – killers and their victims living side-by-side with a unity of purpose: the betterment of their village, the district, their country.

Excerpted from: ‘Kagame’s Rwanda is still Africa’s most inspiring success story’. AlJazeera.com