Rwanda: Answering the critics

President Kagame: Rwanda’s case has been a little bit complex; we really have dealt with very complex situations, some of which have also formed some lessons for us. We always learn as we go along. In dealing with some of our problems we find that you don’t find precedents, you don’t easily find a textbook (laughs) from which you can easily say, elsewhere things were like this, they were handled like this...

Sometimes we have had to do things even through experimentation, it is a learning experience...but you will find that we’ve been dealing with the situation, trying to deal with our problems, stemming from our own history, our own culture, even traditions, but that is always converging with other things, there are also external factors, regional, African and beyond, that come in (and complicate matters further). There is a lot of sorting, looking for these tiny things about Rwanda, like you are picking millet grain from thick grass…

What do I mean? Let me explain. The genuineness of the people, you see this will always escape the pen of many when they come to write (on Rwanda), but for different reasons. One important reason that I have frequently seen, it’s like there are different narratives you can get from it, but there is one constant one that comes out, and this has got more to do with external factors than internal ones…these journalists, these observers, they don’t see for some reason I don’t understand, and if they see it they don’t want to believe it.

They see that maybe something is happening here in Rwanda, and that at least for the Rwandans it matters a lot, and yet when Rwanda is being analysed this doesn’t come out. They will still write, in Rwanda, the Hutu, the Tutsi, they will maintain that narrative about this divide, as of old; it is standard. Yet when you see the mass, the people out there, you cannot see the Tutsis alone, or Hutus who have been coerced to come there.

It’s Rwandans who have come there because they identify with something. But this never comes out, even for people who see it many times. It’s like, Kagame, the RPF, are an imposition on Rwanda, the Rwanda which is supposed in their mind to be the divide between the Hutu and the Tutsi, period. They even talk of the RPF or Kagame being up there and not being linked with the people. That narrative comes out, it plays out every day, irrespective of any evidence you may give to the world and say no, that is not true. It is linked with this constant criticism: lack of political space, Kagame being autocratic, or even oppressive. It’s like here in Rwanda people really have no breathing space; they are coerced into something, outside their own will; they have something else in mind but we are pushing them, it is against their will that some things are happening. In fact it is even as if even for the progress that you may have alluded to and many have alluded to, it always happens by force.

They’ll always be like, yes, there is progress but at what cost? What it is intended to portray is, like, progress yes…and they say yes, also because, even if you hate Rwanda and you are blind you cannot fail to see whether there is progress or not (laughs)…so the argument goes, yes, there is progress, but at what cost?

Jenerali Ulimwengu: On the negative image in some quarters about Rwanda. Is it a question of bad PR that Rwanda is not fully appreciated for what it has done over the two decades, that people dismiss it as a small country that is easy to govern under a dictatorship?

President Kagame: Let me admit about PR. For me it is not so recent. The story of it... Our PR might be poor, and that doesn’t help to set things right in our case, but I still think that is a lesser problem. The bigger problem is, even in our region, when (someone says they are able to do what they are doing) because it’s a small country, well, for being a small country that is a fact, I have no quarrel with that. But that kind of response is also associated with progress, which brings its own problems.

The success we have had has created problems for us as well. Not everybody is genuine enough to accept. It’s human, not all people will give credit where credit is due, for one reason or another. In fact it is not uncommon…there is simple evidence that even in conferences that have taken place over the last 10 years or so, in which people coming from all over the world and who talk about what Rwanda has achieved, I have told my people: One, when you hear these things, don’t get drunk, because there is a danger of falling into complacency from getting drunk because people are saying you are making good progress and you stop making progress or you even start going down.

Number two, I also said, be prepared, that there will be a backlash of some sort, fair or unfair, mainly unfair because people will say, ‘Why Rwanda? It’s not even true.’ For example, a Ugandan writer who was brought here by a colleague of his because this writer had been in Uganda (writing negatively) about Rwanda, so this friend of his brings him here. And you can see that it’s not like this man had no eyes to see, because at some point he was agreeing, saying, ‘yes there is progress’, and later, ‘yeah, there is even more progress’, but all of a sudden he flips back and says, ‘No, it’s all rubbish. It’s because of something else.’

But I was going to say that in the conferences that have taken place over the years, when somebody at the UN says something about Rwanda, and another one comes and says, in Rwanda we have experienced this, whether it’s in AIDS or in education, or in agriculture and food security, and they say, we are happy to be partners with Rwanda, when we put in our money we see the returns in terms of outputs and so forth. Some become so resentful about the whole idea of talking about Rwanda and they detach it from why there is this story about Rwanda, the fact that universal primary education covers 92 per cent and it is a fact and there is evidence, it’s what it is and it’s true, and whether it happens in Rwanda or somewhere else people are bound to praise it. But if you praise it in the case of Rwanda somehow it is not accepted.

Now, number three. The world we live in is very complex. We have had running battles, almost everyday, with these so-called partners of ours. Sometimes we do things and even if they agree with what we have done, they will still say, ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We hear you are doing this, why didn’t you tell us?’ And we say, ‘But we are telling you.’

And it’s as if really a relationship, as of old, has been established that we the Rwandans, the Africans, are probably less human and we may not know what we want or what we deserve, or what we should be having, so someone should be telling us.

It’s an old story, whether it is from slavery to colonialism to post-independence. It’s like we need permission. I’ll give you an example: Two to three years ago we took a decision on what we wanted to do to transform our agriculture. We had things like a crop specification programme, to concentrate on certain crops, to fight hunger, find the markets. And we concentrated these crops in areas where they grow best; and this one-cow programme that you may have heard about, and so on. Not because it was really something new, it’s a known fact that many countries have done similar things.

So we did this regionalisation, divided our country into regions: Where does tea grow best? Where does maize grow best? We never used to grow maize here in Rwanda. And the moment we said we are going to do this and we laid out our policy, we had a backlash from the donors. They resisted.

The first thing they resisted was the one-cow programme. It came from the World Bank, noises were made by the UN. One time I confronted the World Bank person and said, ‘What do you have against the special crop intensification programme?’ They (attempted an argument) but in the end someone confided in me, saying, ‘You know what, these people (a European power is named) are really hard on us and they are asking us to tell you to stop this programme. You are forcing people to grow maize…you are making them cut down their banana plantations. You are really interfering with the people’s way of life…’

On the one-cow programme, all donors refused to give their money. Only this Nigerian who was with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) said, ‘I’m going to give you, I’ll give Rwanda $5 million for the next five years.’ Everybody else was opposed to it, and we could not understand the rationale, the reason for opposing it. So we said we are going to do it, even if you don’t put in your money. We are going to do it from our little resources; we are going to do it. Today, these programmes, including the one-cow project, have transformed millions of lives.

We have thousands of families who never had an income in their lives, who are now building homes, they are buying cars, they are buying motorcycles from the maize they have been growing. And you go there and they tell you the story themselves, or they show you. An area that had so many grass thatched houses, and all of a sudden, the people have proper houses.

Let nobody tell you lies. These people don’t want Africans to move out of their poverty. They will always say the right things, but when it comes to doing they will always keep us…and it’s really unfortunate that Africans don’t understand this. The West, this developed world, don’t want us to get out of poverty, because we must remain beholden to them; and they must always be the do-gooders who do things for you. If you break out of that, or if you are seen to be breaking out of that, you are committing an offence.

And I’m saying this from real practice. For me I’ve come to believe this because I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, I have evidence for it. It comes from many things. It’s like they are saying, ‘these stubborn Rwandans’ and by that they are saying, ‘these stubborn Africans’. And it’s even dangerous because you may infect others with this spirit of being rebellious, doing things your way. I believe it, I experience it, I confront people on this everyday.

I don’t even bring it up except where it really concerns what I’m doing because it keeps bringing up other backlashes. Then they will bring up human rights, repression - they divert you from doing what matters to you, explaining yourself every day. So they create these suspicions so that every day you are caught up in explaining yourself.

When our officials in the ministry of finance and elsewhere meet with these middle level officials of these powers they are always asked: ‘Why are you doing this? Why didn’t you tell us?’ And are we people respond by saying: ‘Why do we have to tell you? Why must we first clear it with you?’ They say they are our partners, but at the same time they also own us and own these processes.

In 1995, when we talked about imidugudu (local assemblies) we were told: ‘Oh, you see you are going to force people to live together, you are bringing Ujamaa that failed in Tanzania.’ And we said: ‘No, we are not bringing Ujamaa, and whatever Ujamaa was, we are not interfering with land and property, we are not taking anything away from anybody.’ We went to the extent of telling them: ‘But even you, in Europe and other places, you live inmidugudu. We fly over all these areas and we see midugudu So what’s wrong when we also want to do it? And even Ujamaa, if it was the choice of the Tanzanians, what is wrong?’

Then later on, surprisingly, they turned around and accepted it, only giving it another name, these so-called millennium villages. The same people who were opposed to our concept have it under another name. Actually they have seen that where we established midugudu, they have served people well.

Jenerali Ulimwengu: About security in the region, the attack on General Kayumba, the fate of General Nkunda…

President Kagame: The problems have calmed down, though some persist. For example, we have evidence that some people in the region are involved in some unacceptable activities regarding our country. When we ask them about this they say ‘no, no, no’, but then we show them the evidence and they are forced to accept and they give excuses.

For instance we have evidence that the people who were involved in the shooting of Nyamwasa (General Kayumba, former Rwanda chief of staff, shot in Johannesburg recently), we have evidence that his driver, who was involved in the shooting, went to South Africa from (mentions an East African country) with a passport (from another East African country). He is the man who was involved in this act. He was the driver and he colluded with some people in shooting Nyamwasa.

Now, what is surprising to us is that the South African authorities have talked about all the other people, they have talked of Tanzanians, they talked about Somalis, Kenyans, Rwandese, but they never talked about this nationality of the passport of the driver. And we have a copy of his passport.

And we’ve been wondering: why do the South Africans continue to keep quiet about this person? We have the passport, it was specially given. But you will never see a (mentions the nationality) being mentioned as being one of the suspects. I don’t know, but it happened between (mentions country again) and South Africa. But we see this connection here.

When I said that there were people in the region who were more interested in our affairs than in their own affairs (a remark Kagame had made at a press conference a day earlier), it becomes too obvious. Even these criminals, these boys who have been publishing these destructive stories about our country, the two who were banned, live in that country. In fact one or both of them was supposed to appear in court and he escaped, and they are living in that country, with the knowledge of the government there. They are being shielded. So these things are there, we manage them quietly, but they haven’t flared up into anything significant.

Concerning (General Laurent) Nkunda, we intend to find a third country to receive him. There are issues about handing him over to the Congolese, but all these issues are debatable. In fact our ministers of justice (of Congo and Rwanda) are dealing with this matter, looking at all the options. In this we are looking at a number of things. One, we clearly don’t want to stay with him. Now that leaves us with a number of options: one is to hand him to the government of Congo. The other is to agree with Congo that we hand him over to a third party and completely get rid of him from the region, from the area and out of the equation. So these are options that we intend to discuss with our Congolese colleagues, and our action will depend on the outcome of those discussions.

But one sure thing, one option we don’t want, is keeping him, because it gives us the task of policing him, which we don’t want, or of being responsible for anything that he does while he is here, we don’t want that.

Well, we can’t keep him in prison for ever. We have him, we hold him so that he doesn’t cause problems again where he came from. He can’t be released and stay here freely because that may come with certain consequences. The other option would be to give him to the DRC, but what does it mean? This is what the two ministers are looking at. Looking at all things together this seems to be the most favourable (giving him to a third country), but it’s something we want to agree on.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Jenerali Ulimwengu, chair of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper, is a political commentator and civil society activist based in Dar es Salaam.
* This interview first appeared in the The Citizen on 1 September 2010.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.