Post by FD1000 on Feb 18, 2024 17:08:25 GMT
Interesting article (www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-01-25/rwanda-s-paul-kagame-is-the-west-s-favorite-autocrat). I read it using the Opera browser.
I knew very little about Rwanda.
Snippets: Businessweek (By Neil Munshi and Simon Marks January 25, 2024)
How the West’s Favorite Autocrat Engineered Africa’s Most Dramatic Turnaround
Paul Kagame, the longtime president of Rwanda, wins plaudits abroad for making his tiny country a continental power. But the transformation has meant suppression of dissent and alleged assassinations of critics.
Once a year, Paul Kagame, the longtime president of Rwanda, hosts a nationally televised program known as Umushyikirano. It’s a unique spectacle, drawing millions of viewers to what amounts to the ritual opening of a complaint box. Kagame assembles politicians and public servants in the Kigali Convention Center, then relays criticisms of their performance and of programs they oversee, sent in via social media or from meeting halls across the country. He calls them to account, often in humiliating fashion.
At the event last February, a businessman rose to complain about having to visit up to five agencies to obtain licenses. This was despite the existence of a “one-stop center” on the ground floor of the Rwanda Development Board’s offices, where entrepreneurs are supposed to be able to get everything they need to set up a business, from permits to immigration services, within six hours.
Kagame proceeded to lay into Clare Akamanzi, chief executive officer of the development board. It was, he said, not the first time they’d had to discuss the Byzantine permit process that the one-stop center was supposed to solve. The center is “fully operational,” she replied.
“I am not impressed,” Kagame said. “For how long has the idea and principle of the one-stop center been there? It should have been operational.”
Akamanzi conceded that “there were some permits and licenses that were still being given by other institutions” before Kagame cut her off. “First answer my question,” he said. “What do you do? You are just there. You are the director of RDB, but you know nothing about one-stop center?”
She continued to apologize, and he kept hammering away, finally warning that he didn’t want to have the same conversation next year. “It should stop,” he said, “or you should stop.”
“Your Excellency, it is very well understood,” she replied. “I apologize for that, and we will make sure it’s done as best as we can going forward. Thank you.”
“I was called out badly,” Akamanzi said, laughing months later in her office in Kigali. “It was tough, you know?” But by the next day, she was fielding calls from every minister in the government, seeking to help. “Because of that, as you leave this building they can show you our one-stop center—all government permits are done here.” (In September, Kagame replaced Akamanzi as head of the RDB, after six years.)
Kagame, 66, came to power in 1994 after fighting through the bush and liberating Rwanda from a government that had just engineered a genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, almost entirely from Kagame’s ethnic Tutsi minority. In the time since, he’s presided over a stunning transformation of a country that had essentially been abandoned by the world. Rwanda is landlocked and roughly the size of Belgium, with only 13 million people and none of the mineral riches of its larger neighbors. While some critics say the government manipulates statistics to embellish Kagame’s image, gross domestic product growth averaged 7.2% annually in the decade to 2019, and life expectancy jumped from 47.1 years to 66.4 between 2000 and 2019. The UN says Rwanda’s Human Development Index score more than doubled from 1990 to 2017—the world’s highest average annual growth rate. Foreign donors argue that the country’s paved roads and reliable electricity grid demonstrate that aid is spent as intended rather than finding its way into ministers’ pockets.
Over the decades, Kagame has become possibly the West’s most important African ally. The French owe him for sending troops to save Total’s massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique from jihadis; the British last year paid Rwanda £240 million ($304 million) to take in thousands of migrants being held in facilities in the UK (although no one has yet been deported, the affair has ignited a political firestorm for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak); the Americans would like his army to assume a piece of the mercenary business long dominated by Russia’s Wagner Group. Last year, Kagame was named the chair of the Commonwealth of Nations, which is made up mostly of former British colonies, though Rwanda never was one. His former foreign minister is the head of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, the French equivalent.
At the same time, Rwanda has become one of the world’s most polarizing nations—viewed from another angle as a Potemkin village led by an authoritarian monster. Kagame has essentially outlawed political opposition, backing his suppression of dissent with what critics including South Africa’s justice ministry, Human Rights Watch and British police say is a global assassination program, which one nongovernmental organization estimates has claimed the lives of hundreds of dissidents.
When Kagame came to power, he was left to try to resurrect the country, phoenix-like, after the government led by Hutus, roughly 85% of Rwanda’s population, massacred its Tutsi minority, who make up about 14%. Kagame was born to a family that fled to Uganda in 1959, along with 350,000 other Tutsis chased away by Hutu mobs. On his return to Rwanda, he served initially as vice president and defense minister—a Hutu figurehead was installed as president—but Kagame was in charge from the beginning. He instituted a program designed to erase ethnicity from the national conversation, starting with identification cards, and had the Rwandan army—effectively Kagame’s liberation troops—hunt down perpetrators of the genocide. Many were killed, along with tens of thousands of Hutu civilians, according to the UN and Human Rights Watch.
The new government rebuilt institutions that had been shattered or had never existed: ministries, the police force, the civil service. And it held a national dialogue that created the foundation for modern Rwanda. A constitution adopted in 2003 enshrined nine “homegrown solutions” from precolonial Rwanda—including Umushyikirano, “Abunzi” mediation committees, “Gacaca” community courts and “Imihigo” performance contracts—that supporters argue have driven its success.
Kigali, a green and hilly city of about 1.7 million people, serves as a living billboard for his benevolent dictatorship, with modern buildings, upscale restaurants and spotless streets that have become a cliché of foreign reporting. Police direct traffic and don’t solicit bribes. Petty crime is nonexistent. On the last Saturday of every month, people there and throughout the country participate in Umuganda, a mandatory cleanup of their communities. The strict control and outward signs of progress have led to another cliché: Rwanda as “the Singapore of Africa.”
Rwanda has become the third-biggest contributor to UN peacekeeping forces, in keeping with Kagame’s strategy and a principle enshrined in the country’s constitution. “After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, our government made a decision that we will do exactly what others failed to do in our case, wherever we are called upon,” says Brigadier General Ronald Rwivanga, the army’s spokesman. But because it has arguably the best-trained and most respected army in Africa, it has also been called upon to intervene in crises across the continent, with its army a kind of mercenary force.
Kagame’s approach has been pioneering, cementing relationships with distant neighbors and shielding Rwanda against criticism from Western states by protecting their interests in places they themselves won’t go—while, crucially, also offering an entree for Rwandan companies. Nowhere is that clearer than in the mineral-rich Central African Republic, where a former Rwandan ambassador oversees the UN peacekeeping operation that began in 2014 and another Rwandan heads up the local World Bank office. Rwanda has committed more than 2,000 peacekeepers under UN auspices and 1,000 other troops by bilateral agreement. Since a 2020 outbreak of fighting in the CAR’s civil war, they’ve been combating rebel groups alongside the national army and Wagner fighters—though they’re generally respected and don’t share the Russian group’s reputation for brutality.
Rwanda’s military presence also protects its commercial interests. The strategy is perhaps most evident 100 miles southwest of the CAR capital, Bangui, where scores of Rwandan miners work beneath dense forest cover at three open pits, digging for gold and diamonds under the protection of Rwandan soldiers, in an operation run by OKO Africa, a joint venture of the two states.
The administration of President Faustin-Archange Touadera touts benefits such as employment and higher government revenue for Central Africans, but people living near the pits are less enthusiastic. “The mining exploitation is only done with machinery that is so high-tech that there is almost no local workforce, and it’s almost impossible to know the quantity of production,” says Serge Vonga, a local government official. When Rwandan miners first arrived in 2022, protests broke out in the nearby town of Bagandou because residents thought their land was being grabbed, according to miners and local officials. Touadera dispatched a delegation to “calm the situation and resolve things,” Vonga says.
Rwanda’s economic presence in the CAR has grown well beyond mining. A RwandAir Boeing 737 makes the round trip between Kigali and Bangui three times a week, ferrying executives and cargo loads of poultry, minerals and dried goods. Data from the CAR’s ministry of commerce count 119 Rwandan-owned businesses in natural resources, food production, construction, transportation and banking. A string of Rwandan bars and restaurants has opened in the past few years, and more Rwandans start businesses in the CAR than people from any country other than Chad or Cameroon, both neighbors with long-standing trade ties.
This economic activity is important enough to the CAR that Touadera has named a liaison to the Rwandan community to promote more investment. Patrick Bida Kouyagbele, an adviser to Touadera, says the CAR can learn from Rwanda’s experience of recovery from strife and polarization that descended into open conflict. “Rwanda has a performing economy, which can be looked at as a reference point,” he says. “They have made extraordinary efforts to come from where they were.”
Some are asking what, after the inevitable five more years, comes next. For decades, potential rivals have found themselves suddenly without a power base, exiled or dead. So Kagame now muses openly about succession on his terms. “Every time we are looking for a chairman and I come back again with 99.9%, I ask myself, why can’t it be someone else?” he said at his party’s annual convention in April. “That is the only way we can build something sustainable,” he added, before quickly catching himself. “What we are building is sustainable,” he said. “But if we can address that issue of finding a successor for continuity, it would be even better.”
Most observers doubt Kagame will try to install one of his children, though over the past few years his government has increasingly become a family affair. In January 2023, his son Ian joined the presidential guard. Seven months later, Kagame appointed his 29-year-old daughter, Ange, as deputy head of his influential policy and strategy council. Eldest son Ivan, 33, is a member of the Rwandan Development Board.
For critics, it just means more of the same, at the expense of most Rwandans. Victoire Ingabire, an opposition politician who was arrested and convicted on terrorism charges after she challenged Kagame in the 2010 election, says most Rwandans would welcome change. “After the genocide, I understand that President Kagame’s regime needed to control everything, but after more than two decades, it’s time to open our society so people can express their views,” she says. She was jailed until 2018, when Kagame granted her early release but barred her from leaving Rwanda. “If you talk to the government, they say Paul Kagame is popular,” Ingabire says. “Why can’t they give room to people like me to compete in the election? If he’s so popular, they shouldn’t be so afraid to be in a competition with someone like me.” —With Michael Kavanagh
I knew very little about Rwanda.
Snippets: Businessweek (By Neil Munshi and Simon Marks January 25, 2024)
How the West’s Favorite Autocrat Engineered Africa’s Most Dramatic Turnaround
Paul Kagame, the longtime president of Rwanda, wins plaudits abroad for making his tiny country a continental power. But the transformation has meant suppression of dissent and alleged assassinations of critics.
Once a year, Paul Kagame, the longtime president of Rwanda, hosts a nationally televised program known as Umushyikirano. It’s a unique spectacle, drawing millions of viewers to what amounts to the ritual opening of a complaint box. Kagame assembles politicians and public servants in the Kigali Convention Center, then relays criticisms of their performance and of programs they oversee, sent in via social media or from meeting halls across the country. He calls them to account, often in humiliating fashion.
At the event last February, a businessman rose to complain about having to visit up to five agencies to obtain licenses. This was despite the existence of a “one-stop center” on the ground floor of the Rwanda Development Board’s offices, where entrepreneurs are supposed to be able to get everything they need to set up a business, from permits to immigration services, within six hours.
Kagame proceeded to lay into Clare Akamanzi, chief executive officer of the development board. It was, he said, not the first time they’d had to discuss the Byzantine permit process that the one-stop center was supposed to solve. The center is “fully operational,” she replied.
“I am not impressed,” Kagame said. “For how long has the idea and principle of the one-stop center been there? It should have been operational.”
Akamanzi conceded that “there were some permits and licenses that were still being given by other institutions” before Kagame cut her off. “First answer my question,” he said. “What do you do? You are just there. You are the director of RDB, but you know nothing about one-stop center?”
She continued to apologize, and he kept hammering away, finally warning that he didn’t want to have the same conversation next year. “It should stop,” he said, “or you should stop.”
“Your Excellency, it is very well understood,” she replied. “I apologize for that, and we will make sure it’s done as best as we can going forward. Thank you.”
“I was called out badly,” Akamanzi said, laughing months later in her office in Kigali. “It was tough, you know?” But by the next day, she was fielding calls from every minister in the government, seeking to help. “Because of that, as you leave this building they can show you our one-stop center—all government permits are done here.” (In September, Kagame replaced Akamanzi as head of the RDB, after six years.)
Kagame, 66, came to power in 1994 after fighting through the bush and liberating Rwanda from a government that had just engineered a genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people, almost entirely from Kagame’s ethnic Tutsi minority. In the time since, he’s presided over a stunning transformation of a country that had essentially been abandoned by the world. Rwanda is landlocked and roughly the size of Belgium, with only 13 million people and none of the mineral riches of its larger neighbors. While some critics say the government manipulates statistics to embellish Kagame’s image, gross domestic product growth averaged 7.2% annually in the decade to 2019, and life expectancy jumped from 47.1 years to 66.4 between 2000 and 2019. The UN says Rwanda’s Human Development Index score more than doubled from 1990 to 2017—the world’s highest average annual growth rate. Foreign donors argue that the country’s paved roads and reliable electricity grid demonstrate that aid is spent as intended rather than finding its way into ministers’ pockets.
Over the decades, Kagame has become possibly the West’s most important African ally. The French owe him for sending troops to save Total’s massive liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique from jihadis; the British last year paid Rwanda £240 million ($304 million) to take in thousands of migrants being held in facilities in the UK (although no one has yet been deported, the affair has ignited a political firestorm for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak); the Americans would like his army to assume a piece of the mercenary business long dominated by Russia’s Wagner Group. Last year, Kagame was named the chair of the Commonwealth of Nations, which is made up mostly of former British colonies, though Rwanda never was one. His former foreign minister is the head of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, the French equivalent.
At the same time, Rwanda has become one of the world’s most polarizing nations—viewed from another angle as a Potemkin village led by an authoritarian monster. Kagame has essentially outlawed political opposition, backing his suppression of dissent with what critics including South Africa’s justice ministry, Human Rights Watch and British police say is a global assassination program, which one nongovernmental organization estimates has claimed the lives of hundreds of dissidents.
When Kagame came to power, he was left to try to resurrect the country, phoenix-like, after the government led by Hutus, roughly 85% of Rwanda’s population, massacred its Tutsi minority, who make up about 14%. Kagame was born to a family that fled to Uganda in 1959, along with 350,000 other Tutsis chased away by Hutu mobs. On his return to Rwanda, he served initially as vice president and defense minister—a Hutu figurehead was installed as president—but Kagame was in charge from the beginning. He instituted a program designed to erase ethnicity from the national conversation, starting with identification cards, and had the Rwandan army—effectively Kagame’s liberation troops—hunt down perpetrators of the genocide. Many were killed, along with tens of thousands of Hutu civilians, according to the UN and Human Rights Watch.
The new government rebuilt institutions that had been shattered or had never existed: ministries, the police force, the civil service. And it held a national dialogue that created the foundation for modern Rwanda. A constitution adopted in 2003 enshrined nine “homegrown solutions” from precolonial Rwanda—including Umushyikirano, “Abunzi” mediation committees, “Gacaca” community courts and “Imihigo” performance contracts—that supporters argue have driven its success.
Kigali, a green and hilly city of about 1.7 million people, serves as a living billboard for his benevolent dictatorship, with modern buildings, upscale restaurants and spotless streets that have become a cliché of foreign reporting. Police direct traffic and don’t solicit bribes. Petty crime is nonexistent. On the last Saturday of every month, people there and throughout the country participate in Umuganda, a mandatory cleanup of their communities. The strict control and outward signs of progress have led to another cliché: Rwanda as “the Singapore of Africa.”
Rwanda has become the third-biggest contributor to UN peacekeeping forces, in keeping with Kagame’s strategy and a principle enshrined in the country’s constitution. “After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, our government made a decision that we will do exactly what others failed to do in our case, wherever we are called upon,” says Brigadier General Ronald Rwivanga, the army’s spokesman. But because it has arguably the best-trained and most respected army in Africa, it has also been called upon to intervene in crises across the continent, with its army a kind of mercenary force.
Kagame’s approach has been pioneering, cementing relationships with distant neighbors and shielding Rwanda against criticism from Western states by protecting their interests in places they themselves won’t go—while, crucially, also offering an entree for Rwandan companies. Nowhere is that clearer than in the mineral-rich Central African Republic, where a former Rwandan ambassador oversees the UN peacekeeping operation that began in 2014 and another Rwandan heads up the local World Bank office. Rwanda has committed more than 2,000 peacekeepers under UN auspices and 1,000 other troops by bilateral agreement. Since a 2020 outbreak of fighting in the CAR’s civil war, they’ve been combating rebel groups alongside the national army and Wagner fighters—though they’re generally respected and don’t share the Russian group’s reputation for brutality.
Rwanda’s military presence also protects its commercial interests. The strategy is perhaps most evident 100 miles southwest of the CAR capital, Bangui, where scores of Rwandan miners work beneath dense forest cover at three open pits, digging for gold and diamonds under the protection of Rwandan soldiers, in an operation run by OKO Africa, a joint venture of the two states.
The administration of President Faustin-Archange Touadera touts benefits such as employment and higher government revenue for Central Africans, but people living near the pits are less enthusiastic. “The mining exploitation is only done with machinery that is so high-tech that there is almost no local workforce, and it’s almost impossible to know the quantity of production,” says Serge Vonga, a local government official. When Rwandan miners first arrived in 2022, protests broke out in the nearby town of Bagandou because residents thought their land was being grabbed, according to miners and local officials. Touadera dispatched a delegation to “calm the situation and resolve things,” Vonga says.
Rwanda’s economic presence in the CAR has grown well beyond mining. A RwandAir Boeing 737 makes the round trip between Kigali and Bangui three times a week, ferrying executives and cargo loads of poultry, minerals and dried goods. Data from the CAR’s ministry of commerce count 119 Rwandan-owned businesses in natural resources, food production, construction, transportation and banking. A string of Rwandan bars and restaurants has opened in the past few years, and more Rwandans start businesses in the CAR than people from any country other than Chad or Cameroon, both neighbors with long-standing trade ties.
This economic activity is important enough to the CAR that Touadera has named a liaison to the Rwandan community to promote more investment. Patrick Bida Kouyagbele, an adviser to Touadera, says the CAR can learn from Rwanda’s experience of recovery from strife and polarization that descended into open conflict. “Rwanda has a performing economy, which can be looked at as a reference point,” he says. “They have made extraordinary efforts to come from where they were.”
Some are asking what, after the inevitable five more years, comes next. For decades, potential rivals have found themselves suddenly without a power base, exiled or dead. So Kagame now muses openly about succession on his terms. “Every time we are looking for a chairman and I come back again with 99.9%, I ask myself, why can’t it be someone else?” he said at his party’s annual convention in April. “That is the only way we can build something sustainable,” he added, before quickly catching himself. “What we are building is sustainable,” he said. “But if we can address that issue of finding a successor for continuity, it would be even better.”
Most observers doubt Kagame will try to install one of his children, though over the past few years his government has increasingly become a family affair. In January 2023, his son Ian joined the presidential guard. Seven months later, Kagame appointed his 29-year-old daughter, Ange, as deputy head of his influential policy and strategy council. Eldest son Ivan, 33, is a member of the Rwandan Development Board.
For critics, it just means more of the same, at the expense of most Rwandans. Victoire Ingabire, an opposition politician who was arrested and convicted on terrorism charges after she challenged Kagame in the 2010 election, says most Rwandans would welcome change. “After the genocide, I understand that President Kagame’s regime needed to control everything, but after more than two decades, it’s time to open our society so people can express their views,” she says. She was jailed until 2018, when Kagame granted her early release but barred her from leaving Rwanda. “If you talk to the government, they say Paul Kagame is popular,” Ingabire says. “Why can’t they give room to people like me to compete in the election? If he’s so popular, they shouldn’t be so afraid to be in a competition with someone like me.” —With Michael Kavanagh