Liberia: a virginity that was De-flowered

As you meddle through Uhuru Park, where independence was proclaimed, one of the street takes you through down-town or central Nairobi. Here you see nicely laid out government and ministries buildings. There are virtually no aggressive petty traders and hawkers. You also, not even miles away, see part of the glory of Nairobi economy-industrial and manufacturing sites for fruits and alcoholic beverages and building materials on both edges of the streets with their well manicured pavements and dotted lane gardens. But soon, its farewell to the city, a dual road the left lane which takes you to the airport and the right towards Mombasa and as far as the Tanzania boarder with Kenya. The tarred roads give way to untarred and pot-holed navigation of vehicular movements. And then you see also more bicycles riders, way-side food vendors avoiding the splashing of liquefied mud from speeding vehicles. Traffic wardens, some with faded uniforms bid your passage through.

We were travelling to Kajiado, a district about one and half hours from Nairobi. On this particular day, rains have come down and so the driver- a Kenyan lady was anticipating that it would take more hours. The stimulus to this economic infrastructure- between the city and rural Kenya is the construction of huge bridges, expansion of road-net by busy Chinese engineers and masons and their Kenyan counter-parts. These are common sites in Africa in the last ten years; the so-called Chinese presence which had changed the trade formula, aid architecture and economic governance between Africa and the rest of the world. This presence has been reinforced by the China Africa Policy of 2006 ⁷ with its great emphasis on financial cooperation, resource cooperation and infrastructure development. This was born also of the China-Africa Forum for Cooperation ⁷ which pitched the leadership of Africa against China in Beijing for mutual benefits.

Interestingly, no policy for Africa, whether of the decades old bilateral ones with colonial ‘masters’ EC-ACP agreement, US Africa Policy, France –Africa Cooperation or Japan’s TICAD have made much impression within a decade as China’s. They work according to country specification and needs avoiding issues of governance and human rights in despotic societies. Some western critics have characterize these as neo-colonial as China’s growth of 9% and more becomes a challenge to their monopoly of leadership. But perhaps if this is the fulfillment of Napoleon’s prophecy that China was a sleeping giant and that its awaken will tremble the earth , little did he know that Africa would serve as one of the engines of that awakening through the supply of its natural resources particularly energy.

The World Bank through a study it conducted into Sino-Africa relations and published in 2007 as, Africa’s Silk Road-China and India’s New Economic Frontier ⁸ did not support this neo-colonial characterization at the end of the first decade of this century. Africa has benefitted at least for the first decade. The problem has been that Africa has negotiated badly from the 1960s with its European partners on its concession agreements for natural resources. Even Nkrumah the apostle of anti-colonial and liberal models negotiated badly on the VALCO with Kaiser. If capacity for that was low at the time it has not improved drastically today as the global multilateral trading system has become more complicated because of the integration of economies- small and big and the many disadvantages of been outside of it.

Does the $40 billion investment in Africa by 2010 (from $400 million in the early 2000s) so far reflect growth into Africa’s future?

We-I and the two European World Food Programme officers in the car knew that some of these mega infrastructural projects we were seeing were critical to the urban-rural bridge that Africa needs for stimulation. The danger also lies in the Chinese penetration into the retail business restricted for locals . In Africa in their tens of thousands, it is one of the reasons for the frosty relations between some Zambian workers and Chinese expatriates. It also explains the arrest in December 2010 in Ghana of some Chinese mining workers without work permit and disrespectful towards local people and environmental preservation. Some of these thoughts and discussions served us well as we passed drought village by village, somersaulting roads into destination.

Kufuor the World Food programme Ambassador against Hunger was in another car behind us. The visit to Kenya and its rural parts were indeed to afford him an intimate field working relationship .

Kajiado’s uniqueness is in its level of poverty. With a population of [ ] they occupy north west of the country. Within it we drove to Mailua- home to the Maasi ethnic group famous for their cultural ways and by-ways as nomads who for centuries have straddled through rural Kenya and even Uganda. With their ethnic totems of bright colours and dresses, big ear holes and hanging rings, the origins in Europe today of pierce skins and tongues could have been copied from here. The economic assets of these ancient people are in the population of the cattle and other livestock. The vegetation for the stock is what adds value to their assets. But climate changes and the advent of drought which has killed thousands of those livestock as well as the vegetation and water sources should change their life styles. You feel the severe Harmatten and other forms of dry winds as trees have died, the soils are depleted partly due to grazing; the adults and infants who are malnourished, sickly, of course unskilled in many ways .

The problem has been how to persuade these pastoralists to diversify their thinking- to realize that they could go into crop farming with bigger dividends, ensure good health, better drinking water, and security of their children. Kufuor spoke to hundreds of Maasei adults and children as they congregated at a small local church about these. They sang for him Maasei praise poems and presented him with a walking stick and hand beads in their colours- a vocation engaged in by women with some little revenue coming from the tourism market. The congregation apart from listening were also coming for their daily rations of rice, beans, and cooking oil . Kufuor gave each according to the family size. Happily they collected these and happily back to the hunts.

There are no way children here- with no idea of the world beyond them, lower life expectation ratio could be part of a future globalization of human capacity utilization.

But again it is interesting how cultural attitudes and practices can influence the potential for growth. The agricultural drought lands, with hilly contours in Kenya, that makes farming sometimes so difficulty, cuts across into Kamal Elhagfarah and Dabae (not far from the Ethiopia town of Nazareth). Standing here on a previous visit, the vistas, one official explained, extends as far as to Botswana, where again nomadic attitude prevails in a small part.

In these villages in Ethiopia contrast to Kajiado however, we met farmers with the right attitudes engaged in MERET- Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transition to More Sustainable Livelihoods, a programme the government had initiated with the WFP. It gets food insecure communities not only to rehabitate the unfriendly environmental conditions but in income generating activities to improve lives. This is augmented by experimenting with seedlings, and better crop yields; working with extension officers and WFP advisors from Nazareth.

The programme seeks to also build feeder roads which would make it easier to transport crops to the destined markets, reforest barren hillsides, restore springs and rainwater ponds as well as the reconstruction of agricultural terraces. Few years after over 400,000 people working in over 200 villages across the country have improved their farms and seen higher producer price for cash crops which are reflected in better homes- from small , thatched mud hut to new and better homes.

Here at least one of the farmers as usual poor in outlook explained the difficulties of production process to Kufuor. With a mobile phone in hand, he was leader of a small cooperative talking of what he does (the types of trees they have planted which bring nitrogen to the soil and help with water retention) when the phone rang. Curious enough there is no electricity in Dabe but this farmer told me he charges the phone every other day in Nazareth- over 30 miles away in anticipation of calls from extension officers or traders. He also shares the phone with others.

Though Ethiopia also has a pastoral population whose infants like those of Mailua, school attendance is encouraging because of the School Feeding Programme of WFP. Prime Minister Zeles Menawi was particularly concerned about that as he told Kufuor during discussions with him in Addis Ababa- a model Aid dependency he wants to avoid though in principle he supports the programme. But definitely food or relief could be a first step or emergency option for arresting a bigger worrying problem of rural and pastoral poverty. That dependency is not reliable is inherent in the fact of laziness it creates in people not to cultivate the soil. But it could also become a political weapon when distribution excludes opposition to the politics of the distributors.

If you were in Kenya on the day of the promulgation of the new Constitution-August 27, two years into the Government of national unity , you could think wrongly that an antidote has been found for the country’s many ills. Devolution of power from Nairobi to the grassroots- so that communities could at least have input in fashioning their destines and addressing some of the challenges they had gone through were what the new Constitution seeks to fulfil. At least that is what part of it says. The judiciary has been known to be corrupt and least a check on the executive; the police service was worst- recruitment had been based on ethnic basis sometimes as had promotion through the ranks. Senior officers ensure that lucrative or special departments are filled by relatives and those without ethnic or other contact hardly got promotion. These and other public institutions were not functioning effectively. A police officer told me the junior ranks as in other institutions were fully in support of the new Constitution after a referendum . Those against were members of the established order who for generations have ensured nepotism prevailed. Interesting aspects of the Constitution which takes full effect when a new Government emerges out of the Coalition include the clause that the position of the Inspectaor General of Police(IGP) be advertised and that an IGP need not be a police officer. An attempt by Kibaki to impose a chief Justice after the promulgation of the Constitution was resisted by the people and the court uncharacterically rejected that.

Infact on the day of promulgation, Uhuru Park which is perhaps bigger in land side then Freedom House in Pretoria had overreached itself with 150,000 people . At the stroke of the pen, a 21 –gun salute, “the nation shed off a set of laws inherited from the British and entered a new constitutional dispensation in which the powers of the Presidency will be reduced.”

The heads of state who had witnessed this had also included some of those who helped to save the country in the aftermath of the electoral disputes. As Kofi Annan entered the grounds cheers was infections; Kufuor who the Daily Nation ⁹ a day before had described as “The Man Who Saved Kenya” received an equally standing ovation as he walked through, others including Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni, Union of Comoros’ Ahmed Abdallah Sambi and controversial Sudan’s Omar-alBashir. But it was really the coming unto the stage of Ralia Odinga to speak that excited the Park; and he did so in the language of the masses, the antics he displayed, the parables he deployed and his power of oratory was such that even those on the VIP including Kofi Annan were turning their backs for translations with unimaginable joy and honorific adoration from the crowd. He mentioned, as a vintage politician would the revere names of liberation leaders- Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, his father and many others.

The crowd was really expectant- those who had engaged in violence and made others widows and those who had not were one as a nation . As the military assets passed by- the tankers, the elements of power and destruction, armored cars with soldiers armed and showing their readiness to defend the nation from external aggression, you could think of how the same weapons could be unleashed on the people not long ago.

Nana Effah-Apenteng retired from Ghana’s diplomatic service on good standing; his last posting was as Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the UN in New York. Kufuor had appointed him as special advisor on African Union affairs in 2007.He worked with the Panel of Eminent African Personalities and became Chief of Staff, Coordination and Liaison Office in Nairobi. Assuming initially that the assignment would run for some few weeks Kofi Annan anticipated a long drawn out one. In his third year by 2011, the office was responsible for ensuring the reform agenda through the KNDR were followed with monitoring and evaluation as objectives. So much institutional publications of the causes of the conflict and its effects on Kenya’s march for progressive nation building had been done. The Kofi Annan Foundation based in Geneva and African Union alone had complied and edited a 1000 page document, the Society for International Development started a series on the general theme of, Constitutional Working Papers; but there is nothing more interesting then getting Kenyans themselves to talk about these issues. The KNDR’s third annual conference, Building a Progressive Kenya from December 5-6 2011 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel was typical. 500 people attended .

Yet these challenges were at the dawn of post-colonial Kenya issues to be overcome with patriotism. Kenya’s foremost novelist and playwright Ngugi Wa Thiong O at 26 was representative of the optimism of his generation after the effects of the Mau Mau rebellion. In the new Kenya, both the intellectual and craftsman, the teacher, the nurse, the peasant would all help, as in Weep Not, Child, to serve the country. Forgotten was the type of leadership to drive this optimism. Thirteen years after in 1977, he had written the play, I Will Marry When I Want a controversial but critical one of injustices and inequalities affecting ordinary Kenyans; a play staged by peasant actors and actreeses in an open village theatre in Limuru. Playwright is imprisoned for incitement. He gets more frustrated and wrote, The Devil on the Cross three years after. Post-colonial optimism has become a pesstimistic enterprise.

Chinua Achebe had in a popular dirge to African leadership in 1983 written on Nigeria and really, Africa : “ The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

Kabeberi, speaking on top of her voice at this dialogue room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel looked very frustrated. Ngugi and Achebe live their frustrations in exile but not everybody can afford that; so you contest: “ Denmark has used its Constitution for 125 years and amended it only twice- to allow women to vote and to have a double legislative chamber ……” It is a confused leadership that would want to change something it has not used or a confused individual who has bought a new cloth and without using it throws it away as an old item.

The testing and operation of the constitution would be hard because of the lack of precedent of practice. It would be many years before temptation not to tamper sinks in. Even the rejection of a ‘Chief Justice’ almost imposed on the nation which I thought was a victory for democracy was no victory in the argument of Kabeberi: “ We should not go to court to enjoy the rights provided for in our Constitution.”

When in the course of the dialogue, Graca Machel, Member of the African Union Panel of Eminent African Personalities, spoke as a respectable outside looking in, she pleaded with them to answer this important modern qualification in whatever they did: what is Kenya’s national identity or the soul or DNA ? In a society where even religious or faith based organizations gravitate toward ethnic sponsorship for political victory, that question under the lubric of a One Kenya, One People was in order. And this particular session was colorful enough to reflect Kenya’s diversity- a retired bishop of the Methodist Church of Kenya, Chairman of the Luo Council of Elders, Chairman of the Kalenjin Council of Elders, Chairperson of the League of Muslim Women of Kenya, an executive Director of the Muslim for Human Rights, the National Coordinator of the Ukambani Progress Forum and many others constituting a panel and interacting with a multitude of local and international stalkholders. They all agreed on the challenges and on the solutions, yet it is some of the same leadership elements that fail to construct the Kenyan national identity by sticking to their individuals parts. But then, a national identity has its limited uses such that even if Kenyans find one, they will still have work to do in building a cohesive society. It was a search for national identity and the inevitable importance of oneness that brought England, Wales and Scotland together for a British identity in the late 1890s. Yet it did not completely obliterate what makes an English, a Welsh or Scottish as seen in the devolution of powers and strengthening of their respective selves before the end of the twenith century. The same could be said of the Blakans before it became Yugoslavia and then again the disintergration to its unit parts in the 1990s. But attainment is still a first step to look forward to.

A very beautiful country with a capital that is perfectly constructed with big parks and shady trees, Nairobi is perhaps the only capital in much of Sub-saharan that you drive through massive avenue trees and where it is an offence to cut trees. That this orderly environment produces a controversial ruling class that much of the citizenry blame for human development is an irony of beauty without growth. They have nothing but their determination to change the unwanted status quo.

-December 2011

Notes

1. 
   Weru, Gakiha, “ End of all-powerful President” in Saturday Nation, August 28 2010. p24. The Saturday Nation, published by the Nation Media Group (also publishers of Daily Nation) is one of the influential weeklies in Kenya.
   
2. 
   Robert H. Bates, a scholar and professor of the science of government at Harvard has done cutting edge research on the economy of development in Africa. Among some of his influences had been the publication of, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
   
3. 
   William Ochieng’s quotation from De-colonisation and Independence in Kenya is cited from the review essay, “Quest for True Change Started a Year After Independence Over Imperial Presidency”, by David Aduba, Daily Nation, August 27 2010, p9.
   
4. 
   wa Muiu, Mueni, “United States Foreign Policy toward Kenya” in, Assessing George W. Bush’s Africa Policy and Suggestions for Barack Obama and African Leaders, published in New York: iUniverse, 2009. This is an anthology on foreign policy and development by mainly African academics meant to influence for good US policy on Africa .
   
5. 
   Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta was first published in London by Secker and Warburg . It was also one of the early books to be published under the Heinemann African Writers Series .
   
6. 
   Wrong, Michela, Its Our Time to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle- Blower (London: Harper, 2009).
   
7. 
   The China-Africa Forum for Cooperation was established to help with Africa’s bilateral relation with China.
   
8. 
   Broadman, Harry, Africa’s Silk Road- China and India’s New Economic Frontier (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007).
   
9. 
   Daily Nation, August 27, 2010, p6.
   

Rwanda: The Beautiful Mountains of Kigali.

Rwanda has a beautiful landscape. The curves leading to the green mountains if you drive around central Kigali makes it a ring city. But the beauty beholds you from the sky. If you are entering it from Nairobi and passing through Tanzania airspace, you see the western part of Lake Victoria. You also see as you descend gradually into Kigali, the many lakes and rivers surrounding this country of 26,338 km2. You are within, without been told the Great Lakes region though geographic location is central Africa. On its northern boarder is Uganda, its east, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo and to its south, Burundi. Between them they have enough lakes, minerals and others whose source for energy consumption and export volumes for the region, the rest of Africa, according to experts cannot be underestimated. Yet it is one of the most conflict prone -ethnic and religious corners of the world.

Sadly, Rwanda, roughly 11 million in population only came to global limelight through its 1994 genocide. How come one people- who speak the same language, share the same traditions and cultures and for centuries lived together could one day in April decide on an extermination spree in the context of eliminating the Tutsis- (the favored group of the Belgian colonialists) by their Hutu brothers and sisters, the majority? Where the now Kigali Memorial is in Gisozi was the central gory point. Built with the assistance of the Kigali City Council, the government of Belgium, Sida, the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation but working also with the Pears Foundation of Britain , here alone, over 250,000 people are buried, the climax of a long story from 1959.

Once- centuries ago, Hutus- the majority group with 75 per cent of the numbers, Tutsis 14 percent, and the Twa 1 percent lived in harmony. Whatever divisions existed was purely on social basis until European colonial rule by particularly Belgium in 1894 turned these normal divisions into ethnic cleavages. They favored the Tutsis because of multiple constructions they made of their beauty, intelligence and other sensibilities notwithstanding the fact that they were virtually nothing to distinguished a Hutu from a Tutsi. This categorization intensified as identification system- ID cards were issued and Tutsis were given more access to education, vocational skills and opportunities in social settings making them wealthier whether through further accumulation of economic assets- cows or other sources of wealth. This class division lowered the self-esteem of the Hutus to the extent that Tutsis who lost wealth, became lazy or unproductive were re-classified as Hutus. Like all colonial methodologies, traditional institutions, especially in Belgian rule as also witnessed in Burundi and the Congo were abolished or weaken using divide and rule tactics. Colonial rule might have brought some education, science and technology to a “dark” corner of the world but as we continued our journey in the museum, the guide, a genocide survivor commented, “But when the Belgians left, there was a country that had its independence but not its identity.” They had abolished monarchial rule of the Hutus in 1959 against their resistance with some going into exile in neighboring countries such as Burundi. By 1961 self-imposed exile was still fashionable and Paul Kagame only 4 years was exiled (with parents unable to stand anti-Tutsi feelings) to Uganda. Later in 1979 he would join the National Resistance Army of Yoweri Museveni. The Belgians finally left in 1962 but historians of the region say that 1959 was the defining moment-the preparation for genocide against Tutsis as manifest hatred built up and got to a climax from 1990-1993. The early 1990s started with the training of youth militia by the Hutus with the assistance of French government as small scale persecution of Tutsis in business, politics, and agriculture began.

Negotiations for a cease-fire on the initial skirmishes between the two group was signed between Habyarimana and his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in July of 1992 and agreed to in 1993 at the Arusha Peace Accords ¹ in Tanzania but it did not work. The hell of April 1994 was inevitable. When the plane flying the Hutu President of Rwanda- Habyarimana was shot air –borne on April 6 1994 by Hutu extremists (many say so though others think it was the opposite)but under the pretext that the pulpits were Tutsi, it was the immediate cause of the war. It had been planned by inference that immediately after the clash on slaughter of Tutsi should began. Thus habyarimana was sacrificed by his own to make a case for the genocide.

Already the ideology of genocide- the intellectual work of justification had been done. Apart from the notorious trio- Jean-Paul Akayesu(a teacher), Clement Kayishema and George Rutaganda all Hutu community leaders of good standing who between them were accused by the international tribunal of killing or instigating tens of thousands, there were others. One Hutu journalist- Hassan Ngeze whose quotation decorates the museum wrote before April 1994 that: “We say to the Inyenzi( cockroaches -that is the Tutsis) that if they lift their heads again, it will no longer be necessary to go fight the enemy in the bush. We will start by eliminating the internal enemy….. They will disappear.” ²

Gorier was the composition of the Ten Commandments by Hutu extremists giving ten reasons why Tutsis should all die. The first one stated : “Hutus must know that the Tutsi wife, wherever she maybe is serving the Tutsi ethnic group. In consequence any Hutu who does the following is a traitor- acquires a Tutsi wife, acquires a Tutsi mistress, and acquires a Tutsi secretary or dependent.” The last commandant says that “all Hutus should be taught at all levels the Hutu ideology- that is the 10 commandments.” ³

The Kigali Memorial is an emotional drench of sorrow. How could innocent children- from ages 5 months to 18 years, be killed alongside their mothers as they lie in pools of blood? Or how do you imagine asking your neighbor to kill your Tutsi wife of over 25 years of marriage whom you have 5 children with because you cannot do that yourself? How would the teenagers grow up- thousands and thousands of them who were sent to orphanages, to know the stories of how their parents died? What country are you in? The museum tour was in complete silence as we moved along to its end and as the women among us shed silent tears. What else? And do you ask for whom the bells toll? And when it was all over-an evil incarnate history of a 20^th century world, and when the killing fields had been created, and over a million people gone, the apologies followed.

But then the last apartment of the museum is also the most sorrowful probably to get the maximum effect. It breaks the heart and even murderous angels could hestitate. It has among the posters of dead children with short biographical notes one of a handsome confident looking boy:

David Mugitraneza ⁴

Age: 10

Enjoyed: Making people laugh

Dream: To be a doctor

Cause of death: Tortured to death

Last words: The United Nations will come for us.

For days it is said that it was this boy’s confidence that gave hope to the adults around in the face of imminent death. The UN did not come and so he died with many others. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had also been a pilgrim to the Memorial told leaders (45 in all) of the G8/G20 this story in July 2009 in northern Italy where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was in the chair. The meeting he recalled fell silent. “ David was a boy who had believed the best of an international community which had failed him.” ⁵ Berlusconi had tears in his eyes and Obama had since then made several references to David’s death. If only David’s faith could be restored even in death.

The UN which had left Rwanda when it shouldn’t through its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan said on the 10^th anniversary of the genocide: “I could and should have done more to stop the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago….. The international community failed Rwanda and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret.” ⁶ The Belgians apologized so did the French and it will be 16 years after that Rwanda would restore diplomatic relations with Sarkosy’s France.

Kufuor wrote in the visitor’s book as the journalists scrambled for space : “The World Must know of man’s capacity to do evil so as to be wiser and better. God have mercy on man.” But his voice was broken and it took him a while, an unusually long while to respond to questions from the journalists after the tour.

One will never understand until one experience it through a tour of this kind why Rwandese and Kagame in particular are very reluctant making references to Hutu and Tutsi particularities and peace-building alliances until this. One cannot also understand the anger that Rwanda generates against others and the UN until this. Though one cannot blame Kofi Annan personally for the UN failure, it’s still a stain. When in July 2010 I was paying for the purchase of Stanley Meister’s Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War ⁷ at a Waterstones bookshop in central London, someone in the queue looked at this particular title of those I was holding and said, “ah, the failure of Rwanda.” It had become Annan’s “annus horribilis.” The biographer admits it in the chapter, The Stain of Rwanda: “ There are naysers who have contempt for Kofi Annan because they believe he has the blood of Rwanda on his hands. Their disdain has not diminished over the years. They opposed his election to a second term as Secretary-General and his award of a Nobel Peace Prize, and they continually demanded that he resigned.”

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It was at the Des Mille Collines Hotel in Kigali where we lodged and sat over for an afternoon lunch that Gasamagera Wellars, a Member of Parliament told me that, Hotel Rwanda, the internationally acclaimed film of the genocide, was a metaphor of what happened at the Des Mille Collines. (Since then Rwanda had featured in more TV, radio, internet documentaries than any other Africa country in diasater including even the Congo crisis perhaps only equal to those on Apartheid South Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade). He had himself escaped to this hotel with his family though the father was butchered. They were among the 1,200 people that crowed for the three and half months turning corridors and every corner into a sleeping place. “ To this day, I feel safer in this hotel than walking across the streets of Kigali” he told me. They had escaped bomb attacks and seen from the hotel people been butchered and would forever be grateful to the Ghanaian contingent that protected many Rwandese slaughtered on the streets at cost to their own lives . The commander of the battalion, Henry Kwami Anyidoho’s account of the detailed events are in his 1997 published memoirs , Guns Over Kigali ⁸ ; of course a best seller in Rwanda.

Rwanda is by the 2010s dealing with the trauma of the genocide. About 200,000 people were initially arrested for the crimes. Some were released. The International Court of Tribunal (in Arusha) set up by the UN had a four year mandate but it passed its time and set a record in its investigation.(Its precedent, the Nuremberg trials lasted within four years.) At the end of it, it had tried 45 individuals, 17 were sentenced to life in prison, 9 to 25 years, 11 between 6 and 20 years. In Rwanda itself between 50,000-60,000 were on trial from 1996 but the number increased in 2001 to over 250,000 with the establishment of the “ Gacaca courts” using traditional alternative source of dispute resolution . Before the Gacaca courts the regular courts had between 1997 and 2002, tried 9,000 of Rwandans with 9 % sentenced to death, 36% of this number to life imprison and 20% acquitted. ⁹

Interpeace’s presence here is very positive and as it is their strategy, they found in Kigali a local NGO and empowered it to solve local problems. The Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace (IRDP)over the last decade has engaged in the restoration of interpersonal relations which had created mistrust and suspicion among people. It has been able to create in its decade of existence, a space for reflection and exchange by identifying possible obstacles to the delicate peace. “ It chose dialogue based on research involving Rwandans from all walks of life and drove a social transformative process in the search for consensual solutions aimed at preventing future conflicts.” ¹⁰

Headed by a professor of economics at the University of Rwanda, Rwanyindo and a team of well trained researchers using desk top, quantitative and focus group methodologies, it has through its annual National Group meeting brought peace builders- often 200 from all sections of Rwanda for discussions on issues to do with democracy and rule of law, local governance and citizen participation as well as ethnic identity in nation building.

Each year has had a theme reflecting on aspects of peace and development. Sometimes participants had joined from Somalia, Ethiopia and Burundi. The interesting and encouraging thing has to do with people whether at the meetings or those interviewed in the villages speaking freely on: procreation, ethnic relationship, agriculture and problems with extension officers. As many as 2,000 had been interviewed for 2010. These research works are then proceeded and has a way of influencing government policy since they work closely with the government.

The IRDP’s Peace Centre funded by the Japanese Embassy in Kenya and the Canadian International Development Agency has become a supplementary facility to help its work. Supported by the Interpeace, this huge building has space for real development, grass-roots debates, publications and filming of regular and annual proceedings as well as commissioned books, documentaries of the past and the way forward as you see children, students and adults- Hutus, Tutsis and Twa at the library . You will not make much of some of these peace analysis and issues until you have visited the memorial and known what the absence of these caused.

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Paul Kagame is an enigmatic figure in the politics and international relations of post-conflict nations. Very slim and tall he is a Tutsi. He is also laconic in conversations and philosophical. At 53, he has the confidence of his country and had just won over a 90 percent approval in general elections in October 2010 in a free and fair atmosphere. Opponents had criticized him for deliberately blocking the chances of major individuals and their parties on the pretext that they were engaged in ethnic politic . A close ally of Uganda’s Museveni (though they would later fall out on strategic and geo-political interest in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Kagame had stationed troops in eastern Congo-until 2002 against Rwandan dissidents suspected of participating in the genocide), he had left Rwanda at the age of 4 a victim of Hutu “banishment” and fought as a guerilla with the National Resistance Army in the bush . At the appropriate time, he would with the great force of the Rwanda Patriotic Front backed by Uganda seized power in October 1994 to become Vice President and Minister of Defense. He would in 2000 replace Pasteur Bizimungu (the Hutu president he has entered into alliance with) on political differences after Bizimungu resigned. He could have plunged the country further into ethnic cleansing as a revenge for the death of tens of thousands of his group. Though they also killed to gain power and a BBC profile of Kagame, Rwanda’s Strongman accuses him (citing a French judge) , of ordering the assassination of Habyarima- an act which sparked the killings, that is normally against conventional history of the genocide as he is known to have no genocide ideology. In the second week of January 2012, a French court that had done intensive investigation confirmed Hutu extremists and not Kagame most likely shot down the plane.

I was going to meet this man for the first time and at very close quarters. I had met him twice- at a conference organized by then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London in 2008 and at the promulgation of the new constitution for Kenya in Nairobi . Francis Gatare, his private secretary came to the hotel to take me there whilst Kufuor came in another car. In any case, the State House where he lives is about 5 minutes drive to the hotel. Like many Rwandese elite, Gatare had been trained at the Makerere University in Uganda, for many years, an Ivy university in east Africa which drew intellectuals from the surrounding countries and even other parts of the continent including Noble laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, Ali Mazuri from Kenya , the late famous Tanzania Marxist and politician also of Birebeck College, London, A.M. Babu ; even V.S. Naipaul held a residence fellowship for writing ; besides some of the future leaders of East Africa including Kibaki of Kenya were educated there too. Gatare until he assumed his current position was an economic advisor to the UN in Kigali and also worked in the public service in other capacities.

Security to the State House is so thorough that Gatare had to undergone a car search first, get clearance from the inner security before we passed through a detector on this late Sunday afternoon. The president, a globe trotter for development had returned from Italy barely a day before.

We sat for some few minutes in an adjacent office space within an obviously beautiful presidential palace built on enormous acreage of land; in an enclave of colonial Belgian space.

Pleasantries over, the media excused, Kufuor congratulated him on his election victory and co-operation with the Interpeace and the IRDP. With legs crossed, he nodded in appreciation as Kufuor told him, he “ sensed the government is a patron in a progressive movement of people and re-construction in Rwanda.”

“ Thank you Mr. President but it is in nobody’s interest if we don’t support. We supported it and will continue to do so. There are challenges and there will continue to be. There is no place without them but as long as there is good intentions, you can confront the challenges.”

Information Communication Technology is advanced in this country then other parts of Africa which has not experienced a history of trauma. In a large measure it is because, it has been a policy to use this era of technology for development. “ A Ghanaian professor, Mr. President, set up our IT policy and our relative success in this field had been his doing.” Kagame told us. And this interest and novelty is acknowledged world-wide through each child per lap-top policy which has been a template for other countries including Ghana-showing it is not just good policies but good-will at their implementation which makes a difference. With few embassies around the world, visas to the country are issued via the immigration department on the internet and fees paid through it or at the point of entry into the country.

We had driven extensively through the city and even though people told us that the provinces are more beautiful than what we saw especially if you are driving towards the Congolese boarder, we still saw beautiful sites and poverty and like many countries in Africa new construction . A UNICEF officer who had been in the country for nine years told us that most of what we saw within central Kigali had recently been built under Kagame and that when he came to the city around that period it was a shanty city . Six new areas were experiencing massive development as urbanization dawns on a people who had previously developed their provinces and villages instead of the capital. The foreign minister, Louis Mushikiwabo a lady in her 40s presumably, and who previously worked for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, told us of a spirit of development among the government and people which saw 30,000 classrooms built in 2009 alone. Still a poor country before the war, it made it no better.

On once been asked by a European journalist on what he thought about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict and how to solve it having done well with his own, Kagame said that that was not his specialty and that what he knew was, “If you have a problem owe it first before you find out the causes of it or blame other people for them.”

He also told us that, “politics can be irrational” which could be a truism but not many also reflect deeply on the other thing he said to us: “It’s the future we have to look at. I tell people it depends on what we want for the future. The genocide happened, there is nothing we can do about it but we can do something about the future.

“ The same human beings who could sit down to draw a master plan for the genocide, the same human it is who can do something for our recovery.”

After 40 minutes of livid conversation which also touched on Rwanda been the first country for the NEPAD’ Peer Review Mechanism ¹¹, Kagame closed on a note of how Africa should know itself better. Perhaps, he said, if the airline service he envisages comes true it would help with aviation and communication needs of central Africa and there could be flights to Ghana and other West African countries. Already, the rail lines from Kigali to other central and east Africa countries had caught the attention of the East Africa Common Market.

There is no doubt the genocide contributed to the poverty of the country at many levels. Many Rwandese working at the Civil Service, banks where monies were also looted, the UN agencies which suffered destruction of personnel and infrastructure and the private sector where industries and manufacturing bases were destroyed. The UNDP office just across the Des Mille Collines Hotel has a memorial for the staff that perished crossing over to the safety of the hotel .

Its explains in part why there is a good number of expatriates in central positions of the economic management of the country. Ghana alone has about 30 working as heads or senior managers with UNICEF, UNDP, MONUSCO, Ecobank, African Development Bank and, Rwanda’s Ministry of Infrastructure. The chief economic advisor to the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning , Fred Quarshie is a Ghanaian and head of this expatriate community . Maxwell Opoku-Afari who had worked in Accra as special assistant to the Governor of the Bank of Ghana in the 2000s and at the time of the visit a visiting senior economist of the African Department of the IMF was working on a three year policy support instrument for the country.

Kagame’s largely aid dependent economy is not so much Eurocentric as a pragmatic approach to where help will come from. Through bilateral relations there is an agreement with the Nigerian government for medical doctors to work in the country. A similar agreement with the Cuban government in Cuba where doctors are paid by the South Africa government. The ratio of doctors per patients had been deplorable and few years ago, there were only 20 dentists in the country.

But the economy of this post-genocide country should be respected more for the leadership that gave birth to it than the base on which it grew- Kagame’s personal style of leadership and sympathy from the world. All the indicators make it a poor country. For instance in an International Development Association (World Bank)and International Monetary Fund Joint Debt Sustainability Analysis approved in May 2010 it reported the following: “ Rwanda’s external debt of the central government (including guaranteed) at the end-2009 was US$ 749.1 million(14.4 percent of GDP). More than fourth-fifths of external central government debt is owed to multilateral creditors. External debt has declined from 85 percent of GDP in 2000-04 to about 15 percent of GDP since 2006, thanks to substantial debt relief. Rwanda reached the HIPC Completion Point in April 2005 and also benefitted from MDRI relief in January 2006. Domestic debt was RWf 228.3 billion (7.7 percent of GDP or about third of total public debt at end-2009, down from 13 percent of GDP in 2005-07. Within domestic debt, the end-2009 stock of short-term debt (Treasury bills and central bank monetary instruments) was equivalent to 3.1 percent of GDP.” ¹²

The government’s Vision 2020 ¹¹ seeks to ensure that the country attains a middle income economy- an annual per capita of $900 from an earlier $380 in 2000 ; reducing poverty to 30 percent from 60.4 percent and life expectancy to 55 from the 49 of 2000 figures. The vision will depend on six pillars for realization:

1. 
   Good governance and a stable state
   
2. 
   Human resource development and a knowledge based economy
   
3. 
   A private sector economy
   
4. 
   Infrastructure development
   
5. 
   Productive and Market Oriented Agriculture
   
6. 
   Regional and International Economic integration.
   

The Government’s self-promotion literature, Rwanda- A Rising Star- 2003-2010, on critical examination paints a donor economy trying to be self-reliant: dependence had been 70 percent until 2009 when it came down to 52 but there had been agriculture growth. With 80 percent of the people involved in agriculture it generates over 40 percent of its Gross Domestic Product . And this has reflected in its growth of 10.4 % in 2009 increasing the export volume of its cash crops- tea exports from $22.6million to $48.7 million in 2009 with a target of reaching $90 million in 2012 as value addition take hold instead of just raw materials; coffee from nothing in 2000 to $37.29million in 2009.¹³ These are enlargement to the sector as facilities such as washing stations keep increasing by the day.

These infrastructures are just developing and there are no coffee or tea brokerages to gauge the international markets and its affiliation with the International Coffee Association and related bodies . In fact there are those who think the genesis of the genocide has been deprived of its political economy causes. In the essay, Coffee and Genocide- a Political Economy of Violence in Rwanda,¹⁴ Isaac A. Kamola, a political scientist argues that it was as the world price of coffee began to collapse that Rwanda’s political troubles intensified. In one year alone- 1986-87 the country’s revenue fell from 14 billion to 5 billion RwF. It got worst after they failed to re-negotiate the International Coffee Agreement. “By situating the Rwandan genocide within the broader context of the international coffee economy, it becomes evident that the violence was not merely a ‘local” conflict, nor was it strictly an ‘ethnic’ conflict. Instead, the conditions for genocide were actively produced by human activity taking place across the planet. The social relations produced by the coffee economy (and its eventual collapse) intersected, overlaid, recorded, and fragmented what were already historically and materially situated “ethnic”, religious, regional, political, institutional, personal, and market relationships.”¹⁵

The role of this commodity not necessarily in the Rwanda genocide but implicit in the case of Ethiopia is show-cased in the 2006 TV documentary, Black Gold directed by Marc Francis and Nick Francis.¹⁶

Still, huge attempts at infrastructure and institutional development finance are ongoing: There had been banking reforms-the Financial Sector Development in 2006; the Rwandan Stock Exchange was established in 2008 with seven brokerage houses ; the Rwandan Revenue Authority was established in 1997 as part of reforms designed to restore and strengthen the “ main economic institutions of the country”; the effectiveness of micro-credit to peasants and others. In fact reporting of Rwanda in this period- 2005-2007, and of its public financial management, the World Bank and the Organization for Economic and Development (OCED) said: “Rwanda recorded significant improvements in the quality of public financial management systems over the period 2005-2007 meeting an internationally agreed target well in advance of 2010 deadline.” ¹⁷

It could be argued in defense of HIPC that countries that take the programmes, enjoy debt forgiveness and have the vision to pursue the objectives of poverty reduction programmes benefit. The economy of Rwanda maybe aid dependent and so long as they make use of this and the leadership is focused, it could graduate to another level as seen in economic history of Korea after its terrible three year war (1950-53), the first Cold War confrontation on Asian soil involving all the major protagonists as well as Japan in East Asia and even Britain( which saw a third of its economy destroyed ) , after the end of the second World War. They relied on the famous aid package of the Marshall Plan to re-build infrastructure and also loans for businesses and industries. If Japan could turn round to the United States after 1945 to re-align in geo-political strategies and benefit in economic and military terms Rwanda could. By joining the Commonwealth, the second non British colony after Mozambique for technical and multilateral assistance in 2009 and also re-establishing diplomatic ties with France, it is moving in the right direction. By this, it is following a foreign policy or economic diplomacy typical of much of the developing world without geo-political or security importance to those who call the shots.

Again by abolishing the death penalty, a policy that surprised many people because of its recent past, the country endeared itself to human right organisations around the world. It has its economic dividends since many of the anti-death penalty advocates are within the OECD.

The world could be what anybody makes of it.

The modern economic architect of Rwanda however is, the former finance minister, Donald Kaberuka who now presides over the African Development Bank in Tunisia. He became President in September 2005 after a fiercely contested election with giants that included K.Y. Amoako, former executive director of the UN Economic Commission of Africa. He had been recognized partly because he made something into the future of Rwanda and not turning back into the past. Kaberuka had said in 2005 and this is still a mantra at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning that:

“We will continue to maintain sound fiscal and monetary policies consistent with our growth objectives. We are fully conscious that macro-economic stability is a necessary but no sufficient condition for economic growth. We should also be aware that instability is a tax on the poor and a brake on private investment. We need to maintain sustainable fiscal stances, contain government expenditure and avoid lax monetary policies. We must always steer clear of what look like easy options but which are actually damaging in the long term.” ¹⁸