The record of Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, elected recently for a third consecutive seven-year term , is a mismatch of prosperity and persecution. The combination underpins the dangerous, if familiar, assumption that economic growth and an efficient administration are a fair trade-off for the democratic rule of law and free expression of dissent. A former guerrilla leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Mr. Kagame is credited with the restoration of peace and security after the 1994 genocidal killings of some 8,00,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu sympathisers.
But in the years since, his past military instincts seem to have got the better of Mr. Kagame. Multi-party elections held periodically since 2003 have been all but a near monopoly of the RPF. Many of the regime’s dissenters are either in exile or face constant threats. The meticulous planning that goes into the country’s feted infrastructure development may be evidence of a rational approach to nation building. The absence of street-level corruption likewise may imply a firmness of purpose. But the attempt to foster reconciliation between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi communities seems to betray the same impatience for results. In the years after the massacres, perpetrators and victims were told to affirm a Rwandan identity rather than remember their particular ethnicity. To emphasise one or the other was frowned upon as “divisionism”. Such quick fixes could be a case of social engineering carried to a clinical extreme with potential risks.
On the external front, Mr. Kagame seldom ceased to leverage the moral guilt among donor nations on their failure to intervene in the genocide and subsequent humanitarian relief and refugee crises in neighbouring Congo. For their part, western countries began to count on Rwanda’s strongman as a shining light of human development thanks to the comprehensive socio-economic transformation he spearheaded. “Impressive but repressive,” was a familiar refrain among the aid and business communities about his authoritarian ways.
Impulse for self-perpetuation
Rwanda has registered average annual growth figures of 5% for over a decade. The country also jumped many notches up the World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ index. The proportion of women represented in Parliament is said to be one of the highest in the world. Mr. Kagame was also nominated to the UN Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group by Ban Ki-moon. These achievements should be enough for the man to rank among Africa’s finest leaders. But the impulse for self-perpetuation rather than a place in history has apparently influenced the President’s actions in recent years. He accordingly ensured the prolongation of his rule, through a 2015 constitutional amendment, to allow him to run for three more terms, subsequently ratified in a popular referendum.
His victory this August is only the first of them. His tinkering with the Constitution as well as his politics of fear have drawn widespread international condemnation. Also, there are concerns regarding Rwanda’s democratic future in view of the entrenched one-man rule and fear of a Hutu reprisal.
