The Population Equation

The Independent (Kampala)

Didier Bikorimana

22 April 2011

Paulina Utabizi is rebelling. The 39-year-old mother of three expects to eventually have a fourth child, violating a government family planning policy that requires all Rwandan households to have a maximum of three children.

“I notice that with only four children, we can still be able to get them food, send them to school and put them in the health insurance scheme,” says Utabizi from her home in Muyogoro, a suburb about 10 kilometers away from Butare town in south Rwanda. “A disease may take away one or more of our children and that’s why we plan to have more than three children — just in case.”

Both Utabizi and her husband cultivate their land around their house to help take care of their children. However, Utabizi is aware that should she and her husband exceed four children, their land would become too small for their children to share.

According to a report on the National Agricultural Survey carried out by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda from September 2007 to August 2008, agriculture accounts for a third of Rwanda’s GDP and constitutes the main economic activity for rural households. In 2005 and 2006, the agricultural population was estimated to constitute 89.6 percent of the total population.

With a fertility rate of 5.4 births per woman, and a population growth rate of 2.9 percent, Rwanda’s estimated population of 10.4 million is on path to double in size in just 24 years, according to data from the Population Reference Bureau, a world population monitoring agency.

Though these statistics are only slightly higher than the sub-Saharan Africa averages, the Population Reference Bureau reports they are of particular concern in a country where the economy is agriculture-based and where agriculture has little physical space to expand.

Domitilla Kankindi, a 62 year-old widow with six children lives a stone’s throw from Utabizi’s home. In the early 1970s, the family moved to the capital Kigali after her late husband had secured a job there as a housekeeper. But in the years after the 1994 genocide, the family decided to return to their home town in Muyogoro.

For Kankindi, life has become much harder since then and now believes that it wouldn’t be wise for current and future generations to have as many children as she did. “My husband could get a monthly salary of 1200 Rwandan Francs (two US dollars) and it could feed us all the month,” she says. “But today five thousand Rwandan Francs (eight US dollars) can hardly feed us for one day. Can you imagine?”

Samuel Hakizimana, 24, one of Kakindi’s children seems to have heeded his mother’s advice. Still single, Hakizimana has gone as far as primary six, but for him, the number of children he’s likely to have will depend on his means to look after his wife and his children. “I plan to have a maximum of three children. Otherwise I won’t be having enough land to distribute to each of them and pay for their studies,” he says.

Regis Dukuzumuremyi is yet another single young Rwandan student who is not interested in having more than three children once married. Dukuzumuremyi, a final year computer science student at the National University of Rwanda, alludes to what he calls “the dire life” in Rwanda today to worry about his would-be children. “I want to first save some money for my children”, he says, “in case of sudden death.”

“The Rwandan government’s main concern today,” says Dr Richard Sezibera, Rwanda’s Health Minister in a phone interview, is that “the population growth must match the economic growth.”

Back in 2007, BBC reported that Rwanda was planning to limit couples to no more than three children because of rising poverty in Africa’s most densely populated country and the government was reportedly holding discussions with church leaders hoping to win their support for population control.

The health ministry, says Dr. Sezibera, has also initiated a series of family planning measures, including condom use for males and females, pills, abstinence and vasectomy, a minor surgical procedure that makes men sterile.

A man living in Busogo Sector of Musanze District, North of Rwanda, says he underwent vasectomy because he was incapable of caring for a seventh child. “I still enjoy sexual intercourse with my wife as if nothing had happened,” he says.

More than six men, reports say, have already undergone vasectomy in the Busogo Sector.

But according to other Rwandans, vasectomy should still be an option for someone in their mid-forties. Others go a step further and say vasectomy would be a sign of disrespect.

“People should respect themselves and be proud of how God created them and therefore any attempt at altering any parts of the human body would be a way of disrespecting the Creator,” says Father Achille Ebawe who is in charge of Evangelisation in all Rwandan households for the Catholic Church.

As the World Health Organisation reports, vasectomy is very safe and is nearly 100 percent effective for preventing pregnancy. It does not, however, protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

But the whole idea of vasectomy is not good news in some Rwandan academic circles.

“Denying people the right to self propagation on basis of their failure to meet costs for their children ought to be an issue of utmost concern for the international community,” wrote Dr. Charles Kambanda, a Rwandan academic and lecturer at St. John’s University Law School in New York, USA in an opinion article dated February 10, 2011. “Targeting the poor with vasectomy is presumed forceful because the poor always lack free will. Vasectomy in this unique Rwandan context might amount to a crime against humanity. The essence and function of government is redistributing resources and power among the citizens. Vasectomy in Rwandan context manifests government failure to perform its core functions and responsibilities.”

However an opinion article that appeared in The New Times newspaper, Rwanda’s Daily, on Feb. 16 by Dr Sezibera said: “There is no left, right, or center in this program, just the reality of the imperative to match Rwanda’s population growth with her capacity to provide her sons and daughters with the wealth and dignity they deserve.” He then added that “those who say the program is only aimed at the poor should be dismissed with the contempt they deserve. The claim that the vasectomy drive is aimed at some specific section of Rwanda’s society is too contemptible to be dignified with a response.”

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