The Nation’s Unusual Way

The Independent (Kampala)

Joseph Were

27 May 2011

opinion

Unlike most international airports, the departure lounge at Kigali International Airport is one large hall the size of a standard lawn tennis court with a section hewn off for the VIP. So its three ‘gates’, as the departure doors are called in the language of air travel, appear as superfluous as the shuttle bus that drives you to the plane just 20 metres away. As one leaves this country, with its reticent people and inscrutable ways, one thinks about such little niceties which are, in fact, not superfluous. Nothing in Rwanda is opulent. But almost everything shows the staid determination of this country to make every Franc and every life count.

Driving through the new Kigali suburb of Nyarutarama, with its new, well-lit and paved streets, neatly arranged bungalows, manicured lawns and flower-lined walking tracks and swanky restaurants, it becomes obvious that it is the spirit of the new Rwanda. The old Kiyovu suburb, with its dilapidated tiny asbestos roofed maisonettes and rickety gates is the fading old capital.

Until four years ago, Jean Gakwaya, lived in the worst part of this Kiyovu called Kiyovu yabacene; ‘Kiyovu of the poor’. His was a mud and wattle house, without water and electricity. Today, the 36-year-old carpenter lives in a well built burnt-brick house with all modern amenities in a planned settlement called Batsinda on one of the many lush green hills a few kilometres from the capital. Everything here is new, including Gacuriro Road which leads to Batsinda just off the new main highway to Byumba, north of Kigali.

The government, through Kigali City Council, with funding from the Housing Bank of Rwanda, built Gakwaya’s house and 250 others at about US$6000 each. It compensated him for his former shanty, and offers him subsidised services like improved earth roads, piped water, cooking biogas, and bus transport to his new community of two bed-roomed homes with inside toilet and kitchen. Gakwaya, like his neighbours in the new settlement, was supposed to service a sort of mortgage for his new home but to date there has been no attempt by the City Council to collect it.

Surprisingly, Gakwaya does not find it unusual that the government is doing all this for him. He also takes for granted the health insurance, Mutuelles de santé, that the government provides him and 98% of all Rwandans. Never mind that when he fell off a four-storey block he was roofing, the insurance scheme to which he contributes a paltry equivalent of US$2 every year in member premium, forked out Rwandan Francs 450,000 (approx. US$ 750 or two times his annual income) for his treatment.

Gakwaya’s attitude is typical in the new Rwanda. He says without Mutuelles de santé he would possibly be dead, he loves his new home, and is grateful that the government helped his community set up the Obumwe Batsinda cooperative chicken farm to supplement his income and enables him take his daughter to a good private school. But his tone shows that, like a child expects to be fed by the mother, he expects nothing less from the government. Almost all Rwandans feel this way.

The day before I met Gakwaya, I had been to Kigali’s elite hospital, King Faisal, in the posh Kacyiru area when the newly appointed Minister of Health, Dr Agnes Binagwaho (Rwanda has many women ministers and the highest number of female MPs of any country in the world), was visiting four patients who had been evacuated by a military helicopter from neighbouring Tanzania after an accident that killed two. Evacuating victims of such tragedy has become quite common in Rwanda. Every village has an ambulance on call in case of emergency. But I was surprised by the minister’s answer when a journalist asked her if the government could still evacuate citizens in case the numbers were big.

“Why do you doubt your government,” the minister asked, “that is how a government should work.”

Later, at about 8pm in the evening, as I walked with friends along the Golf Course Road past the Nyarutarama Sports Club where the architect of the new Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, sometimes plays a game of tennis, we met a lone lady taking a walk in the night. Are you not afraid to be walking here alone at this time, we asked. Not at all she said, surprised by our question, there are soldiers and police patrolling. She was a Briton living in Rwanda who had obviously caught the Rwandan bug of taking government’s service for granted.

Indeed moving around Kigali, one sees soldiers and police standing sentry at many locations. To a visitor their pervasive presence intimidates. The deployment intensified soon after a spate of grenade attacks rocked the city soon after the presidential elections last year that Kagame won with 93 percent of the vote. The residents do not seem to notice the soldiers who stand menacingly, in battle fatigues, with neat black boots and red berets and fingers on the trigger of their AK47s.

“You can even step on their head and they will do nothing to you,” one resident boasted, “they only react if you do something criminal.”

Most visitors find such confidence quite unusual but common. It is a far cry from the old Rwanda of the 1994 genocide when the State turned on its own people and organised the slaughter of a million in just 100 days.

Today, the Nyarutarama mansions and their swimming pools, have swept away the old regime of the late Juvenal Habyarimana with its asbestos roofed maisonettes and its mantra of ‘life is farming’ and ‘one hoe per child’. In its place, Kagame and his team have introduced a new dotcom orientation of ‘one laptop per child’. Understanding how they achieved it would be useful. That is why I asked Lt. Col. Dr Emmanuel Ndahiro, Rwanda’s Secretary General of National Security Services and one of the leading thinkers of Kagame’s government about it.

The lean, soft-spoken intellectual, who studied medicine at Makerere University in Uganda before joining the RPF to fight for the liberation of his country, was reading former Kenyan MP Joe Khamisi’s The Politics of Betrayal when we met at the Kigali Serena Hotel. He attributes the new Rwanda to the character and discipline of President Kagame who is a perfectionist in everything.

“President Kagame has won his way the hard way,” he said in a wide ranging conversation, “he won the trust of the people. Now we can change anything.”

To show how it has not been easy, Ndahiro narrated how in early 1992, as Kagame’s RPF intensified its fight to capture power, Pasteur Bizimungu the man who would be Rwanda’s first post-genocide president, once doubted they could make it.

“We had been striking the enemy and retreating,” Ndahiro narrated, “this time however, we decided to stand and engage the enemy. We scattered them and many deserted. That is how Bizimungu was shown that it was possible.” According to Ndahiro, similar tough persuasion was applied on everyone else who initially doubted their ability to succeed.

Ndahiro says the Rwandans trust the government because they see that the reforms it is carrying out, like the land reform and demolishing half of the old Kigali are good and not for the selfish benefit of the leaders. Every Rwandan, like Gakwaya, shares in the success.

But the efficiency and precision of Kagame’s regime results from another, more strategic reason: It is a lesson the RPF leaders learnt the hard way during their war with the old regime. According to Ndahiro, fighting without the luxury of a fallback position prepared them to operate within very narrow margins of error; to ensure everything succeeds the first time.

“Having a fallback position is very dangerous,” says Ndahiro, “we always knew that if we failed, it could be disastrous.” It is a lesson they have taught the Rwandan people well.

Ndahiro is a passionate believer. But what can one know about a country by talking to its people or admiring its capital? Can the capital, like the heart, reveal what gives a nation its energy? Are leaders, like Ndahiro, the soul that gives the nation its essence?

These questions perturb every keen visitor to a new place. They are more poignant in Rwanda which, like a mask, gives away little. So the key to the determination of this tiny nation to offer everyone, Rwandan and visiting foreigner, an experience of life beyond expectation is often missed. Yet, as shown in recent discussions I had with senior business and political leaders, bureaucrats, taxi drivers and hotel waiters, the determination to succeed is what has shaped the miracle of ‘little Europe’ as foreigners, who nowadays flock there for holiday, gorilla trekking, and business, call Rwanda.

One story illustrates this. It was told to me by a frequent visitor to Rwanda. Apparently, he was being chauffeured around Kigali when something very unusual happened. His driver, Peter, suddenly swung the car round without consulting him and started to chase a huge four-drive car. When they caught up with it, Peter jumped out of their car and went for the occupants of the 4-by-4.

“Why did you throw an empty plastic bottle out of your car,” Peter shouted furiously, “I saw you. Go and remove it.” My friend told me that he was surprised when the people they had pursued, who were obviously not ordinary folks, meekly drove their car back to where they had thrown the plastic bottle, picked it up, and drove off.

I met the driver, Peter in Kigali and he confirmed the story. I asked him why he did it and he explained. Still, I kept asking myself, what makes an ordinary person so passionate about a policy of his government? I was thinking about it as I left Kigali at about 20hrs when suddenly, I noticed a convoy turning off Airport Road. It was the CEO of Rwanda Inc., President Kagame, driving to his residence in ‘Kiyovu of the rich’ from his office in the new Village Urigwiro. He works a 9am-to-6pm day. As I checked-in to board my flight through Gate 1 at Kigali International Airport, I thought about what could become of Kigali when Kagame’s last seven-year term ends in 2017. Will his work style have become a culture? It is another secret that Kigali is still keeping.

This May, the government took a drastic decision; it would divest its shares in the biggest telecom company, MTN. The decision signified the state’s recognition that a vibrant economy requires a powerful private sector. The state has been too strong on the economy for too long; it has provided the houses people live in, the roads and buses, and the schools and hospitals. Ensuring the welfare has been good, but as the oil economies of the Arab states that pioneered the model have shown, it is not the best model for an emerging lion economy.

AllAfrica – All the Time