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Kagame may be the Big Man, but new Rwanda isn’t about him

Saturday December 27 2014

The 2014 edition of Rwanda’s Annual National Dialogue Conference, East Africa’s boldest attempt at institutionalising popular accountability, has come and gone. As usual, it raised questions, provided food for thought, and elicited scepticism among some observers.

Before it kicked off, a young journalist from a neighbouring country, in attendance for the first time, wondered aloud whether the whole thing was not stage-managed and whether, if it were genuine, ordinary people could ask President Paul Kagame hard-hitting questions. In an e-mail filed with unmistakable scepticism, a friend writing from Uganda asked whether Rwandans could use the occasion to challenge their president.

Such questions reflect the way people in Rwanda’s neighbourhood conceive of leadership and politics, a conception born of the manner in which leadership is practised and politics organised and managed in their own countries.

In the popular imagination in Rwanda’s neighbourhood, leadership tends to boil down simply to what presidents do and how they conduct themselves. People around the president meant to help him get things done are, rightly or wrongly, seen as mainly placemen and women who owe their elevated positions to connections, patronage, and political horse-trading.

And so it follows that when questions have to be asked about matters related to public policy or the government’s performance of its functions, there is no point looking beyond the president, who usually goes by the grand moniker “fountain of honour.”

Against this background, and no doubt encouraged by the popular but far-fetched view that President Kagame makes all the decisions, they imagine that Rwanda works in similar fashion. However, as a perceptive Kigali-based diplomat who does not believe that the dialogue is staged, remarked during a conversation three days later, the dialogue is not about President Kagame.

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Rather, it is about the government of Rwanda as a whole, the commitments it makes to its citizens, and whether they are fulfilled as envisaged within the stipulated time.

The government of Rwanda is a tight ship in which lines of responsibility are clear and scope for shirking duty is limited. Which is why, at the dialogue, which President Kagame chairs, questions and comments about failure or poor performance are directed at ministers and officials charged with policy implementation, some of whom have faced sustained grilling.

As is evident from the different angles from which commentators who attended the recent dialogue have written about it, the event has something for everyone, usually an occurrence that sticks in the mind.

For me this year, the key moments were when three young men, one speaking at the national parliament where the main gathering was and the other two by video link from a rural district, talked about how their lives have been transformed.

At parliament, a former émigré who left Rwanda in the early 1990s as a child and settled in Canada, revealed how, despite members of his family being pursued for participation in the genocide against the Tutsi, he had decided to return to the country of his birth and make a contribution as an entrepreneur.

Before doing so, he had to overcome the fear instilled in him by fellow exiles who had told him that post-genocide Rwanda was not for people like him. He was also responding to the government’s undertaking that children of people accused of genocide crimes would not be held responsible for their parents’ crimes.

The two men speaking from upcountry are former insurgents. They deserted the DRC-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and returned home in response to assurances by the government that returning rebels would be helped to start new lives. One had joined the rebels at the age of 13. Upon returning to Rwanda, the government sent him to school. Today he is a confident secondary school teacher and a respected member of his community.

The second man returned alongside other insurgents and subsequently persuaded a number of other fellow former combatants to also return. One of his fellow returnees, he said, had joined the Rwanda Defence Forces and had recently returned from a peacekeeping mission.

As for himself, today he is the top civil servant in a major administrative unit in the local government’s administrative hierarchy.

For the three young men, the government had promised a new beginning and gone on to help them start afresh. In many ways, the three cases address directly the question of whether or not the national dialogue conference is a staged piece of theatre.

It is difficult to imagine that the young men would have narrated made-up their stories calculated to lie to the public. That would be too brazen and easy enough to establish and expose.

The returnee from Canada revealed, for example, that prior to packing his bags and returning, he had visited and toured the country, clocking 1,400 kilometres as he tested the government’s “come and see, go and tell” campaign, which encourages emigres to return and contribute to the reconstruction and development effort.

The dialogue does many things. Adding meaning to “New Rwanda” is perhaps most important.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs.

E-mail: [email protected]

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