Research and journalism can be odd, especially when it comes to politics, or “high politics.”

Researchers and journalists seeking opinions about political issues of the kind about which “ordinary people” are assumed to have nothing interesting to say, often look for the high-heeled of society, the so-called chattering classes.

Ever armed with an opinion on anything and everything, they don’t disappoint. Few can resist the temptation to theorise rather than own up to knowing little or nothing about whatever they are pressed to comment on.

Researchers and journalists who have been around for some time easily see through the theorising. Others, however, focus too much on getting the story, switching off their “nonsense filters” in the process.

Once the stories are out, lazy reporters, analysts and armchair pundits do the usual recycling. In that way, claims that start life as idle speculation come to define what is known about situations and contexts, relationships, and other phenomena. Audiences are easily taken in. They, too, begin repeating the falsehoods.

When it comes to Africa, the falsehoods are numerous: Politics in Africa is simply about “eating”; political conflict is about “competition for scarce resources”; politicians are “essentially” corrupt and pursue no higher goals than merely lining their pockets; democracy is about “fierce competition” every so often, the presence in any country of a “vibrant civil society”, and completely free media; and the good life is about civil liberties that include saying whatever one wishes to say regardless of where they are saying it from and to whom they are saying it.

These ideas are rarely tested on ordinary citizens who have not had the benefit or misfortune of being pumped with fancy theories, many of which are contextually derived and certainly not universally applicable.

Recently I found myself reflecting at length on this privileging of the opinions of smart commentators in political analysis and reporting on politics.

The reflection followed a long conversation I had with a 27-year old semiliterate young man working as a driver for a Rwandan Tour and Travel Company, and a story I heard concerning a 32-year old woman working as a maid in a middle-class household, in Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

Nyiranshuti was born and raised in hilly Ngororero district in northern Rwanda, not too far from the village where the country’s former president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was born and raised. She dropped out of primary school after a few years of schooling.

In 2001 she left for Kigali for the first time to take up a job as a nanny. In 2004, she changed jobs and has lived in the same household since. Fairly at ease with her current “Madam,” the two usually engage in debate and light-hearted banter about all sorts of things.

Last week after a trip to the local food market, she asked “Madam” if she had heard what was happening in Burundi. “It’s hot out there,” she said. And then she narrated what she had encountered at the market. Market women, she said, were vowing to go out and riot like people in Burundi were doing (“Natwe tuza kora nk’ibirya by’Iburundi”) “if any one tries to force our Kagame (Kagame wacu) to step down.”

Madam retorted: “But the Barundi are rioting because they want their president to leave.” Nyiranshuti said she knew that, but that she and the market women would riot to ensure Kagame stays.

“But white people want democracy. They may tell him to go,” added Madam. In a dismissive tone, Nyiranshuti opined: “demokarasi ya hehe? Baba bashyaka ahanu bagurisha imbunda zabo” (What democracy? They are just looking for where to sell their weapons”).

She and the market women believed, she emphasised, that if Kagame left there would be war in Rwanda, which would benefit only those looking to sell weapons. And then: “Ntago tuza kira ibisambo biri hanze” (We will not survive the wolves out there).

The conversation with my temporary driver, Jean-Baptiste, started when I asked him: “What do you think of President Kagame?” Kagame, he said, is, “A tough man. He has made ordinary people and leaders equal. You can’t go around saying you are a big person. You can’t go around saying you are colonel so and so. People will say ‘colonel what’? Who are you?”

As for the police, “Rwandans fear the police because they don’t take bribes. But they don’t beat people. If a policeman arrests you, he will take you to the station. He can’t beat you.”

I pushed him: “Do you like Kagame?” He answered rather wistfully: “He’s a good man. He works very hard. He travels all over the world looking for money to do things for us. He travels to look for bread and when he brings it, we eat together. And if leaders steal the money of the Rwandan people, he locks them up. He makes the big people work hard.”

Such simple but revealing views from two unpolished Rwandans are not the kind you will read in prestigious publications quoting smart commentators and experts purveying sophisticated perspectives.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]