The whole world may hate Kagame, but he is the choice of Rwandans

On August 9, Rwandans went to the polls to elect their leader for the next seven years.

Hundreds of journalists were in Rwanda early enough to cover campaign rallies for the four presidential candidates.

There was a very clear distinction in the numbers of people who attended the rallies where the RPF candidate Paul Kagame attracted mammoth crowds compared with the other three presidential candidates, but most of the news briefs filed by international reporters simply chose to ignore this.

Did such omission mean that numbers at rallies did not make news or could have been a result of deliberate selective amnesia?

On the same elections, I read an article in the Washington Post of Tuesday, August 10 by Sudarsan Raghavan, who was probably in Rwanda on the voting day.

In his piece, “Rwandan President leads in preliminary election count,” he wrote that Rwandans had few choices to make.

If the list of four candidates who were contesting was not enough, one wonders as to what number of presidential candidates is permissible in an election.

In developed America where they have only two presidential candidates, that is not seen as having few choices; with four in Rwanda, it becomes an issue.

There is another argument put forward that two opposition parties were banned from taking part in the elections, but the proponents conveniently fail to mention the reasons why the government took that decision so as to imply that there is lack of political space.

The two leaders of the banned parties, Frank Habineza and Ingabire Victoria of The Green party and FDU-Inkingi, respectively, are on record making public utterances aimed at fuelling ethnic divisions among the Rwandan people. Such utterances were the genesis of the 1994 genocide.

On the very first day of her arrival in Rwanda, Ingabire proved to the whole world that she was a genocide denier going by what she said at the genocide site at Gisozi and thereafter.

To create the impression that had the two politicians been allowed to run for the presidency then Kagame would have been seriously threatened is nowhere near reality.

What, indeed, would have been the chances of such parties when competing with the RPF, which has been on the ground for 16 years and has made remarkable progress in the country’s development?

For those who have followed the politics in Rwanda, Faustin Twagiramungu alias Rukokoma was by far a better known politician in the country than Habineza and Ingabire.

In 2003, Twagiramungu contested in the presidential elections and got less than 5 per cent of the vote.