Advertisement

Nkurunziza don't sit upon him throne, it sit upon him

Wednesday August 15 2018
pierre

Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza. Since the 2015 failed coup he rarely leaves the country. PHOTO | AFP

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

I have not been back to Burundi since its “second troubles” started in 2015.

In the past few days I did pass through, kind of, when a Kenya Airways flight to Kigali stopped in Bujumbura.

The modest circumstances of Bujumbura have always been apparent as you approach the airport, and the strife of the past three years, following President Pierre Nkurunziza’s grab for a presidency-for-life, means if you were there at the time, you’d find the scene hasn’t changed much.

But I have always been fascinated to see who gets off, and who comes on a plane that stops at the international airport of a troubled African country.

A stop at Abidjan at the height of the conflict in Cote d'Ivoire a few years ago takes the biscuit. The seedy look of a place that is not well-tended was evident at Félix Houphouët Boigny International Airport, but the Ivoirians who disembarked walked like they were going to a gala, several resplendent in those West African robes.

The most memorable, though, has to be Bujumbura at the close of the 1990s in the middle of the civil war.

Advertisement

One day, a journalists’ safety network in which I was involved received a desperate call that a colleague in Bujumbura was in trouble. Fighting had come to the capital, and she was trapped. Some days later, a Sabena flight from Brussels to Entebbe on which I was travelling stopped in Bujumbura.

I thought that no one would get off. For who in their right mind would come to a besieged Bujumbura? Wrong.

There were the usual suspects; aid workers and peacekeeper types. But the one who struck me was a tall, marvellously dark-skinned woman. She must have been at least six feet, in African gear with a high head wrap.

She got up, all freshly powdered, grabbed her bag in one hand, and in the other a huge gift wrapped in colourful paper. I peeped outside and saw that a small party of well-heeled Burundians, with a mound of flowers and shiny things, had been allowed to the foot of the stairs.

They had come to receive her. She ambled out, with the gait of a royal, and in the humid Bujumbura air waded into a rapturous welcome. There was a lot of hugging and kissing on the cheeks.

Also, one of the passengers disembarked with what looked like a new set of tennis rackets. A flower reception, and new tennis rackets into a Bujumbura under siege!

This time, quite a few well-fed fellows, and nice-smelling people disembarked. The human spirit is remarkable. People never really give up on home, and the place their loved ones are holed up in, even when it’s hell.

I looked outside, expecting to be surprised with a sighting of my “friend” Nkurunziza. If he had showed up, I don’t think he would be as welcoming as he was the last time I met him. I have called him names lately.

But he didn’t, for since he was nearly deposed three years in that failed coup, he doesn’t venture outside Burundi. Pierre no longer just sits on the throne. He also no longer lets it out of his sight.

In Burundi, people seem to still have something they love very deeply.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and explainer site Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3

Advertisement