Last week the government of Rwanda held its 13th National Leadership Retreat (Umwiherero). It is one of the two, arguably most significant gatherings in any given year.

The other is the Annual National Dialogue (Inama y’Igihugu y’Umushyikirano). The retreat brings together Rwanda’s leaders, national and local, political and civic. Some of the political leaders belong to the different, potentially rival political parties that constitute the government, thanks to power and responsibility-sharing arrangements that are embedded in the Constitution.

Others are party-less and in government solely because of their skills and talents.

The Dialogue adds other layers of participants. They include Rwandans who fly in from the diaspora, others who join in via social media and video links, friends of Rwanda, and numerous observers from different corners of the world. At the gatherings, Rwandans focus on the past, the present, and the future.

The past offers lessons from a turbulent history. The present focuses on their successes and failures and how to respond to them. The future highlights collective aspirations. Some of the aspirations may strike observers as excessively ambitious, even foolhardy.

Over the past two decades, however, Rwanda has repeatedly shown that there is more to the local slogan Byose birashoboka (nothing is impossible) than just bravado.

Come to think of it: Some 22 years ago hardly anyone imagined a future Rwanda as anything but a failed state. Hardly any outsider imagined the Rwanda Patriotic Front having a fighting chance of presiding over the country for more than a few months.

Attending the Umwiherero as an observer, I found myself reflecting on what explains the country’s remarkable achievements. Others also puzzle over the question. Some find easy answers in foreign aid, its small size, even “dictatorship.”

But if these three were that significant, Africa would boast more Rwandas, wouldn’t it? From where I sit, the really significant explanations lie elsewhere.

In a recent edition, The Economist magazine characterised President Paul Kagame as Rwanda’s “sternest taskmaster.” Western media are no strangers to exaggeration, even distortion, about Rwanda and Africa generally. This particular characterisation, however, is spot-on.

Watching him presiding over both the retreats and the dialogues and, when necessary taking officials to task over this or that issue leaves no doubt that leadership in Rwanda is about hard work, not merely enjoying the trappings of power and position.

One official wasn’t exaggerating when he confided recently: “Being a minister here is a pure nightmare.” Additionally, self-assessment is a key function of the government, with bad news about performance coming from its own organs such as the Rwanda Governance Board (RGB), a kind of performance watchdog.

Some foreign experts claim that the government massages its own statistics to please donors. The RGB, however, sometimes produces unflattering data that make life really difficult for the leaders concerned.

Other outsiders heap praise on Rwanda for its achievements. Inside the government, however, many officials are reluctant to rest on their laurels. And leading the reluctance is none other than their president who, at the recent retreat, cautioned against getting drunk on the accolades, the complacency that may result from that, and the associated risk of reversal.

Perhaps the real foundation of Rwanda’s success was the decision most of its political elite made after the war and the genocide against the Tutsi, of working together, not against each other.

Working together has meant shunning the divisive politics that, elsewhere, divides the political elite into mutually hostile factions, some of them led by mendacious demagogues seeking to replace each other through aggressively “competitive elections” every five years.

The time and resources such groups expend on unprincipled political infighting is in Rwanda spent on figuring out how to solve problems that prevent the achievement of real benefits for the ordinary citizen.

Democracy theoreticians and others who would democratise Africa instantly and reinvent it in the image of “model democracies” in the West, some with decaying political systems of their own, may sneer at this. However, the benefits of co-operation among potentially antagonistic elites are clearly evident.

Elsewhere, governments are held hostage by self-interested groups that stall policy reform or implementation. In Rwanda the government’s insulation and autonomy from interest groups has meant that policy formulation or implementation succeeds or fails on its merits, not on the basis of which powerful group may be opposed, regardless.

Bureaucracies in many African countries are sites of mass inefficiency and dereliction of duty. In Rwanda, on the other hand, public servants work under intense performance pressures.

They are not any more skilled or experienced than their counterparts elsewhere in the region or beyond. Nor are they older, let alone more experienced.

In fact, Rwanda has some of the youngest public servants operating at the highest levels of the state. For example, permanent secretaries aged 50 and above are relatively rare exceptions. What many lack in age or experience or even skill, however, they make up for in clear performance targets as well as facilitation and support.

And unlike other countries where performance contracts were introduced as a formality that had to be fulfilled in response to external pressure, without necessarily being enforced, in Rwanda many careers are built or destroyed on the basis of performance evaluations.

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