We are not where we want to be or need to be. We still need to work very hard.” So said President Paul Kagame about democracy in Rwanda over the past 20 years, in an interview with this newspaper.

The statement is significant, if only for signalling his agreement with people who maintain that there is a democracy deficit in Rwanda, and who sometimes give the impression that it is their responsibility to push his government to embrace democracy.

On the other hand, though, it is the kind of honesty one should expect from any leader in the Great Lakes region where all the countries are democracies in the making.

That is if one believes that democracy is not simply about periodic elections where leaders of political factions or parties compete for power and, as usually happens in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, incite their supporters to maim and kill those of their rivals.

There are, of course, people who believe that a democratic country is one where there are regular, winner-takes-all elections, and political competition means participation in elections by two or more mutually hostile political parties.

In Rwanda, this second view of democracy as being about competition between mutually hostile parties brings together political parties that call themselves “the real opposition’” to the Rwanda Patriotic Front-led government on the one hand and, on the other, international actors, among them donors, human-rights groups, media and academia.

In case you’re wondering, in Rwanda political organisations that claim to be “the real opposition” are either those that operate in the country and have failed or refused to enter into power- and responsibility-sharing arrangements with the Rwanda Patriotic Front and the seven other parties with which it governs, or those in exile who, for all kinds of reasons, are unable to operate on home soil. Their view of themselves is meant to distinguish them from the other parties in government, which they and their supporters dismiss as “satellites of the RPF.”

I do not seek to debate whether the “satellite” label attached to parties that co-operate with the RPF is justified or not. Instead, I would like to highlight a striking and self-defeating aspect of the relationship between Rwanda’s “real opposition” parties and their international supporters and sympathisers.

Attributes of the “real” opposition parties include their small, sometimes miniscule, size; lack of resources; internal fragmentation; and failure to formulate and articulate agendas that speak to the concerns of ordinary Rwandans in ways that those of the RPF-led multiparty government do.

One outcome of their failure to make political headway has been frustration. It has pushed some individual party members to resort to conducting themselves in dramatic fashion. Two recent examples come to mind:

On September 5, 2012, news broke that Alexis Bakunzibake, the first vice-president of a faction of the PS-Imberakuri party led by jailed politician Bernard Ntaganda, had been abducted in Kigali by armed individuals travelling in a jeep with tinted windows and escorted by a police patrol vehicle.

The news first appeared on the website of another “real opposition” party, FDU-Inkingi. According to security sources, the news unleashed a barrage of queries by, and pressure from, international actors who seemed convinced that Bakunzibake was in the hands of security agencies, even that they might already have killed him.

For some time thereafter, statements by government representatives that they had no idea where the man was, fell on deaf ears. And then, early this year, the same Alexis Bakunzibake who it now appears staged his own disappearance, reappeared.

And he did so with a bang: He and Major-General Victor Byiringiro, president of the DRC-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a group led by people accused of participating in the 1994 genocide, had, signed an agreement establishing a common front, FCRL-Ubumwe.

And then there is Omar Leo Oustazi, formerly of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, the country’s newest political party. Mr Oustazi who was “secretary-general” before the party was officially registered, disappeared on January 18, 2013, setting off another round of pressure and a torrent of rumours that he too had been “disappeared” and killed by the government.

And then just as dramatically, he too reappeared a few days ago. Even more dramatically, he told the police that he had fled after he discovered that his Green Party colleagues were planning to kill him and blame his death on the government.

The question for Rwanda’s “real opposition” and the impulsive international actors is what value stunts such as these and the noise they generate add to efforts to advance the cause of democratisation in Rwanda.

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