Untold stories about President Kagame and the Rwanda government

Since President Paul Kagame recent election victory, the vast majority of Rwandans in and outside the country have been in festive mood. On the night the election results were announced, I was in the Belgian capital, Brussels, a key site of anti-Kagame and anti-RPF activism. I was watching TV Rwanda on the internet and the scenes of jubilation as the thousands of people in and outside Amahoro stadium sang, danced and cheered were truly disarming. President Kagame, members of his family and a host of government officials, could be seen swaying to the music as the clock ticked away towards dawn. I was with a group of admirers and a few critics of President Kagame, his government and his party, the Rwanda Patriotic Front. One of us could not stop bragging about having been the first member of the local Rwandan Diaspora to cast his vote at 6 am the previous day.

Critics and admirers of Kagame rarely agree on anything but that morning the people I was with were united in their surprise to see the president dancing, smiling and waving his cap at the cheering crowd. There was general agreement that having a sense of humor and giving in to simple pleasures were not things for which Kagame is famous.

As the arguments and bonhomie went on, I reflected on the period leading up to the campaigns. Commentators had thrown around a great deal of stridently critical commentary about Kagame and his regime. The few voices, mainly of Rwandan officials and local columnists seeking to tell the other side of the story, had literally been drowned in stories claiming that Rwanda was growing into a typical African dictatorship, and Kagame becoming yet another of Africa's power-hugging 'strongmen'. The Kagame government, the critics insisted, had no interest in opening up what they saw as restricted political space and allowing 'the real opposition' or 'the main opposition parties' from competing for power. Further criticism focused on the other presidential candidates, roundly dismissed as puppets, and their parties as 'satellites' of the RPF, with no credible alternative agenda of their own but parroting that of the ruling party and its candidate. A common critique of the Kagame regime is 'the climate of fear' it has allegedly created, apparently in order to intimidate whoever wishes to engage in 'real debate' about the situation in the country. This 'climate of fear', the critics claim, has turned Rwanda into 'a volcano' that is set to 'erupt anytime' into mass violence and possibly another genocide.

Rwandans know that neither President Kagame or the RPF or the Rwanda government is without fault or weakness. Indeed, if one spent time talking to Rwandans in Kigali and elsewhere about several aspects of government and public life, one would be treated to a litany of complaints. It is also true that the critics, especially foreign commentators, are guilty of a number of shortcomings. The main one, at least in the case of those whose knowledge of Rwanda is limited, is the tendency to disregard context and the country's history of systematic discrimination, marginalization, and mass violence. Critics who know Rwanda well, on the other hand, are often guilty of willful distortion and twisting of facts to suit their purpose. I would like to illustrate this through a quick examination of the main issues around which debate about the country's leadership, politics, and government has been conducted over the last few weeks.

Political space

Rwanda is often portrayed as a country in the grip of a suffocating monopoly of power by the RPF, a party presented as unwilling to cede space to political parties that pose 'a real challenge' to its hegemony, but prepared to create satellites, which it presents as 'opposition'. It is true that the RPF is an overwhelmingly powerful political organization, with unrivalled access to financial and intellectual resources, two key sources of the very power it projects over the country. What critics do not say, though, is that, prior to seizing power in 1994, it negotiated and signed the Arusha Accords with other political actors, the most powerful of which was the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), the former ruling party, whose leaders organized and orchestrated the genocide and mass murder of the early 1990s. The Arusha Accords obliged the signatories to share power. After the MRND had been deposed and banned, the RPF, given its military might, could have easily opted to rule alone and sideline or even ban other parties. Instead it chose to stick to the spirit of the Accords and lead the formation of a government of national unity. This and other steps it took to build a system based on consensus politics suggest that it had neither a plan nor intentions to suffocate other actors and monopolise political space.

In the country-wide consultations, which led to the making of the post-genocide constitution of 2003, the vast majority of Rwandans argued against a return to multi-party politics on the grounds that parties had created the instability that had led to political violence and the genocide. The RPF could have easily capitalized on this anti-party mood and proscribed political parties. Instead it chose to disregard popular opinion and, together with other parties, work towards building a functioning multi-party system through a highly guided processes influenced by history. The consultations ran alongside elite-focused consultative meetings presided over by then President, Pasteur Bizimungu. These consultations, referred to as the 'Village Urugwiro' meetings, brought together the country's significant elites, including clergy, notwithstanding the soiled image of the church at the time, with the objective to forge a consensus about how to move forward. Much of what has happened in the political arena since, including the imposition of strict requirements on groups seeking to register as political parties, has been the product of a consensus among the country's elites, some of whom are directly responsible for its dirty history but are now determined to build a 'new Rwanda'. Admittedly some have fled over the years and are today members of the highly organized, well-resourced, well-coordinated and media savvy anti-government exile groups.

It is in the same spirit of consensus building that the RPF has run the country in cooperation with 7 other political parties, of which 5 are officially allied to it, while two have opted to stay out of the alliance but remain part of the 'New Rwanda' project. These two parties, the Liberal Party (PL) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which critics and the newly-emergent opposition inside Rwanda have labeled satellites of the RPF, were both founded in the early 1990s in opposition to the Habyarimana regime. Both sponsored candidates to run against President Kagame in the recent elections, a development the RPF candidate welcomed as a sign of growing political maturity in the country's politics. In more recent years other political groups have fulfilled the stringent requirements and have been registered as political parties, bringing the total to 10.

One of them is PS-Imberakuri, founded by Bernard Ntaganda. Following its split into warring factions, apparently because some members objected to their leader's use of ethnic rhetoric, Ntaganda and some of his supporters ended up in jail on criminal charges. As a result, he could not contest in the presidential elections. Two other groups seeking to register, FD-Inkingi of Victoire Ingabire, and the Democratic Green Party of Frank Habineza, have been denied the necessary permission to participate in the elections as presidential candidates. Popular media have opted to label these three parties 'the real opposition', and criticized President Kagame and the government for their failure to secure permission to register.

What Kagame's critics have not bothered to do is examine and debate the reasons why the government has given for its decision. They have also failed to ask whether the decision is permanent or subject to change. In constantly highlighting how narrow political space in Rwanda is, critics do not mention that the country has a functioning, constitutionally-mandated and state-funded forum of political parties, complete with a secretariat, in which all legally-registered parties, without or without representation in parliament, participate. They mention that the forum was intended, among other things, to ensure that parties without parliamentary representation have a dedicated space in which to make their views on important issues known to other law-making MP's. Nor do they bother with another presumably inconvenient fact: until 2006, political parties were barred from opening branches below the district level. In 2006, those restrictions were relaxed. Today, across the country, one is able to see party flags flying high at their local offices, a sure sign of grassroots party activity.

Rwanda's Climate of Fear

In a recent BBC broadcast, one of it journalists, Rob Walker, averred: 'what distinguishes Rwanda from its neighbours is the real climate of fear.' Mr. Walker, who was in Rwanda on temporary assignment, is not alone in making these claims. I have encountered them several times, including in academic forums, across the globe. There are three things to remember here. One is that until the early 1990s, pre-RPF Rwanda was a one-party, quasi-military, dictatorship in which control by the state pervaded every aspect of people's lives. The other is that the RPF's path to power was, for most Rwandans, their first introduction to war on grand scale, a war which, viewed broadly, lasted well into the late 1990s, leaving death and mass disruption. Third, it was a war that few inside the country had expected the RPF to win. Its victory over a regime and army that had come to be viewed as unassailable, whose members then fled in disarray before the very eyes of people they had dominated for so long, turned the RPF into a terrifying outfit. Put together, these aspects of the country's recent history render the palpable vestiges of fear predictable.

Nonetheless, this is not the fear critics of Kagame and the Government of Rwanda have in mind when they portray the country as enveloped by 'a climate of fear'. What they mean is that there are on-going efforts by the state and President Kagame to intimidate the citizenry into total silence and prevent the emergence of free discussion and debate.

Continues next week

The writer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research. Over the last few years he has conducted and overseen research for the Crisis States Research Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Africa Power and Politics Programme (APPP) at the Overseas Development Institute.

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