Much has been made of the small central African nation of Rwanda since it emerged dazed from genocide in 1994. It would get a government headed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, formed in Uganda and dominated by English-speaking Tutsi.

This Rwanda would go on to win much praise from a guilt-ridden western world. In 1994, South Africa attained Black majority rule and, like Rwanda that same year, would go on to be praised profusely in much of the world.

Most of the praise directed at Rwanda and South Africa centred on something to do with having achieved successful reconciliation between formerly bitter enemies. Since 2009 and with increasing frequency in 2010, this optimism about Rwanda has started to be questioned.

Any random check up on Internet search engines today brings up reports of journalists or top political and military figures fleeing the country, the opposition parties and leaders being suffocated. On Thursday, June 17, the U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a speech in Washington warned, in carefully chosen diplomatic language, that Rwanda was in danger of losing all the gains it had made since 1994.

Whatever the reason, in 2010 Rwanda has started making news and attracting attention more for what is usually associated with repressive police states than with rapid economic growth and good governance.

I visited the Rwandan capital Kigali in May 2006 and had two days of touring the city, the housing complexes, and roads and other sights and sites of Kigali. My impression was of a small city, quieter and more orderly than Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

I grew up in Entebbe town in the 1970s under the Idi Amin regime. Street lights worked, public gardens well maintained, and the first time I experienced potholes on Ugandan roads was after the 1979 war when Tanzanian battle tanks destroyed them. Entebbe was a quiet, orderly and decent town in the 1970s.

So when I visited Kigali, it did not make a special impression on me since I had seen that in my childhood. It puzzles me to see Ugandan journalists constantly praising Rwanda because street lights work and the roundabouts along the Kigali city network have flowers.

I have a photo collection of shots taken of streets in various African cities. Windhoek, Namibia; Antananarivo, Madagascar; Asmara, Eritrea; Port Louis, Mauritius; Victoria, Seychelles; Rabat, Morocco; Tripoli, Libya; Khartoum, Sudan; Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Cape Verde, and so on. It is taken as basic that these African capital cities should have street lights, zebra crossings, a drainage system, traffic lights, parking zones and a public transport system.

By constantly rating Rwanda alongside Uganda or other failed states, Ugandan journalists compare the normal with the dysfunctional and so describe what should be normal as being visionary and almost revolutionary.

In my view, there are many other considerations to make in assessing Rwanda. In the 1990s, we witnessed states that had lasted decades start to disintegrate. First was the Soviet Union and more dramatically, Yugoslavia.

Although Europe is generally, with North America, one of the world’s most stable continents, over the last 20 years, we have seen civil, border, and secessionist wars rage in Yugoslavia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and in recent weeks, clashes along the border between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

These wars that have displaced tens of thousands, broken up states and reshaped the geographical map were a reminder that a state is not just about buildings, street lights or a functional civil service.

From the way it emphasises a rapid pace of Internet connectivity, managing public infrastructure and a certain amount of economic growth, the Rwandan government gives the impression that economic and material growth and well being can resolve all or most questions of a state.

But as we saw in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990, identity, self-determination, a feeling of exclusion from the political theatre, disputed borders and even deeply-held religious beliefs can be just as emotive reasons for a part of the population to reject the centre of power and rise up in rebellion.

The way I would assess Rwanda is the way I would differentiate between a wedding and a marriage. For all the fine wine, nice cake, decorations and music at a wedding party, it’s resolving differences, balancing needs and preferences and compromises that are the core of a marriage and upon them rest the chances of success or failure of the marriage.

If Rwanda witnessed a mass exodus of part of its population in 1959 and a horrendous genocide in 1994, it follows that we should evaluate Rwanda’s progress not in the abundance of WiFi Internet connections, clean streets and laptop computers available in every home, but in how far these deep-rooted Hutu-Tutsi ethnic tensions have been resolved or addressed.

In Rwanda, there has been a strained effort since 1994 to blot out in total any reference to ethnicity, emphasise nationhood and focus on economic growth and management. This approach does not make sense.

If religion and ethnicity have been the driving force behind the raging civil wars and violence in the breakaway regions of Europe and the Caucuses in and since the 1990s - places that, presumably, had been turned into wholly secular and Socialist in belief for 45 to 74 years - how realistically can we claim that in the much more agrarian and rural African society, just 16 years from an appalling genocide, tensions between Tutsi and Hutu have eased?

Rwanda’s top priority and the image it projects to the world should be over matters of reconciliation and the attainment of real harmony between the Hutu and Tutsi. Ethnic tensions had lain hidden for decades in Europe, only to erupt in the 1990s. Between 1959 and 1994, there seemed to be a stable situation in Rwanda.

What is to prevent this ethnic hostility going underground for another 20 years, only to erupt again? Facing up to this aspect of the country’s history is what matters the most, not the mechanical, policy, administrative, logistical side. Certainly not beautiful flowers or street lights or nice pavements.

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