Rwanda: Prosperity By Fiat

Prosperity, by Fiat RWANDA A notable international exchange occurred recently when Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister of the United Kingdom, announced that he would scrap his Conservative predecessor’s plan to fly migrants to the southern African country of Rwanda. Starmer said the plan was a “gimmick” and “dead and buried”, and it was now time to “turn our back on tribal politics,” reported Yahoo! News. The UK has already paid around $280 million to Rwanda, a formerly impoverished nation still grappling with the legacy of the 1994 genocide where the Hutu ethnic majority massacred 800,000 people mainly from the Tutsi minority community. Starmer hoped to recoup that money. Rwandan President Paul Kagame likely has other ideas, however. The British approached Rwanda “to address the crisis of irregular migration affecting the UK – a problem of the UK, not Rwanda,” said Kagame’s government in a statement. Rwanda “has fully upheld its side of the agreement, including with regard to finances.” The response reflected Kagame’s confidence in his hold on power and his international standing – but also showcased his questionable methods to stay in office. Kagame is expected to win a fourth term when Rwandan voters hold presidential elections on July 15. He has served since 2000 and in that time, he has centralized power in the country and suppressed dissent while also pushing through economic reforms that have expanded the country’s economy, explained the Liechtenstein-based analysis group, Geopolitical Intelligence Services. The president is credited with expanding life expectancy, promoting a boom in the tourism industry – underscored by luxury hotels proliferating in the capital of Kigali – kickstarting an entrepreneurial landscape featuring tech startups, building a new stadium that hosts basketball games, and other developments. All have helped turn Rwanda into an example of development and innovative success on the African continent, National Public Radio wrote, even as Kagame’s support of rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere has destabilized the region. Kagame has also baldly stifled his opponents’ chances, wrote World Politics Review. Electoral authorities only approved Kagame and two other candidates, the Democratic Green Party’s Frank Habineza and the independent Philippe Mpayimana, according to the BBC. A critic of the president, Diane Rwigara, was blocked from running. A Rwandan court had previously sentenced another vocal critic, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, to eight years in prison. In a first-person piece in Al Jazeera, Umuhoza described how she spent five years of solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison after her trumped-up conviction on charges of denying the genocide. Kagame pardoned her a year after the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled that her rights had been violated. Umuhoza wasn’t optimistic about the upcoming election. Her name won’t appear on the ballot, either, despite her attempt to run. “It already promises to entrench the persistent suppression of opposition voices by the current government in Rwanda,” she wrote in Foreign Policy. “As a victim of this suppression, I find myself once again barred from participating in an electoral process that I, as a Rwandan, have a right to take part in.”