Rwanda: The Price Of Progress

RWANDA

The Price of Progress

Campaign season is in full swing in Rwanda as the nation’s more than 7 million registered voters prepare to elect a new parliament in the first week of September.

This being the fourth parliamentary election since the end of Rwanda’s brutal civil war and the 100-day genocide in 1994 that left some 800,000 dead, many are taking the opportunity to reflect on how Rwandan democracy has evolved over the past 25 years.

The nation’s representatives, for example, are becoming younger and more female.

There will be more women than ever before on the ballot this year – 326 out of 521 candidates – making it very likely that an even greater percentage of legislators will be women this time around. Women already make up 64 percent of parliament, one of the highest proportions of female representation in the world, according to UN Women.

There are also bound to be fresh faces in parliament. The average age of candidates hovers between 38 and 42 years old. And the main opposition party in Rwanda, the Democratic Green Party, has its best chance ever to overcome the 5-percent barrier to enter parliament for the first time, wrote Rwanda Today.

“We are confident that, come elections, we shall win some seats,” said Green Party president, Frank Habineza, in an interview with the New Times, a Rwandan daily.

But for all of Rwanda’s strides over the past decade to liberalize its economy, combat corruption, open itself to international diplomacy and become a more democratic and inclusive society, progress can’t be seen everywhere.

The Rwanda Patriotic Front party of longtime President Paul Kagame, in power since 2000, is once again expected to win in a landslide – with a projected 95 percent of votes, reported the Independent, a news magazine based in Uganda.

That should come as no surprise, given the results of last year’s presidential election, in which Kagame swept the race with 99 percent of the vote, Al Jazeera reported.

The US State Department has commended Rwanda on its steps toward democracy. But such lop-sided election results leave US officials “disturbed” by both voting irregularities and the steps taken by the government to disqualify opposition candidates ahead of the election, according to a September 2017 State Department statement.

Such developments were prefaced by Kagame’s push to do away with constitutional term limits in 2015, effectively allowing him to remain in power until 2034.

Though that’s problematic, one Kagame supporter told Al Jazeera’s Up Front program that the president and his party were not corrupt, just extremely popular because of the turnaround the country has seen during his tenure.

In Rwanda, it seems one-party rule and the possibility of an autocrat ruling for life is the price of progress.