Rwanda pursues democracy rooted in needs of her people

An article published in the Sunday Standard of October 8, under the headline “Corrupt power that has placed East African region in constant anarchy” by Daud Osman, cannot go unchallenged.

The writer purports to portray Rwanda as a dictatorship and the recent elections that returned President Paul Kagame to another term in office as illegitimate.

The entire story elicits one huge question: When will some writers stop reciting discredited myths and get down to serious research on their writing? This article is a classic case of armchair journalism where the writer is too lazy to observe cardinal rules in media good practices: Accuracy, fairness and objectivity.

This entails letting all voices, especially those mentioned adversely, be heard. Short of this, it is nothing but either propaganda or just being rash. It is doubtful that Mr Osman has been to Rwanda and if he has, he can’t have been there for any length of time that would qualify him to be an expert on its affairs.

In all probability, he based his purported analysis from the dispatches of Western correspondents who themselves mostly write from prejudicial perspectives.

Like them, Mr Osman would like a cut and paste democracy for the country – cut from Western countries and pasted on Rwanda without any consideration whatsoever of specific circumstances of the country that are borne of its history and culture.

For him and his ilk, democracy, human rights and all that go with them are concepts to be transferred from the West to Africa without question.

Rwanda is not a dictatorship. The overwhelming support President Kagame gets from Rwandans at home and in the diaspora is the direct consequence of his visible and viable good deeds.

If Mr Osman just travelled across the country, and very importantly read its history and took into account the distance travelled in the time that the RPF has been in office, he may see things differently.

One issue we have to interrogate from the article and many others from various writers is why don’t they bother to ask Rwandans on why they decided to retain Kagame as their President than starting to call him names? I don’t want to assume reasons because I think Osman can do better.

But Osman actually owes the readers of The Standard this. He will have no shortage of sources to give him credible information. Organisations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and many others can provide him with all social and economic data that might help him to understand why Rwandans are not in any hurry to vote out President Kagame. And we at the Rwandan High Commission, of course, will gladly be of assistance if he cares to contact us.

Rwanda pursues a democracy rooted in the particular needs of her people. It does not seek to impress anyone – just to be accountable to her people.

I want to believe Osman knows that extraordinary leaders are not simply let go when they are still needed. In 1940, when the US decided to go for the third and fourth term for President Franklin Roosevelt, the choice of the American people was based on the circumstances at the time.

The US was in turmoil, World War II was at its height and the post-depression era was a menace.

Transformation

Far from being accused of any of those, he had been hailed as the brilliant general who put a stop to a genocide that consumed about one million lives. Thereafter, he has presided over a transformation of Rwanda that is nothing short of a miracle in the eyes of many people in the world.

These are facts. To put President Kagame in the league of tyrants he put his life on the line to remove - is simply unfair.

Liberation movements are historically popular with their peoples because of just that: the freedom they brought. But the RPF has not used its dominant position to terrorise other political players. Instead, it has included them in the decision-making processes but none-players in this will always be the ones to make false conclusions.

Unfortunately, many writers are too lazy to research on this, lazy to ask those who know and, of course, too lazy to physically familiarise themselves with the situation they are writing about. They are only content at repeating well-worn clichés and falsehoods. If we are to have a good debate, at least let us strive for fairness and accuracy.

- The writer is the First Secretary of Rwanda High Commission to Nairobi.