Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf reflect on Rwanda in HuffPo. The donor darling and authoritarianism trends are old news, they say.
The recent period has also signalled new – and more destabilizing – trends. First, Kagame turned on four of his top generals. Two fled the country and another two were arrested. After denouncing Kagame, General Kayumba Nyamwasa barely survived an assassination attempt in South Africa. His exiled colleague, General Patrick Karegeya, is openly calling for Kagame’s violent overthrow.
Second, the government did not just target challengers from the Hutu majority that it feared might play the ethnic card; it also prevented Tutsi politicians and Tutsi-led newspapers from opposing Kagame. And this period’s most gruesome violence was the beheading of the Green Party’s Tutsi vice-president.
Their advice:
Donors also need to stop doing penance for the 1994 genocide by unconditionally backing Kagame. Surely, they have made enough failed bets on big man politics in Africa
h/t: Congo Siasa
2 Responses
“Rwanda will be the next Singapore in no time at all” hard to tell but donors should not jump the gun and withdraw aid. After all, corruption in East Asia was easily dismissed.
What surprises me is the excessive focus on high profile political violence. Didn’t the donor community find it a bit alarming when the government decided that it had the authority to tell every farmer in the country what to plant on his own land? Or made it illegal to discuss ethnicity? I find these examples much more worrisome than the jostling for power at the top, but this stuff has been going on for years with nary a word of objection from the donor community. But yeah, Rwanda will be the next Singapore in no time at all…