Like it or not, Rwanda is Africa
If African leaders get their way, the country’s controversial development approach will be replicated across the continent
You probably don’t know much about Rwanda. Gorillas. Genocide. Don Cheadle. Maybe you’ve heard of Paul Kagame, the president. Maybe you’ve come across the phrase “Africa’s Singapore”, although what exactly that looks like, or what it means, is a mystery.
You need to know more about Rwanda.
In the grand scheme of African development, Rwanda is an experiment, a trial run, a test case for a new type of society. And the experiment is about to be repeated in a country near you.
Rwanda is your future, whether you like it or not.
At least, that’s the plan. In Africa’s air-conditioned corridors of power — in the boardrooms of its banks, in closed-door Cabinet meetings, in donor discussions and interminable governance conferences — it is repeated like a mantra: “The Rwanda model. The Rwanda model. The Rwanda model.”
After decades of searching, Africa’s leaders think that they have found a homegrown, Afrocentric development plan that works, and they are vigorously spreading the doctrine.
The praise-singing cuts across sectors and geography. Here’s Benedict Oramah, president of the African Export-Import Bank, shortly before handing Rwanda half a billion dollars in development financing: “This is a country that was all but written off some two decades ago. But just like the phoenix that died and arose from its ashes, it emerges to become the shiniest star on the continent. The shiniest in terms of governance, in terms of the can-do spirit, doing those things that nobody ever thought was possible.”
Here’s the Africa boss at the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Matshidiso Moeti, explaining why she chose Kigali for this year’s first ever Africa Health Forum. “I want to recognise [Rwanda’s] remarkable leadership — its creativity, tenacity and resolve — which have delivered significant progress in advancing health and development for the benefit of all your people. Your achievements in such a short space of time are truly remarkable.”
And here is Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president turned elder statesman-in-chief. “Rwanda has made difficult trade-offs. But as an African leader, I tell you that I would make the same trade-offs.”
Kagame — slender, thin, bookishlooking — is so popular among his fellow leaders that the African Union has chosen the Rwandan president to lead the commission to reform the struggling continental institution.
It’s his job to make the African Union more efficient and effective and, in the process, implement some of his ideas on a much grander scale. He has also been elected to chair the African Union at this month’s summit in Addis Ababa: a largely ceremonial role, but one that serves as yet another glowing endorsement from his peers.
Africa’s big men love Rwanda. So does the big money, and the world’s big institutions. But what exactly is the Rwandan model? And why should the rest of us be worried?
The shining city on the hills
Kigali is immaculate, and quite unlike any other African capital. It is a city of well-tended verges, neat houses and quiet roads. Houses cling to the precipitous slopes and the valleys below are reserved for parks, urban farms and a golf course. The views are dramatic: all you see, in every direction, are pyramids of dense habitation floating on a lush green sea.
This is Kagame’s showcase, and it’s hard not to be impressed. For human resources purposes, the United Nations ranks Kigali alongside New York in terms of ease of living. The restaurants are great, there are several world-class hotels and you can walk wherever you want at any time of day or night without fear of mugging or assault.
‘There was nothing like this 23 years ago,” says Magnifique, my tour guide, as he points out yet another high-end housing development. “One day, everyone will have a house with two storeys.” Then he points out the single-storey, lowincome tenements next door. “These people know they have to go soon. They must build a new house or go somewhere they can afford.”
For Magnifique, it’s not a question of if, but when. “Come back next year, or in two years at most, and you will see the new houses.”
I don’t doubt him for a second. This is why policymakers love Rwanda. Every country has grand development plans. Every country makes promises. But Rwanda, almost uniquely in Africa, routinely delivers on its promises. It gets things done.
Take as an example improvements in healthcare, which is a cornerstone of Rwanda’s development model. The improvements for the country’s 11.6-million-strong population are almost unbelievable. According to health ministry statistics, life expectancy is up to 64.5 years from just 49 in 2000. Child mortality is down more than two-thirds. Maternal mortality is down nearly 80%. HIV/Aids prevalence is down to 3% from 13%. There is now one doctor for every 10 555 people, compared to one doctor for every 66 000 people in 2000.
Dr Olushayo Olu, the WHO’s Rwanda director, says the extraordinary statistics are supported by the WHO’s own research and talks me through how Rwanda did it. “The main ingredient is visionary leadership. It’s about having a target, saying we want to be there in the future and understanding obstacles in the way.”
Key to getting there is accountability and a performance-based system where each layer of society must answer to the layer above. “Mayors and top officials sign performance agreements with the president himself,” said Olu.
Accountability is an art form perfected by the Rwandan government. Provinces are divided into districts, which are then divided into sectors, then cells and finally villages.
The village, or umudugudu, is the primary organising block of Rwandan society, and it is key to Kagame’s control. Every Rwandan belongs to a village, even Kagame — the presidency is called Urugwiro Village. There are more than 14 000 such villages in Rwanda, including dozens in Kigali, each with an average of 250 people.
Every month, on the last Saturday, villages are legally obliged to come together to participate in Umuganda, a nationwide community service day. Afterwards, villages will meet to discuss community issues, often in the form of directives handed down by the national government, and take decisions. People who don’t toe the line — who have not signed up for mandatory health insurance, for example, or who haven’t delivered on personal behaviour pledges — may be reprimanded or, on occasion, kicked out of the community.
There are elements here of the peer shaming that was so central to chairman Mao’s China, or the totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. And that, perhaps, is the point — it certainly does allow for extraordinarily direct governance.
But it’s easy to see how such an efficient system can be abused. It offers near-perfect surveillance, and a level of control at an individual level that is nearly unparalleled in the modern world. Big Brother is watching, and no one is talking back.
The undesirables
Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship details Rwanda’s suffocation of free press. It ends with a 12-page list of journalists who have allegedly been beaten, tortured, exiled or killed by Kagame’s government. It is not, Sundaram says, an exhaustive list.
The book also touches on other things that Rwanda would prefer to keep quiet. Sundaram follows one story to a rural province, where he finds that people are living in huts without roofs. He says the scene looks like the aftermath of some great tragedy, but when he asks villagers what happened, they tell him that they removed the roofs themselves in response to a government edict forbidding thatched coverings (thatched roofs apparently do not fit in with Rwanda’s modern self-image).
He speaks to one woman as she sat in her newly uncovered house: “She said the president was a kind man for thinking of the poor.”
A local journalist tells Sundaram that the key to understanding Rwanda is not to look at what is there, but at what is not there. Truth is in the gaps. It lies in the unlit dirt paths that commuters still prefer to use; it lies in the lack of meaningful criticism of the president; it lies in the near-complete absence of beggars or homeless people.
Even Singapore has beggars and homeless people.
With no free media or independent civil society to raise the alarm — more glaring absences — it is left to Human Rights Watch to explain where all the poor people are.
“Scores of people, including homeless people, street vendors, street children and other poor people are being rounded up off the streets and detained in ‘transit centres’ or ‘rehabilitation centres’ for prolonged periods. Detainees have inadequate food, water and healthcare; suffer frequent beatings; and rarely leave their filthy, overcrowded rooms,” the rights group said in a July 2016 report.
It said detainees are rarely, if ever, charged, and several have died as a result of their poor treatment.
“The arbitrary arrest of poor people is part of an unofficial government practice to hide ‘undesirable’ people from view, and contrasts with the Rwandan government’s impressive efforts to reduce poverty,” said Human Rights Watch.
One of these detention centres is the notorious Iwawa Island. Officially, it’s a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts, set in the glittering blue waters of Lake Kivu. Unofficially, it’s often described as Rwanda’s Alcatraz, where enemies of the state, along with its poor and homeless, are kept in prison-like conditions.
Illuminée Iragena is another undesirable. She is a nurse and also a member of the United Democratic Forces, an unregistered political party whose members have been repeatedly arrested and intimidated. She left for work at Kigali’s King Faisal Hospital on March 26 2016. She has not been seen since.
“The arbitrary arrest of poor people is part of an unofficial government practice to hide ‘undesirable’ people from view”