Rwanda’s contradiction
Ambitions for tech revolution at odds with government control
KIGALI, Rwanda — You can’t take an Uber to kLab, the premier tech incubator in Rwanda’s capital city. The ride-hailing app doesn’t exist here.
If you decide to walk, under the low-hanging clouds that graze the tops of emerald hills, you might get caught in a thunderous downpour. But you can hail a moto, or motorcycle taxi, from an app on your phone. Or pay your cab driver via text message using mobile money.
Once inside, whiteboards line the walls. Young entrepreneurs hunch over laptops and smartphones, earbuds tucked firmly into their ears.
On the rooftop deck on a cool November night, half a dozen men crowded around a foosball table for a game, jocularly bumping elbows and cheering with every tiny goal.
This place, founded in 2012 by en-
trepreneurs and the country’s government, encapsulates Rwanda’s ambition — its commitment to creating a technological utopia, to becoming the Silicon Valley of Africa.
“Here, we teach people what exists, what’s possible, so they can go on to create and invent new solutions to challenges,” said manager Aphrodice Mutangana, who has visions of a sprawling tech campus to rival Googleplex. He dreams of a kLab in every district in the country and producing “at least two” unicorns, or billion-dollar companies, in the next decade. He talks loudly about the innovations born here, the expansion into hardware development and building the country’s future.
But ask about the challenges of innovation in a country so tightly controlled by its government that entire websites, news organizations and journalists have disappeared, and most people go silent. The few willing to answer drop their voices to a low whisper.
Rwanda exists in a contradiction of its own making.
Its desire to become a formidable player in the international battle for technological prowess stands at odds with its government’s need to control information, innovation and expression.
“I’m very scared of how technology can be used to control everyone, control what people see, what people read, what people are allowed to know,” said John Williams Ntwali, a journalist and vocal critic of the Rwandan government. “Here, there is no other way. We are all scared of this, but we don’t have another option other than to use the technology and accept it. Right now, there is no way to escape that.”
Known for its lush verdant hills, treks through gorilla territory and an unthinkably brutal genocide that left more than 800,000 people dead during the spring of 1994, Rwanda has transformed itself into one of East Africa’s leading technology hubs.
Buses, outfitted with computers and a generator, travel through the countryside to help teach people living in rural areas the basics of computer literacy.
Schools offering technology courses have seen a surge in interest. Coding classes are packed to the gills.
In Kigali, the capital, people work at restaurants and cafes with laptops and smartphones.
“Technology has changed everything for us,” said Regis Nisengwe, 30, an environmental and natural resources consultant who does much of his work from the Kigali library, where a computer lab stacked with desktops offers an alternative to a co-working space. “Before there was a total information blackout. Now, we can just Google things.”
MTN, a South African telecommunications company that operates throughout the continent, was the first to take a risk on the scarred country.
The telecom company set up shop in 1998, four years after the infamous genocide began. Two years later, the Rwandan government had a 20year plan for a total turnaround — from a tiny, landlocked and natural-resource poor country into a tech hub.
“It gave the country hope, and the ability to create a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve,” said Pierre Kayitana, 31, the director of operations for Rwanda Online, a company that in partnership with the government has digitized public services. “The only opportunity was for Rwanda to place itself strategically as the center of platforms and services that would serve the rest of the continent.”
By 2010, the country had laid miles of fiber optic cables throughout Kigali and into parts of the countryside where even paved roads do not exist.
Eight years later, technology has become ubiquitous.
Even the word “geek” in Rwanda has been morphed from its origins as a taunt, a putdown, to mean somebody who is smart, cool and talented.
“Being a geek, a nerd, that’s cool,” said Yannick Mfuranzima, 22, a radio DJ and local Internet celebrity. “It’s much more cool to be a geek than to say you are a DJ. But I think I am both.”
At kLab, interest has grown steadily each year. In late 2017, the incubator reported 1,700 members, each of which is given access to its facilities, networking events, mentorship and training programs.
Across town, painted portraits adorn the walls of the Kigali Impact Hub, whose locations in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco boast the same mission of supporting socially minded startups.
“The challenges are the same everywhere,” Mutangana said. “And through technology, through coding, we can all speak the same language.”
Or at least as long as what you’re saying is government-approved, critics said.
The Rwandan government has a history of censoring websites, media organizations and individuals, including journalists. A branch of government is specifically designated to launch cyberattacks both within and outside the country for the sake of national security.
That has likely kept some of the biggest players away from the country, despite its tech-friendly policies and sweeping infrastructure.
If American corporations opened up data centers or started offering local services, said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they would then be subject to the government’s whims as well.
“If you are not comfortable fulfilling government requests because of human rights issues in a country, you should not put servers or employees there,” she said of Facebook, Twitter, Uber and other tech juggernauts. “You should stay the hell out of the country ... so you don’t necessarily have any kind of obligation to fulfill its legal requests.”
Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Rwanda’s minister of technology, declined several requests for comment.
Galperin said that the recent net neutrality rollback in the United States carries distant echoes in Rwanda’s problems.
It’s a matter of who controls the Internet: With new U.S. regulations, Galperin and others fear that companies like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon could block, slow down or charge extra for websites owned by competitors. They could stop their customers from viewing content they don’t like or don’t want seen.
They would, in many ways, have power that mimics those of Internet providers half a world away.
American telecom companies have disputed these scenarios.
But Ntwali, an activist and journalist, said he’s seen firsthand what this kind of corporate oversight can sow. Ntwali, who has worked for various Rwandan media companies and as an independent journalist, has been targeted for his views, his reporting and his refusal to shut up and leave the country for good.
“We live in this illusion that Rwanda is the best country to facilitate business, to build technology,” Ntwali said. “But we locals see the reality and know that’s not the case. Investors can’t be comfortable registering their business here.”
In 2014, Rwanda placed an indefinite block on the BBC following the airing of a controversial documentary called “Rwanda’s Untold Story.”
The documentary suggested Kagame may have been involved in shooting down the plane of his predecessor, whose crash triggered the mass killings, and that many more of the 800,000 Rwandans who died in the 1994 massacres were ethnic Hutus, rather than ethnic Tutsis, the target of the genocidal violence.
Rwanda’s government accused the news organization of genocide denial — a grave offense that carries a 25-year prison penalty in the country.
It’s the same charge Ntwali said has been leveraged against him on several occasions.
Ntwali, who has at turns worked for various Rwandan news outlets and run his own, said that since 2013, he has struggled to continue his work amid near constant cyberattacks, arrests and threats against him.
He’s been forced to flee the country four times, seen his website and articles hacked on seven occasions and has lost track of the number of times he’s been arrested. Though he does not know for sure who has executed the numerous cyberattacks against him, when his website was blocked nationwide, he said, he knew exactly who to blame.
While Rwanda’s government may identify what content it wants blocked, it falls to Internet service providers there — MTN, Tigo and Airtel — to do its bidding.
MTN, which had 64 percent of the market share last year, did not respond to a request for comment.
“When (the government) can’t get a website taken down, they prevent it from being seen inside the country,” Ntwali said. “When they did that to my website, I couldn’t see it anywhere. I thought it was gone. But when I called the host they said, ‘Your website is OK. It’s just not viewable inside Rwanda.’ ”
His story, Ntwali said, should be a cautionary tale of what can happen when technology and industry grow unchecked while speech, expression and the media are tightly controlled.
“It’s not like the world is divided up into the West and the rest,” Galperin said. “We like to think, ‘Well, we have civil liberties here, not like in those other places.’ But the reality is it’s not so clearly divided. Authoritarian governments love stealing U.S. ideas and branding them as their own, so when the FBI says they need a golden key in order to decrypt all end-to-end communication, or when we send a signal that maybe dismantling Internet freedoms is a good idea, that makes a big difference not just here but in the rest of the world, too.”