The election whose outcome is already known
As Rwanda heads to the polls, Paul Kagame, the West’s favourite autocrat, is confident of another term
Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s order-obsessed president, is fond of palm trees. Every boulevard in his capital Kigali is bisected by them. Council workers hose them down with detergent every night. Any motorist who damages one faces a £900 fine, more than a year’s wages for most Rwandans.
For foreigners it is proof of the president’s reputation for turning a country once ravaged by genocide into one of the best managed states in Africa.
But for opposition critics, it is another example of how Britain and its Western partners have been hoodwinked into propping up a murderous regime that has squandered millions in aid on vanity projects while most Rwandans welter in hidden poverty.
On Friday, Rwandans will go through the motions of a presidential election whose outcome is known to all.
He is the West’s favourite African autocrat after rebuilding his shattered country following the massacre of 800,000 people, most of them members of his Tutsi minority. He exercises almost total control over all aspects of life in Rwanda.
With regime agents everywhere, it is little wonder that when parliament embarked on a nationwide consultation to ask Rwandans if Mr Kagame should change the constitution to stay in power, just ten people demurred.
Already Rwanda’s most powerful man for the past 23 years, 17 of them as president, Mr Kagame is now able to remain in office until 2034, by which time he will be 77.
Western criticism of the president’s constitutional heist has been muted, despite mounting alarm over the disappearance and murder of prominent regime opponents during Mr Kagame’s most recent term.
There is little sign of Western donors cutting aid. Britain, Rwanda’s biggest direct donor, will give £64million this year, despite police intercepting an assassin at Folkestone harbour in 2011 who had been sent to murder two Rwandan dissidents in the UK.
All too frequently, at home and abroad, the assassins have succeeded.
Days after the body of Patrick Karegeya, his former intelligence chief, was found dead in his Johannesburg hotel room in 2014, Mr Kagame told supporters: “Whoever betrays the country will pay the price I assure you.”
Given the political climate and Mr Kagame’s record in previous elections, he has always won more than 90 per cent of the vote, it is a surprise that anyone is standing against him
Outspoken critics have been barred from standing, among them Diane Rwigara, a member of the president’s Tutsi elite who maintains that the regime murdered her father.
“People live in such poverty when a small percentage of the Rwandan Patriotic Front are doing great,” she said. “The only people who enjoy peace here are foreigners.”
Yet for all Mr Kagame’s authoritarianism, his defenders argue that there was virtually no way that the president could have rebuilt his country and defended his fellow Tutsis, had he acted more democratically.
In a country whose churches are often stacked high with the skulls of the dead to commemorate those slaughtered in 1994, it is not hard to perceive the noxious legacy of the genocide.
Florence Murekatete was 13 when the killing began. Having been mocked by her teachers as a “cockroach”, the pejorative used for Tutsis by majority Hutus, she was already aware of the animosity aimed at her because of her ethnicity.
But she had little idea just how virulent that hatred would be until Hutu militias embarked on one of history’s swiftest slaughters in a bid to rid Rwanda of its Tutsi population.
Mrs Murekatete and her family spent day after day up to their necks in water as they sheltered with hundreds of other Tutsis in the marshes of the Akagera River.
A Hutu patrol, among whom she recognised a former school friend, eventually found her, attacked her with machetes and flung her unconscious body into a corpse-filled trench.
For Mrs Murekatete, there can be no doubt that Mr Kagame is Rwanda’s saviour, embarking on a policy of reconciliation after the genocide which saw him attempt to heal divisions by banning his people from identifying as either Tutsi or Hutu.
“The president and his people saved me, treated me and fed me,” she said.