Against the odds: Rwanda, 20 years after
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi
Last updated: 6 hours ago
Rwanda has made rapid strides in development since 1994.
In the aftermath of the genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda and the
victorious Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), the rebel movement that had
taken over the government, faced numerous challenges. The political
institutions had collapsed and there was virtually no justice system.
The part of the population which had not fled was traumatised, fearful
and mistrustful of the new government.
Genocidaires continued to roam the countryside, threatening the
security and lives of genocide survivors, driven by a deep-rooted
genocidal ideology nurtured over three decades of systematic
demonisation of the Tutsi minority, while a belligerent defeated army
was just across the border in the then Zaire (today's Democratic
Republic of Congo), preparing to return and continue with the
genocide. The national coffers were empty.
There was also a peculiar challenge: Some observers believed that
because they were from a small minority, the new leaders could not
possibly hold power for long, over a hostile Hutu majority. Potential
donors withheld support as a result, in anticipation of further
violence. In the early days, save for hundreds of uncoordinated NGOs
pursuing their own narrow agendas focused mainly on refugees and
internally displaced persons, the international community remained
indifferent, sceptical and shocked by the scale of violence ordinary
Rwandans had indulged in against fellow Rwandans.
France, widely accused of supporting the genocidal regime and of
facilitating many genocidaires to escape, is reported to have been
hostile towards the new government from the very beginning, and to
have undermined its efforts to secure assistance, including from
multi-lateral development agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank.
Emerging from the abyss
For some time after it seized power, the RPF grappled with running a
broken country on a shoestring. To finance some of the government's
activities, it dipped into resources it had previously mobilised for
the war effort and took to fundraising from individual supporters in
and outside the country. Much of this was happening alongside a
ferocious insurgency mounted from then Zaire by remnants of the
defeated forces. For a young government led mainly by returning exiles
without much prior experience of running a state, these challenges
could have easily proved overwhelming.
However, with assistance from external supporters whose number has
grown over time, and backing from its internal political partners, the
RPF slowly began to pick up and put the pieces of their broken country
together again. Few who had seen the civil war and genocide unfold
expected Rwanda to recover. The general expectation was that it would
join the list of Africa's failed states, with their cycles of ethnic
violence and perpetually high dependence on external aid.
None of this happened. Instead, post-genocide Rwanda has, in ways some
characterise as miraculous, lifted itself out of the abyss into which
the civil war and genocide had plunged it, and become one of Africa's
most-talked-about countries on account of the rapid and remarkable
advances it has made across a wide range of domains. If to some
commentators Rwanda is "a country in a hurry", it is because it has
defied all the negative predictions, and instead demonstrated an
unexpected capacity for driving change on grand scale.
In the economic sphere, it has one of the fastest growing economies in
the world. Between 2008 and 2012, growth averaged 8.2 percent. In 2013
it was the ninth fastest growing economy in the world. One outcome of
this trend was the lifting of over one million Rwandans out of poverty
between 2005 and 2010, the equivalent of 12 percent poverty reduction
rate. Just as significant, over the last 20 years Rwanda has achieved
the highest school enrolment rates in Africa, at 95 percent for boys,
and 98 percent for girls, with overall completion rates at 72.7
percent. Access to health care for the entire population is also high.
At over 90 percent, Rwanda has probably the highest health insurance
coverage for ordinary citizens not employed in the formal sector, in
the whole world. As a result, life expectancy has doubled in the past
two decades from 28 in 1994 to 63.5 in 2012. Rwanda is easily the only
African country expecting to achieve all or most of the Millennium
Development Goals.
At the level of institution building, the Rwanda Defence Forces and
the Rwanda National Police have gained much respect in the world,
having distinguished themselves, for example, in the UN's peace
support operations across Africa and in places as far-flung as Haiti.
Rwanda's judiciary, which in 1994 lay in ruins, has been rebuilt.
Today many jurisdictions and the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda trust it enough to extradite genocide suspects for trial.
Advances in the socio-economic sphere and the benefits they have
bestowed upon ordinary Rwandans provide a basis for looking forward
with optimism that their bad history is fast receding into the
background, and that their future promises greater prosperity and
wellbeing.
The government's expectation is that this will re-orient Rwandans away
from focusing attention on the sectarianism that in the past divided
them and fuelled the genocide, to pursuing the wide array of
possibilities the new Rwanda offers everyone regardless of background.
In the end, this is supposed to drive much-needed reconciliation of
which a great deal has been achieved, and much still remains to be
done.
Challenges ahead
None of the achievements highlighted here ought to minimise the vast
challenges post-genocide Rwanda continues to grapple with. A key
priority for the government is to eradicate the sectarian ideology
that made the genocide possible. The continued presence in the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) of elements of the genocidal forces
bent on promoting the ideology, makes combatting it inside Rwanda that
more urgent. The international community's failure to defeat and
demobilise these forces renders the government's task more
complicated. Their capacity to promote the ideology can only increase
over time. More and more Rwandans may be embracing the government's
unifying national identity that emphasises Rwandan-ness, dignity, hard
work and self-reliance. However, many still remain vulnerable to
manipulation after 30 years of unrelenting indoctrination by the
sectarian governments of old.
Also, as long as they have the space to organise themselves and
recruit new members, the genocidal forces will continue to pose a
threat to Rwanda's national security. These forces have been at the
root of numerous wars in the DRC, in which Rwanda has participated or
has been implicated in, usually with negative consequences for its
reputation and ability to remain focused on its transformation agenda
inside the country. More wars are a real possibility and will remain
so for as long as these forces continue to roam at will and grow in
size and strength.
The nature of Rwanda's political system and the perception that it is
closed and should be opened up to democracy also poses a serious
challenge. While the choice the RPF and other registered parties
operating inside Rwanda have made is one of a consensus-driven system
based on power and responsibility-sharing, key actors continue to
press for an adversarial competitive system that Rwanda's political
elite argue is ill-suited to a still-fragile post-war and
post-genocide context. How this still low-intensity controversy but
which seems likely to escalate will be resolved may or may not put the
country's still fragile context at risk.
Dr Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based independent
researcher, analyst and columnist. He was educated at Makerere
University in Uganda and at the London School of Economics and
Political Science in the UK.
http://m.aljazeera.com/se/201441292413620474
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