‘Even with all the hardships and hunger, war is straightforward and clear-cut,” Paul Kagame mused to a journalist recently on the problems of power. “But building a nation from nothing? A nation that has just experienced genocide? There is no strategy manual for this. There is nothing that is not a priority, and the priorities are always conflicting.”
It is a telling insight into Rwanda’s president, aspiring to be re-elected on August 9th, that reflects the contradictions in a man admired and frowned on internationally in almost equal measure. There are two faces to Paul Kagame, perhaps even two Paul Kagames. The one, the driven, Cuban-trained commander of a rebel army who returned from exile to liberate his country in 1994 from a genocide that had seen 800,000 die. A minority Tutsi with, it is said, authoritarian tendencies, in a country where 85 per cent are Hutus, many implicated in that very genocide. Who insists now, in the name of reconciliation, that his fellow citizens eschew their tribal identities by proclaiming “We are all Rwandans”. Failure to do so, engaging in “divisionism”, can result in political proscription, jail, or be fatal, as a number of journalists and opposition politicians have recently found to their cost. Parties seen as having an ethnic bias – in practice Hutu – have been banned.
Or there is the successful, business-friendly statesman, an honest patriot, an intelligent and engaging autodidact who admires the tiger economies and societies of Singapore, South Korea and China, and who has driven Rwanda’s recovery. He is feted by many international donors. Sixteen years on from the genocide its economy grew by 8.6 per cent last year, skyscrapers pepper its well-kept capital, while 19 out of 20 children attend school, and the hard-working government appears to have largely eliminated graft. Although poverty is still deeply rooted, tourism, unimaginable after 1994, is now a $200 million a year industry. And Kagame has set out a credible roadmap to move the country beyond dependence on agriculture – largely tea and coffee – and foreign aid – 42 per cent of the budget – and to transform it into an IT hub.
He says his philosophy is "pragmatic, doing what is doable". But there's also an element of "doing what is necessary", as he sees it, democratic aspirations notwithstanding. "Democracy is good music but you need somebody with ears to listen to that music," Kagame, somewhat elliptically, told the Guardianrecently. Supporters of his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) talk of Rwanda ahead of its second post-genocide presidential poll as still "in transition" to democracy, still enormously vulnerable to ethnic propaganda which has to be suppressed.
Some human rights groups have urged an international aid boycott in protest at rights abuses. It is a difficult balancing line for a still troubled country and one which Kagame has undoubtedly crossed. Yet even without the repression, he would be expected to win more than 80 per cent of the votes. It is to be hoped that perhaps the security and legitimacy of an overwhelming mandate may allow a loosening of the reins.