Perhaps the best way to begin this piece is to ask readers to dust off their copies of Ngugi Wa Thiong’O’ s Weep Not, Child, Alex La Guma’s A walk in the Night and Oswald Mtshalli’s Nightfall in Soweto and confront the horrors of colonialism once again. Along with Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia shall be free, those are the works that immediately come to mind as I ponder the pains that Black Africans and their leaders underwent under colonial rule, only to suffer another round of horror under local dictators.
Now, did the people suffer so much pain only to have the kind of horrible reality that continues to define their existence? For how long will Black Africa continue to be ruled by duplicitous and demonic leaders such as Paul Kagame who, with a dark history of bloodshed, brutalities, thefts and suppression of vast populations behind him, continues to pose as the face of good governance in Africa while perpetrating some of the most horrendous political frauds, assassinations of critics and opponents, suppression of legitimate dissent and the reconstruction of the very state of affairs that plunged Rwanda into a bloody civil war in which over 500,000 souls were dispatched to their untimely graves?
To the unwary, Kagame is the lodestar of political excellence in Africa. After all, “Rwanda has made excellent progress under him and Kigali is perhaps the neatest capital in Africa,” etc. Kagame’s medicine men have crafted the image of a statesman of Nelson Mandela’s stature, an exemplification of Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Julius Nyerere rolled into one. They tell us that Rwanda, a country potentially in trouble without foreign aid, is the way forward. Kagame, a fraud who routinely arrests opponents before general elections and runs Rwanda as a police state, says he has “empowered” the people, but even a moron ought to realize that there can be no empowerment without democratic freedom, including, most crucially, free speech. Kagame is a criminally oppressive, double-dealing dictator whose extreme arrogance is rooted in ignorance.
In order to maintain his vice grip on Rwanda, Kagame routinely jails critics and opposition candidates. In September 2017, Diane Rwigara, who had been blocked from challenging him in the previous month’s election, was charged, along with her mother and sister, with “offences against state security and forgery.” Rwandan journalist Cassien Ntamuhanga, who had in 2015 been sentenced to 25 years in prison for “forming a criminal group and conspiring against the government or the president”, was abducted in Mozambique in May 2021. He was “arrested on Inhaca Island, taken by boat to the mainland, shackled, handcuffed and handed over to the Rwandan embassy in Maputo.” Patrick Karegeya was murdered in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013. There is no space to tell the chilling stories of Joseph Nkusi, a blogger deported from Norway; Robert Mugabe, editor of Great Lakes Voice, charged with treason; Shyaka Kanuma, publisher of Rwanda Focus, charged with tax evasion and fraud; and Philippe Mpayimana, accused of “minimizing the genocide” once he landed in Kigali from France and announced his intention to run for president. Violette Uwamahoro, a Rwanda National Congress (RNC) chieftain’s spouse, visited Rwanda to attend her father’s funeral, but went missing in Kigali.
Kagame’s men have been plundering Congo’s mineral wealth for decades. Detailing his bloody role in the festering crisis in the DRC, American author James North wrote in October last year: “Since 1998, violence in the eastern Congo has killed at least 6 million people and displaced another 5.6 million…Rwanda, which borders the country to the east, helped revive a vicious armed group called the M23, which had been largely dormant since carrying out a campaign of regional terror a decade ago.” North cites British writer Michela Wrong, author of Do Not Disturb, a book which chronicles “how the Kagame regime represses dissent at home and assassinates opponents who have gone into exile.” Wrong “reports that in 2011 recordings emerged of senior Rwandan officials ordering the murders of dissidents who lived in other countries.”
Following the coup in Gabon, Kagame sacked many military officers, desperate to perpetuate himself in the power obtained by fraud and retained by force. Last month, while indicating that he would run for a fourth term in 2024, Kagame denounced the West, the same West whose support and adulation he had always craved, saying that Western feelings about his tenure did not matter to him. Of course he is banking on the same tactics he employed during the 2017 elections, ahead of which he had boasted: “I am very pleased because we are already aware of the results of the elections…The results were already known since December 2015 (sic).”
Kagame unleashed hell on the media and critics before the December 2015 “referendum” that allowed him to run for a third term. Together with his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), he organized a sham on August 4, 2017, following which he was sworn in for a seven-year term. He couldn’t even conduct his electoral robbery sensibly: he scored 98.79 per cent. Ahead of the election, donations to the RPF were mandatory. And on election day, RPF thugs forced voters to choose Kagame, while election officials even voted for those who had elected to stay at home instead of participating in a charade. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: the revised constitution that emanated from the 2015 referendum reduced presidential terms to five years, renewable only once, after a transitional seven-year term starting in 2017, but then it granted Kagame a seven-year third term run, as well as two five-year terms, in 2024 and 2029, meaning that Kagame will rule until 2034. In other words, the constitution is all about King Kagame.
An ex-rebel leader who used his military connections as an officer in the Ugandan Army to gain power in Rwanda, Kagame is intent on moulding Rwanda in his rotten image. In nearly three decades of rule, he has not broached the question of succession, let alone setting up institutions that would outlast him. Instead, he has been busy hounding critics. Now here’s my point: Kagame is a Tutsi, and his people are just about 14 per cent of the Rwandan population, while the Twa are around 1 per cent. The Hutus constitute 85 per cent of the population. Now, if ethnic strife caused the Rwandan civil war and Kagame is doing everything he can to shut out the majority from power, how can Rwanda avoid deadlier conflict? Given that Kagame has comparable stature of involvement in bloodshed as ex-Liberian president, Samuel Doe, who is serving time for war crimes, this question becomes even more salient.
READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE