Someone directed me to this New York Times article on Rwandan leader Paul Kagame. Kagame isn't just favoured by the Western European and North American governments, he gets a lot of glowingly positive press from quite a few Africans. Every week, The East African publishes a regular column by Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, who functions as an uncritical, downright fawning town crier for President Kagame.
I will never pretend to know or understand Rwanda as well as a Rwandan would. I am an outsider, and will always be so.
But in the equation I used at the title of this post, and equal about of negative and positive nets to zero. If you increase the magnitude of the negative, it would move from 0 to a negative value.
I am sure I have mentioned before that I am the most politically neutral person you will ever meet. I do not support any political party or politician or political ideology. And yes, that is neutrality, as much as you will see in this world where everyone seems to have someone or something that they support, sometimes without enthusiasm and other times quite passionately.
For more than 10 years, there was vicious, vicious, unbelievably vicious violence in Liberia and Sierra Leone. A proper discussion of why this came to be is too vast for a blog. Suffice to say there were many internal/domestic actors, many regional African actors, and many global/international actors who bear some degree of responsibility. It might be politically incorrect of me to say, but as citizens, we also share responsibility for watching passively as our countries collapse all around us. Collapse is never instantaneous; it always happens over a period of time long enough for us to do something to stop it.
On the list of people who are most responsible, you will find three African presidents, two of whom are dead, and one of whom is still alive. One of the dead presidents remains popular with many Africans because he is perceived to have made his country an "economic miracle" (inasmuch as it collapsed in anarchy after his death, because his was a one-man dictatorship with no institutions of substance beyond himself). The second dead president is popular with certain sections of the "Pan-Africanist" movement, because of his rhetoric in favour of a United States of Africa (inasmuch as his spent his decades in the presidency fomenting wars all over the continent). The third, still-living, still-in-power president is praised in the Western European and North American media for being a key sub-regional interlocutor, mediator and ally in terms of their security interests in the region.
What nobody ever talks about is how much responsibility the three bear for the horrors visited on Liberia and Sierra Leone. Whatever good thing they may happen to have done in there own countries, or on behalf of Western European and North American security interests (leaving aside the question of whether their interests and ours are compatible), cannot make up for what happened in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The Rwandan Genocide happened. There is a vital security interest for Rwanda in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But sometimes .... no .... very often .... no ... always in the arena of "strategic national interests", governments use a real "interest" as an excuse to do other things that have nothing to do with that "interest". And with all due respect to the fans of President Kagame, his actions in and policies toward the DR-Congo are a massive negative that outweighs whatever good he may be doing within Rwanda.
There is dispute as to how many people have died directly and indirectly because of the Congolese catastrophe. Some say the numbers in terms of "excess death" are already higher than the numbers for the Rwandan Genocide. Others say the "excess death" toll is lower than the Rwandan Genocide. But so long as the "excess death" numbers continue climbing year-after-year, this dispute may be moot.
If you've been reading this blog, you would know that I favour analytical explanations for violence in Nigeria over simply claiming one ethnic groups hates another one. As such, I want to be careful in the next thing I say, which is that the 1994 Genocide was not the first incident of Hutu-on-Tutsi, or for that matter Tutsi-on-Hutu communal violence. I would have to be a Rwandan or Burundian, with their level of knowledge of their country, to come up with an explanation for why this violence occurs, but it has happened often enough for me to say that there is no particular reason for assuming that it will not happen again.
I am not a prophet of doom ... but, as you might have noticed from reading this blog, I really dislike the way so-called "experts" analyze the continent. And I think it is rather dangerous that we Africans accept their analysis as truth.
Kagame's government is not the first government to be in power in the aftermath of one of these violent incidents. And this is not the first time that it has appeared, on the surface, that it was over and would never happen again.
The DR-Congo is a rather large place, and insofar as Rwandan policy does nothing to help the place, and plenty to harm it, Kagame is not exactly making Rwanda safer in the long-term. Maybe not even in the medium-term. Whatever the real security interests of Rwanda are, the policies of
the Kigali government are not making the region more secure or less
insecure.
To be honest, I am not entirely certain that Kagame's domestic policies are making the country safer. To what extent are things quiet because the underlying issues have been resolved, and to what extent do things simply appear to be quiet because he has established an unchallenged institutional capacity to coerce the appearance of resolution from his people?
The late President Felix Houphouet-Boigny received an even greater magnitude of positive, appreciative media support from Western Europe and North America. Within Africa, he was seen as the man responsible for what was perceived to be a miracle economy in Cote d'Ivoire. Then he died, and the people were exposed to the realities of a country where there were no real institutions beyond Houphouet-Boigny. They had no electoral system really, no judicial system, no political parties, no security system (with all due respect, their Army and Police were too small, and way too ineffectual). There was nothing. Just Houphouet-Boigny.
There are two lessons. The first is that no matter how pretty a country might look when in the grip of a one-man government, there are inherent, structural dangers to such a system, dangers that would exist even without the complication of genocide or of anarchy in a neighbouring DRC. The second lesson is the fact that praise or even criticism from the Western European and North American media does not really tell you whether or not the person they are praising is doing the right thing, or whether the person they are criticizing is doing the wrong thing. We have to step out of their centuries-long shadow, and start to ask ourselves what a proper government of an African country is supposed to look like and function like.
I know people will say that I should not be unrealistic, and that under the circumstances, this is better than the alternative .... but this is the same nonsense excuse that has been used repeatedly over the decades, and the one thing we should have learned by now is these supposedly "realistic" solutions to dilemmas end up perpetuating the very thing that the so-called "realists" think they are countering.
I just find it very hard to overlook what is happening in the DR-Congo when I read an article about how Paul Kagame is transforming Rwanda. Why does it not occur to people that events in the DR-Congo can, in the medium- to longer-term, wreck whatever Kagame builds in Rwanda in the short-term?
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