Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

Rwanda: Why the Tribalists Are Scared of This Government

By Focus Media
(Kigali)
June 4, 2009

We in Rwanda live in truly transformational times. We live in exciting times.

Never in the history of our country have we, the collective citizenry, enjoyed such equality; such freedom to do as we please; to be what we want; to move where we want, to live where we want in any part of the country as we do now. Of course those with a sectarian bent of mind (and their few backers overseas) profess not to see this equality, this freedom we are talking about here.

They will nitpick and find fault with everything President Kagame and his administration does and claim we are a repressed society because we do not conform to Western notions of what form of rule is best for everyone.

The honest person instead looks at the times we live in and marvels at the fact for example that things such as tribal quotas (iringaniza) in schools are now history.

In the infamous iringaniza of past sectarian governments schools would not admit more than a few Tutsi children because "the Tutsi population is only 14 percent, so not more than that percentage of their children should be admitted in primary school." But even the few who did make it to school did not go beyond a few years there. Schools were places of sheer psychological torture for Tutsi children. The Hutu teachers, the Hutu children, even the Hutu cleaners and other employees taunted these children and abused them and subjected them to all sorts of misery.

Today no child from whatever background suffers. Of course there are many who cannot go to school but this is due to the general poverty of their parents, and the government's inability - due to a paucity of funds - to adequately provide for every child.

We do not have to ask for permission to move from Rwanda to any other country. In the times of Kayibanda in the sixties and early seventies, and the worst years of Habyarimanism people were penned in their prefectures like livestock. You never moved to Kigali without the written permission of a bourgmestre.

The backward and tyrannical nature of Rwandan government and its politics were such that ordinary citizens feared heads of a prefecture, a prefet, like he was some kind of monarch. The tyrannical rule of most African governments is manifest in the way citizens live in fear of the military. A major, a majoro in Habyarimana's times for instance was a man to be truly feared. He ordered you to do whatever he wanted. He beat you up if he felt like it. He locked you up and threw away the key. Now imagine what a colonel and others above those ranks did to you. By you we mean the ordinary, poor citizen which was pretty much the entire populace of the country.

But here is what drives the tribalists in Rwanda and their friends overseas insane: they know that Kagame and his government are a totally different category of rulers than their past governments. Today an ordinary citizen will ask to meet the President and most likely get the chance to meet him. No one lives in fear of the governor of a province and if someone asked you to produce a pass allowing you to move anywhere in the country this person would most likely would be candidates for Ndera Mental Hospital. And a general won't advertise it in today's Rwanda.

The tribalists and their backers know Kagame and his ruling party stand for everything decent, everything human and everything one can ever want in a government in a situation like Rwanda's. Yes, we have problems with certain policies of our government and a number of its officials. But these are more to do with the imperfect nature of human being than any acts of tyranny.

The tribalists are frightened because each passing day proves to the world what an inhuman bunch they were and what a progressive group Kagame's is. They are frustrated because Kagame won't round up Hutus to throw them in jail en masse but instead his government is busy pardoning thousands of minor Genocide suspects. This deprives them of the ammunition with which to accuse him of running a Stalinist state.

Truly, the tribalists, the sectarian operators and their Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other international pressure group friends, and deniers of the Genocide are grasping at straws whenever they go out to hurl more accusations against this government. They are flabbergasted when they learn that Kagame has taken certain senior members of the ruling RPF for not providing proper leadership; for lining their pockets at the expense of the public and for committing other offences of bad governance.

By tribalists let's be clear what we mean - we mean Hutu tribalists within and outside Rwanda. And of course we do not mean that every Hutu is a tribalist, just like we know there also are Tutsi tribalists; but for the purposes of this editorial we are talking about Hutu tribalists.

The tribalists and sectarian operators and their friends are not used to a government like Kagame's. Obviously they always were going to fight the RPF government no matter how it turned out, but they assumed it would rule like Habyarimana's or Kayibanda's before, which would have made it much easier for them to fight it.

Instead Kagame and the RPF have blindsided the tribalists. They have disarmed them with ideas and through running a responsible government of all Rwandans by all Rwandans.

And if things continue like this, it is clear, the tribalists and their foreign masters will never get a foothold in Rwanda again.

That scares them no end.

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posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 3:52 PM