Kagame slams private sector demanding change

By RNA Reporter
August 5, 2009

Kigali: Using language such as ‘sleepy’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘unnecessarily aggressive’; President Kagame on Wednesday seemed to have had enough of the services given in the private sector.

He also hit angrilly at the public service for inflating performance percentages when the situation on the ground is totally different, RNA reports.

Mr. Kagame was addressing 30 mayors from across the country after they had presented their achievements and set new targets for the next six months. The President spent most of his address complaining bitterly about the sluggish services offered at different private companies.

All the ‘so called international hotels’ will take hours to serve you a meal, he said, adding that when the food arrives it will be ‘half-cooked’. “In addition to that, the same food will be very expensive”, he said, but was not done yet.

“Worst of all, everybody pays for the food and leaves like nothing happened. Why does it have to be like that? Why can’t you protest to be given the service you deserve”, he said, raising his voice with vigorous gestures amid silence in the parliamentary building.

Just using prepared notes instead of the usual speech-reading routine, Mr. Kagame was not finished as yet again.

“When you ask for wine at these hotels, they will tell you its not there. But you will see it when you check carefully”, he said amid laughter from the audience, before he interjected saying more was coming.

“Instead the problem is that nobody knows how to open the wine”, he said as the whole audience went into lengthy laughter, adding that those serving are often ‘really good looking’ men and women but have nothing to show for how they look.

President Kagame also wants parents to take more charge for the education of their children. He said government and parliament need to come up with a policy-frame work purposely concerning parents and the education of their children.

He told the mayors that they should also set targets aimed at evaluating how much parents are putting into the schooling of the children. “The education of children must be a responsibility of parents as well not just government”, he said.

“There have to be measures to handle parents who ignore this responsibility such that they are also held accountable”, he added pounding his podium.

For the mayors and the targets they were setting, Mr. Kagame said they have to aim to attain much more ‘not staying on the same level all the time’. He accused civil servants of inflating performance percentages when the ‘situation is different on the ground’.

“I will not mince words here, no diplomacy, and no other way of saying”, he said repeatedly pounding his podium. “How do you give yourself 100% when children are dying of malnutrition?”

After bitterly criticizing the private sector, he said his feelings about the performance of the public service would come another time.