38 - Putin-like Compatriots, V: Rwanda's Kagame
Proposing to transport migrants who manage to cross the English Channel and struggle to Britain’s shores to Rwanda instead of evaluating their asylum claims in Britain, or at least sending them back to France, is shameless, illegal, and immoral. Only a government led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson could have conceived such a scheme. And only a government led by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame could have agreed to receive migrants denied fundamental rights – for cash.
Moreover, and here is the other major flaw: Despite Johnson’s praise for Kagame, he is one of Africa’s most rapacious autocrats as well as being a likely sponsor of the assassinations of numerous rivals. As the Economist says “Dealing with an autocrat messes with your moral compass.” (April 16, 2022)
Last year Kagame lured Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of Hotel Rwanda, from Texas to Dubai to Kigali. Last month, after a Soviet –style show trial, Rusesabina was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on treason charges. “Treason” in this case meant opposing Kagame and publicly saying so.
Entrapping Rusesabagina was hardly the first “clever” Lukashenko-like entrapment of Rwandans who dare to criticize the tight-fisted manner in which Kagame has run his otherwise oft-praised African government. Much earlier, thugs sent by Kagame to South Africa enticed Patrick Karegeya, the autocrat’s one time close friend and intelligence chief, into a Johannesburg hotel room, where he was brutally strangled in 2014. A journalistic critic was gunned down in 2011 in Uganda and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the one-time head of Rwanda’s armed forces, was wounded in 2010 during a hit job, also in Johannesburg. Attacks on Rwandan dissidents roiled Stockholm, too, and Rwandan exiles were menaced repeatedly in Brussels and London, Russian style. Putin poisons, Kagame strangles and decapitates.
All of this “off the books” Mafia-reminiscent activity reflects murderously on the positive aspects of Kagame’s governmental enterprise in Rwanda, where deep in the troubled heart of Africa a strict autocracy masquerades successfully as a benevolent democracy. Rwanda is widely regarded as one of the best run and governed countries of Africa in terms of service delivery. Yet Rwandans may not freely speak or assemble, nor criticize their ruler. There is no free press or media. And Rwanda ranks close to the bottom on the global happiness index. Rwandans have traded (or been compelled to trade) basic freedoms in a Faustian way for compulsory conformity, low crime, low corruption, and improved standards of living. In 1994, Rwanda’s GDP per capita was $205. It rose to $698 in 2014, to $765 in 2017, and to $850 in 2021. GDP per capita has been growing at 8 percent in recent years, but those improvements may depend on what some analysts term fraudulent statistics.
The man behind this compromised political arrangement is Kagame, a tall, stern, tight-lipped, heavy-lidded former American-trained intelligence officer and general who rescued Rwanda from the Hutu-led genocide of Tutsi in 1994 and has run Rwanda ever since. He also scrapped term limits, which means that he can legitimately remain Rwanda’s chief until at least 2034. Kagame, 65, tolerates dissent as little as he tolerates incompetence. Disloyalty, or opposition of the mildest kind, is often punished with death.
For all of these reasons, Kagame’s leadership in tiny Rwanda – a poor, congested, African country half the size of Nova Scotia (or the size of Maryland), with a swelling and congested population of 13 million -- provides a remarkable model that merits searching examination. Can a Platonic case be made for excellent results achieved by (mostly) dreadful means? Most of the world – as indicated by French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit of apology and reconciliation to Kagame and Rwanda – appropriately acclaims all that Rwanda has achieved under Kagame’s rule.
Much of the rest of Africa is less effective than Rwanda in reducing corruption, improving educational opportunities, upgrading public health facilities, gradually boosting GDPs per capita despite few natural resources, and providing the key political goods of safety and security. Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, Cape Verde, and the Seychelles are all democratic nations that offer excellent outcomes to their citizens, what we term good governance. But three of those countries are island states and all are thinly populated, with fewer than 3 million inhabitants.
Three of the medium sized African countries like Rwanda -- Ghana, Malawi, and Senegal -- are democratic, with high levels of governance performance. But those places are more corrupt than Rwanda (according to the Corruption Perceptions Index), and - Ghana excepted – their educational and health systems are no more advanced. South Africa rates better than Rwanda on the Index of African Governance, which I created, but is wildly corrupt whereas Rwanda has mostly eliminated corruption – a major burden lifted off the backs of Rwandans.
Unlike the presidents of Botswana, Kagame can hardly claim to be a thoroughgoing democrat, or even a consensus-building quasi-democrat. He is a naked authoritarian, but with substantial legitimacy as a seemingly genuine modernizer. What truly distinguishes him and his long reign as the headman of Rwanda is his close attention to improving the public good and the daily lives and outcomes of his densely packed constituents.
Kagame responded to the horrific 1994 genocide in Rwanda by invading Rwanda at the head of a Tutsi army to save as many remaining Tutsi lives as possible and to restore order in his country. Initially that meant imprisoning and killing supposed Hutu perpetrators of genocide or pursuing them and their ethnic compatriots into the nearby forests of the Congo. Subsequently, after Kagame had become vice-president (under a titular but powerless president), he focused on rebuilding, stabilizing, and pacifying the desperate land that had lost at least 800,000 Tutsi and had seen 200,000 Hutu flee into the Congo, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and overseas. It also meant invading Zaire/the Congo twice, with great losses of life.
Kagame was no mere military leader with rudimentary ideas about organizing a re-born state and a responsible government. By 2000, when Kagame acceded to his nation’s presidency, he had articulated a vision for the emergence of war-damaged Rwanda as the Singapore of Africa. Lacking most of Singapore’s advantages: its perfectly positioned harbor, its geographical location at the crossroads of a good third of the globe’s commerce, its well-educated and advanced-skilled population, and its greatly appreciated wealth per capita, Kagame nevertheless became determined – at least by 2005, if not before, to transform a very poor state with natural resources no more promising than shade-grown coffee (subject as it is to fluctuating world prices) into a well-functioning, promising, potentially middle-income jurisdiction in the heart of equatorial Africa. Kagame has been favorably termed a “developmental patrimonialist,” with considerable wealth derived from the mineral resources of the Congo.
Benevolent autocrats occasionally have their uses. But the cases of Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, today’s Ghana, and the new dispensations in South Africa and Malawi and Zambia, demonstrate that excellent qualities of government can be achieved in developing countries by fully democratic means, employing the usual political stratagems of consensus-building, compromise, accommodation, and—where necessary—healthy competition. They benefit less from enforced conformity, intimidation, and widespread killings of persons with different views. Human and national development can best be realized within an environment of freedom and open dialogue – results for which Ukraine is striving and Russia, China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Rwanda, and so many other countries now abuse and disdain. Deporting migrants to Rwanda is expedient, but wrong.