Paul Kagame is a soldier; a military general for that matter. His name has often been connected to the shooting down of the plane that killed the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda, in reaction to which Rwandans killed each other while the world watched. Some 800 thousand people died as a result. Later the Rwandan government fell.
Kagame quickly understood that although his fighters had won the military battle, Rwandans were deeply divided and that a Tutsi government would be resented and possibly another genocidal war would engulf Rwanda and the interahamwe, a paramilitary group comprising mostly Hutu fighters and regular soldiers that had melted away and regrouped in the deep forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, would come back and cause havoc.
Kagame humbled himself and chose to be deputy to a Hutu president essentially to assure the Hutu and the Tutsi that it was possible to work together and rebuild Rwanda. Immediately a programme of social transformation was launched. The curriculum, the constitution, identity cards and political documents were changed, and any official reference to one’s ethnic grouping was proscribed.
Henceforth, all citizens of Rwanda were Rwandans and they were free to live and operate any business anywhere in Rwanda. The institutions that promote ethnic divisions, such as traditional chiefdoms, were abolished and a new form of rural governance adopted. People were asked to move from their traditional homes and come together in imidugudu, planned villages using Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa village concept, where leaders were and still are regularly elected.
Today, Rwanda is different. Rwandans rarely, if ever, talk about their ethnic origins. Their major preoccupation is poverty reduction.
Policies are in place to promote rural development an d u r ba n i s a t i o n b y empowering the people to start looking at themselves appreciatively and as capital for their own development. Rwanda is at peace today because the military winner humbled himself.
Models of sustainable social change, such as Appreciative Inquiry and the Communication for Social Change, and Freirean critical pedagogy, indicate that transformation starts with people being made aware of the positive side of life and people’s own value to change things and their own lives.
This is done through intrapersonal and interpersonal interrogation or introspection, publ i c di a log ue, and identification of societal level issues that are worth promoting for the benefit of the entire country.
Without this dialogue and conscientisation of the poor and marginalised, there can be no sustainable social transformation. Rwanda has implemented this process. Chances of Rwanda going back to war are very remote.
Even if the remnants of the interahamwe decided to come back, they would not go very far, firstly, because Rwanda’s military is available everywhere and ready for any attack, and secondly, because Rwandans have no more appetite for conflict. Their vision is collective progress.
After the internecine murders that followed the 2007 elections in Kenya, Kenyans learnt the value of looking beyond tribe and an election. They interrogated themselves, individually and collectively assisted by civic education programmes and decided tribalism would lead them nowhere.
Six years later, the elections that saw Uhuru win, passed peacefully. The losers accepted defeat and the winner extended a hand of friendship and reconciliation to the losers. Kenya, like Rwanda, had learned from its unfortunate past and decided to take a different route
In Malawi, unfortunately, losers never accept defeat, which increases ethnic tensions and reinforces the winner’s resolve to deal with the defeated. To be defeated in an election does not one mean one has failed. It only means that the defeated is not the number-one choice.
To be contiued next week
