January 23-24 was Umushyikirano time. Umushyikirano, a yearly National Dialogue Council, brings together leaders and citizens to put under the microscope the country’s performance for the past year, the present standing and map-out of the following year’s actions. Time for serious business and, therefore, marked by solemn mood, right? Well, wrong!
This being the 19th Umushyikirano, those before it may have been sombre as complaint-quiz-harangue-apology affairs but this one was anything but. If anything, it was celebratory.
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That complaint-quiz-harangue-apology bit refers to how the routine was for leaders to report on how they had fared on their performance contracts. How citizens complained about promised goods and services unmet. How the overall leader tore down leaders’ reports but patiently discussed with them his thoughts on what was supposed to be done and how.
Many leaders ended up only giving apologies, which were accepted if found valid, rejected if found to be excuses for absolution. It was a sombre time then. However, that the leaders felt compelled to apologise to citizens and that the country’s president acted on citizens’ wishes shows who is in the driving seat, whatever Western do-gooders and armchair critics may choose to project. The latter, to whom Rwanda gives no fig.
Anyway, the poignancy of the fact of who runs the show was loudly demonstrated at this two-day Umushyikirano by the impressive line-up of youths, perhaps more female than male, on the panels of discussants.
With 78% of Rwandans being below the age of 35, the citizenry is marked by a big youth bulge. This Umushyikirano, then, was it celebrating Rwanda’s youth?
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I see no reason why not. The well-articulated ideas the youth put forth; the impressive enterprises, economic, social and otherwise, they are in charge of; the innovations they are driving; the solutions to general Rwandan social and economic ills they proposed; et al; were nothing short of revolutionary. Those representatives of their peers gave us cause for celebration of the youth.
And, indeed, the jovial participants, the very décor in Kigali Convention Centre, in different sites upcountry and in the Diaspora were a celebration of the revolutions that begot today’s Rwanda.
Granted, youths as well as their elders face diverse challenges as should be expected in any country. Still, what’s important is that the youth have the chance and will to put their energy to the test in tackling those challenges. And it’s a chance they are seizing and a will they are affecting at every opportunity since the 1970s, the time the RPF idea was born.
Today’s greyheads were the 1970s youths who dared to haul the then community’s paradigm of resignation to oppression and polarisation that had been subjected to them for close to a century. Some Rwandans had been banished to the four corners of the globe while those inside the country had been relegated to the life of second-class citizens. To entertain the idea of changing this status quo alone was a revolution in its small way.
When all attempts to hold a sane dialogue with the Habyarimana regime that held power as if in a vice and strangled its unwanted citizens in the 1980s, the regime summarily trashed it. Like the paradigm shifters they were, however, the youths of then did not stop there. In the 1990s, they put their lives on the line for a united, prospering Rwanda. To envision the eventual realisation of this idea was itself a revolution of no mean measure.
But what the youths of the time hadn’t bargained for hit them hammer and tongs. A government going for the total elimination of a section of its citizens? Not even a crazed demon can imagine that. Yes, though, the regime was worse than that demon and it went about its macabre business methodically. Our youths grieved but were not fazed.
They put a halt to the Satanism and put the incubi and succubae to flight and delivered the mother of all revolutions: the liberation of this land. This odyssey may sound like a walkover when I tell it, but consider that the regime was backed by practically all of Francophone Africa and its head.
From this abyss, Rwanda, the comeback kid, was ready to rise to the realm of embracing the revolutions that would finally land her at the high table: cultural and economic revolutions. And she has gone a long way with both, so, youths of today, go forth. You are treading a tarmacked path.
After digging back into history to bring up what united Rwandans of yore, greyheads have combined their experience with youth energy to put on the road today’s society of one Rwandan, Ndi Umunyarwanda. Now they are working together like one oiled machine.
The cultural revolution has gone hand-in-hand with, and facilitated, an economic revolution. An economic revolution which has enabled the economy to grow at a steady pace. With peace and security ensured, there will be no interruption to this growth.
So, youth of our land, go ye forward. Fear not those fat talking heads around you, threatening fire and brimstone. They are nothing but noisy-fatso balloons: a mere pin will put them asunder!