Just 13 years after the Genocide, Rwanda is accomplishing miracles. Can a deeply scarred society simply will itself to succeed?In 1994, neighbours killed neighbours, priests their congregants, and parents their own children until one out of every 10 men, women and children was dead.
Just 13 years after the Genocide, Rwanda is accomplishing miracles. Can a deeply scarred society simply will itself to succeed?
In 1994, neighbours killed neighbours, priests their congregants, and parents their own children until one out of every 10 men, women and children was dead.
Just 13 years later, Rwanda has become one of the safest, best-governed and most optimistic countries on a continent where corruption, insecurity and abysmal leadership are often the norm.
How? As far as I can tell, sheer force of will plus a whole lot of positive thinking.
The Genocide was a story of highly organized mass hysteria, Rwanda’s "follower culture” taken to its most evil extreme. Today, President Paul Kagame, a former military commander, has mobilized that culture to serve a very different vision.
The government wants to position Rwanda as a hi-tech service hub for East Africa and a centre for luxury tourism. And an industrious people are all contributing. It’s as though all 9 million Rwandans watched "The Secret” and decided to make it the bedrock of their development policy. Group think, with a productive twist.
First there’s "Vision 2020,” an audacious development policy that aims to see every Rwandan literate, educated and well nourished in 13 years. The headlines in a typical issue of New Times, the daily English-language newspaper, convey the optimism: "No more power shortage”, "Promote women”, "Population growth controllable”, "Malaria no more”.
The differences between Rwanda and other countries I’ve visited are striking. Elsewhere in Africa, roads are edged by gutters clogged with waste and will wash away with an uncharitably harsh rain.
In Rwanda, plastic bags have been outlawed, and you have to squint to see a piece of rubbish. Every third Saturday of the month, all Rwandans are expected to spend the morning cleaning streets as a service to the community.
Elsewhere, being stopped by the police means paying a bribe, getting beaten or worse. In Rwanda, when the police - who all wear prominently numbered neon vests - stop a motorist, it’s to make sure their driver’s license is valid or to issue a warning about a broken taillight.
Crime has decreased alongside corruption.
I even spoke to one Rwandan who said he no longer felt the need to buy auto theft insurance. "Even if someone stole my car, they wouldn’t find any Rwandan to sell it to,” he explained. "No one would buy stolen property.”
Elsewhere, Africans talk about everything they are denied. In Rwanda, they talk about all they have built.
That sense of building something together is tangible. It goes beyond destroying the identity cards that once designated Rwandans as Hutu or Tutsi.
Many children were orphaned during the Genocide, leaving households headed by teenagers. Kagame regularly calls upon Rwandans with resources to take into their own families as many children as they can afford, and they do.
This would hardly be remarkable if you were in, say, Japan. But in a country that borders the Congo, where, less than three hours away, Hutu militia are still pillaging villages and raping women so violently, and where fistulas have become pandemic, it’s nothing short of a miracle.
The government has also cracked down on public corruption, instituting strict auditing mechanisms of public funds, zero-tolerance to corruption and aggressive pro-investment policies.
According to governance measures published by the World Bank last week, Rwanda ranked among traditionally high performers like South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius on controlling corruption.
Rwanda has had help which is well managed that donors are increasingly turning toward general budget support, rather than aid earmarked for specific purposes.
The government is also aggressively chasing foreign investment as far afield as Oman.
In May, a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer opened its first African assembly business - in Kigali, the capital.
In the end, talk to almost any Rwandan, and he or she will tell you the biggest difference between 1994 and 2007 is leadership and attitude.
Kagame, who regularly calls his own people lazy, has raised the bar high. So high that for every Rwandan from the octogenarian cabinet minister who had to learn PowerPoint to the peasant farmer nurturing his own personal aspirations for 2020, the only choice is to succeed.
"Ten years ago, walk into a bar at 5pm and it would be packed full,” a Rwandan employee of the World Bank told me. Now they are empty: CEOs, secretaries and even janitors are busy taking night classes.
So, there are shortcomings, to be sure. But Kagame is a vast improvement on leaders who, just before 1994 - year zero - were mass murderers who drove the country into anarchy. Rwandans are committed to never allowing genocide to happen again. The memory of Genocide is a powerful motivator.
David Kanamugire, Director for ICT in the president’s office, is busy working to secure Rwanda’s hi-tech revolution. He believes peace cannot be secured without development. "If I don’t work as hard as I possibly can everyday, the cost of failure will be our people killing each other,” he told me. "I cannot fail. I will not fail.”
But what if any country, no matter how poor, no matter how scarred its past, can build a society that works? What if it really is just a matter of believing in a better future and mobilizing the will to achieve it?
This slightly edited article was first published on July 26, 07in the Guardian