Editor, Re: “The missing jigsaw in explaining Rwanda’s rebirth” (The New Times September 17). Rwanda’s miraculous recovery from the abyss is the product of a confluence of many factors some of which are specific to our country. These include but are not limited to a long shared history as a unified country with a common overarching culture, traditions and belief systems, even if these had been shaken to their very foundations by deliberate colonial and Church policies to reshape the characteristics of what it is to be Umunyarwanda as a means of radically transforming our society as a whole. But the most important ingredient in Rwanda’s recovery and rebirth is a leadership that knew how to draw the best from that shared history, to mobilise Rwandans around a shared vision of our own self-redemption and a more prosperous future of a nation that had healed itself from its near self-destruction. It is also because of a leadership that knew how to and was able not only to motivate us to share that vision, but to actually make that vision our own and to successfully nudge us to put all our undivided efforts into making it a reality. In a nutshell, these are the words that explain our nation’s miraculous rebirth: Leadership, leadership, leadership! Mwene Kalinda
