Democracy is when people can set their own priorities

Editor, RE: “Rwanda: Our downfall” (The New Times, November 25). Every time I see most Western articles or audiovisual reportage on Rwanda, I always know in advance what the outline looks like. Most of the time I don’t bother because I already know what to expect. The question I would pose to all these self-styled experts—but don’t even bother doing so for I know they are set in their baseless conviction is: How do you achieve such a miraculous recovery and clearly visible advances on the economic, social, educational, health and security fronts without the involvement of the people who are, after all, both the main architects and primary beneficiaries of such advances? What is democracy, if it isn’t the right of a people to set their own priorities and the path and means of achieving them? And what do human rights mean in practical terms, if you are hungry, sick, are physically insecure in your person and possessions, your child has no access to basic information, you are isolated on your hills without access to markets or to basic public services and matter to the elites in the capital and other major cities as objects of use to beg alms from donors or at periodic moments when those elites need your vote in exchange for small packets of sugar or one or two corrugated iron sheets for your hovel? The conceited Western elite professional humanitarians and professional human rights lesson-givers are part of the problem that afflicts and has afflicted us for a very long time. We need to emancipate ourselves from their hold if we are to be able to raise ourselves from the ground, shake the dust off our chagua clothes and start thinking and doing for ourselves. That Rwanda’s recovery is primarily based on applying this thinking is in reality, why many of those who had a tight hold on the market for our development ideas and action detest President Kagame and the RPF. He has shown that true popular development is driven by those for whom it is intended, not by self-styled external do-gooders, whether foreign or domestic elites both of whose overarching interest is their own agendas. Note how, in this regard, Rwanda’s problems with the likes of HRW and their international brethren in the think tank and ‘human rights’ constellation dates from when a still struggling country told them to act in accordance with the government’s blue-print or leave the country The lesson of all of this: Nobody can develop your country; only that country’s people can. There is also no higher degree of democracy than that dedicated to promoting collective progress and the general welfare. Anyone who tells you otherwise does not have your interest at heart. Mwene Kalinda

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Democracy is when people can set their own priorities