I spend almost an hour daily reading up on what is happening across the region. Unfortunately, because of the myriad of problems that it faces, the majority of the news that I read concerns the DR Congo. I follow a bunch of Congolese journalists and influencers based in Goma on 'X' (formerly Twitter), and looking at what they have been posting over the last week or so, things have been particularly grim in the capital of North Kivu province. In a new low even for the DRC, last Wednesday a bunch of soldiers from the presidential guard shot indiscriminately into a crowd of marchers, killing between 50-200 unarmed civilians. And after reading the sad news, what I did next was shake my head in sadness, switch off the X app and go about my day. Why? Because, truth be told, my daily struggles here in Kigali had nothing in common with those of the people dealing with state collapse a mere five hours’ drive away. You see, while I was dealing with the normal daily grind, people over there are dealing with live bullets. This difference in reality was brought into sharp focus when I travelled to the Petit Barrier border crossing between Rubavu and Goma on Friday. I arrived there at dusk, sadly too late to witness the daily throng streaming in and out of Rwanda. As I stood right on the actual border demarcation and stared into Goma, breathing in the fumes (an odd mix of volcanic soil, woodsmoke and burning plastic) eying the shacks made from corrugated iron sheets (mabati) and listening to the loud conversations the Congolese border guards were having in Kiswahili, I noticed something rather odd. Every few minutes or so, a small group of women, carrying goods on their heads, would cross the no-man’s land and march, unmolested by the DRC border guards, towards the Rwandan side of the border. All this despite the fact that the DRC government had directed, almost a year ago, that their side of the border was to close at 3pm sharp every day. When I asked a security official from our side how what I was seeing was possible, I was informed that the women bribed the DRC border guards to let them through and because the Rwandan side stayed open, Rwandan immigration had no reason to stop them coming in. Beyond the air quality and open bribery, what got me thinking was just how different life looked on the different sides of the border. Because of an imaginary border (a mere twenty meters wide) the lives of two communities couldn’t have been more different. For example, whereas social media users on one side of the border were mourning the people killed by their own security forces, their neighbors were debating how Black Panther actor Winston Duke was able to get Rwandan citizenship. The funny thing is, when you look back, our neighbor’s fate could have been our own. The religious among us will say that it was God’s grace that we didn’t end up in an even worse state than our neighbors after 1994. As an agnostic I’ll say that it was a combination of the right leadership at the right time as well as plain good luck. Either way, staring across the no-man’s land, all I felt was thankful that I was born on one side of the divide and not the other. The writer is a socio-political commentator
