Nothing like good news from Burundi

Time check 7:30pm East African Time. I am in Kampala’s business hub trying to make my way out of the massive human and motorised traffic. I beck on a BodaBoda (motorcycle taxi) to take me to Namayiba Bus Park so I can board the Modern Coast bus to Kigali that was to depart at 8:00pm. The brief ride turns quite hectic when I am left to inhale fumes from the static traffic during the evening rush hour. We eventually get to the bus station just in time. I present my ticket and proceed to locate my seat. I place my bag in the overhead luggage hold and sit down to charge my phone as I wait for the bus to set off. At exactly 8:00pm we were off but the seat next to mine was empty. A couple of girls nearby beg the driver to wait a bit for a friend of theirs who was still stuck in the traffic maze. As fate would have it the said friend, who I later learnt was called Alice, showed up on the side of the bus with her suitcase. The door was opened and she jumped in and with a face full of exhaustion she sat next to me. Her other four friends were asking her all sorts of questions but she wanted to catch her breath first. A little later on, we exchanged hellos and she told me how the BodaBoda driver had initially taken her to the wrong bus office and that is why she was late. From the conversations with her friends across the aisle I could tell they were Burundians. And she later confirmed to me that she was indeed continuing to Bujumbura and not stopping in Kigali like me. When the bus made a stop in Mbarara we chatted again and I told her something I have said several times. I told her of my desire to visit Bujumbura but she did not even let me finish. She quickly interjected with, “Don’t come. It is bad.” In other words, the worries about missing a scheduled bus are indeed nothing compared to what they have to live with once they cross the Akanyaru border and enter Burundi. The sad tales haven’t stopped streaming in via social media with each morning introducing a new body count. These days not much is said about the names of the dead or what they were doing for a living, all we see are lifeless bodies in dry pools of blood. The bodies are nothing but graphical representations of more death statistics from the country whose map is shaped like a heart. Now a bleeding heart. My friend Kris Nsabiyumva, now living in the US, asks in a tweet what the threshold is for multiple deaths to be called a massacre or even genocide. I hate it when the loss of multiple lives is reduced to a semantic debate. The crisis in Burundi has been a process that we have watched unfold over time. It was never an event. We saw the protests and thought they were the usual urban anger pouring on the streets. We talked about sovereignty and indulged in constitutional law debates but the bodies on the street kept on piling. We have seen numerous statements of concern from political leaders all across the world but well it is just concern. Now major airlines have cancelled flights to Bujumbura because their employees live in fear. It is always a struggle for them to move between their homes and workstations. A matter of life and death in every sense of the word. And the biggest irony of all this is that Burundi is led by a leader whose name means good news. Where is the good news you may ask? As a region we have enjoyed Tanzania’s new leader supplying us with enough good news. President John Pombe Magufuli, whose name seemed to cause laughter to some, is now having the last laugh as everyone talks about his drive for efficient governance. The kind of efficient governance that made Rwanda’s Paul Kagame a leader his people don’t want to let go of anytime soon. Pictures of Magufuli getting his hands dirty in a general cleaning exercise remind us the numerous pictures we have seen of President Kagame taking part in the monthly Umuganda cleaning exercises in Rwanda. No wonder another friend told me that if Magufuli continues with the current pace his people may ask him to remain around much longer.

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Nothing like good news from Burundi