Self-hate is a terrible condition. Ingratitude is another. So is an oversized sense of self-importance and unchecked craving for attention. When all these afflict an individual at the same time, that person is gravely sick. Self-delusion, even in an obnoxious individual, sometimes moves one to pity. Other times you simply say, if it pleases them, let them live in their fool’s paradise. Trouble is they do not want to live there alone. They want company and so are keen on infecting others with their dangerous delusions or dragging them there against their will. Such characters exist. Luckily, not many. We have one here, in Rwanda, in one Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. The self-deluded do not come worse than that. All her adult life she has set herself up as a very important person in Rwandan politics, helped in no small measure by Western media. She actually believes it. Her idea of that role, however, is that of setting up Rwandans against one another. She has actually waged war on her country and compatriots. At various times in the last 30 years, she worked closely with the genocidal FDLR militia in its different formations. Everyone knows the ideology and intentions of FDLR, which she obviously shares. For crimes against her country, she was tried, convicted and sentenced to a prison term. After serving part of the sentence, she was pardoned and released under presidential clemency. Apparently, she met that generous gesture with scorn. She went back to her old ways, continued maligning Rwanda and its leadership, and trucking with elements with genocidal intentions. Obviously, she was never contrite when she wrote to the president pleading for clemency. Lately, she has taken to praising the Wazalendo, a collection of vicious militias in eastern DR Congo’s North Kivu Province allied to FDLR, as good people. This is an alliance sworn to exterminate the Kinyarwanda-speaking Tutsi of DR Congo. Individuals with such terrible disorders and illnesses think they are very clever. Ingabire now presents herself as a champion of unity and reconciliation, and lambasts the government of Rwanda for failures in that area. Only in foreign media, of course. They love her, but not for her newfound cause, (they know it is a lie). They love stories about disunity and conflict, failure and dysfunction, and she readily obliges. Not everyone is gullible. Certainly not Rwandans. They know her better. She knows it too. With them, she does not even pretend. She preaches hatred and division. And so she takes her attempts at sanitising herself to foreign media. Last week, she appeared on BBC’s HARDtalk programme with Stephen Sackur. She was at it again as usual, disparaging the achievements Rwandans have made in the last 30 years. She dismissed her country as dirty, poor, and not safe for its own citizens, let alone foreigners, including asylum seekers. That is, of course, what some in the United Kingdom wanted to hear – confirmation of their bias coming from a Rwandan ‘politician’ whom they have elevated to heights she never imagined. She went on and on denigrating her country and herself and became a willing tool in the UK’s internal political quarrels, and thought she was scoring political points. Sackur was uncharacteristically sympathetic, leading her gently, patiently, almost lovingly. He was not the mean, ruthless, and intimidating interrogator who browbeats his interviewees to accept his assumptions, who never waits for an answer but presses on with questions he does not really want answered. She revelled in the attention she was getting and poured more vitriol on her country. You cannot really blame her. For a person who craves attention and recognition, such interviews are a godsend, especially since she cannot get it from anywhere else. She craves other things, which, unfortunately she does not get. One of them is fame, but like that of a moth flying into a bright hot flame. The flame seems to have rejected her. Even fire is selective and will not touch tainted creatures that have warped intentions. But if Ingabire thinks that her denigration of her country, its leaders, and people will shake Rwanda and earn her the greatness she hankers after, she is gravely mistaken. Far from doing much harm, her utterances actually strengthen the country. They are proof that her claims are false. She herself is proof of that. Her loud cries of suppression of such rights as the freedom of expression, for instance, ring hollow when she makes the most rabid anti-Rwanda statements on Rwandan territory and has not suffered for it. When hate of others turns to hate of self, some people can do terrible things. They cannot see any positive thing. At least other detractors of Rwanda acknowledge progress that cannot be denied or made invisible, and only add that it must have come at a cost. But not Ingabire. She is incapable of seeing good. The very concept is alien to her. For speaking ill of her country, Ingabire has no equal. She easily wins the gold.
