Umuganda community exercise will resume on Saturday, February 26, which falls on the last weekend of the month, according to the Ministry of Local Government. The exercise was suspended for close to two years, as one of the measures to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic that was registered in Rwanda since March 2020. Normally, Umuganda is conducted every last Saturday of the month where village members came together and undertake cleaning activities in their neighbourhoods and find time to talk about critical issues affecting their day to day lives. In an exclusive interview with The New Times, Local Government Minister, Jean Marie Vianney Gatabazi said that the first round of the exercise will be marked by discussions around pressing communal and developmental issues. “In the first place, we will discuss on curbing the school dropout cases, the school feeding programme and disaster management among other important community issues,” he said. What did we miss? As the exercise returns, some residents say that some of the gaps created due to the suspension of Umuganda – which is considered world over one of the best home-grown solutions from Rwanda – may be difficult to plug. Philip Ntampaka, the leader of Nyagacyamo village in Kacyiru sector, Gasabo District says that criminal cases reported to the security organs had increased due to the absence of Umuganda. “After the cleaning exercise, people came together in the village hall to discuss pressing issues in neighborhoods. So because the exercise was suspended, most people were taking the criminal cases to the investigation body which drove up the cases received there,” he recalled. On cleanliness, he said the rainy season and the resulting erosion had greatly affected the roads among other infrastructures of the neighborhoods, asserting that citizens were sensitized to often clean around their homes, during such seasons. Umuganda was introduced in Rwanda in 2007. According to Ange Sebutege, the mayor of Huye District, the contribution of the citizens in the government programs had scaled down due to the absence of Umuganda. “Umuganda is often an opportunity for people to be informed on government decisions and they get to also share their inputs, hence the element of citizen contribution was lacking,” he told The New Times in an exclusive interview. On his part, Minister Gatabazi said that more areas were affected by soil erosion, as cleaning activities had stopped. “People living in hilly areas were affected by soil erosion but on the other hand, citizens did not get time to sit down and assess problems in their communities,” he said. The New Times understands that the decision to resume the community work was taken after the significant drop of Covid-19 cases. Since the beginning of this week on February 14, the nationwide confirmed Covid-19 cases did not exceed 15 in the last three days with the national prevalence has remained at 0.1 per cent for the past week.
