The "single story" of Rwanda's rise

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the Nigerian novelist who gave the famous TED talk “The danger of a single story,” where she warns against reducing people or places to a single narrative and argues for multiple, layered stories instead Pritish Behuria has written a book that Rwandan observers have waited two decades to receive, and that achievement should be recognized plainly before anything else is said. There are shelves on the genocide, on memory and reconciliation, and on the Congo wars, but almost nothing that treats the economy itself as a serious object of political analysis. Behuria fills the gap with a decade of fieldwork, more than 580 interviews, and a multi-sector method that moves with equal confidence across finance, agriculture, mining, services, and the near-absence of formal industry. It is the most complete political economy of contemporary Rwanda now in print, and because it appears as open access under a Creative Commons license, it will be read in Kigali, Brussels, and Washington in the same week. Its framing will shape how a generation of European analysts talk about the country. To read the book well, you have to know the intellectual house the author lives in. Behuria belongs to the structuralist tradition of late-industrialization political economy, the school that runs from Gerschenkron and Arthur Lewis through Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, Ha-Joon Chang, and Mushtaq Khan, and in its African register through Thandika Mkandawire and Lindsay Whitfield. He was trained at SOAS under Christopher Cramer and formed within the Effective States and Inclusive Development program, which is the institutional home of the political settlements approach that structures the book. The Defining Prior This tradition has a defining conviction and a defining prior. The conviction is that genuine catch-up requires structural transformation, meaning a move into manufacturing and the acquisition of technological capability by domestically owned firms. The prior, which matters enormously for how Rwanda is judged here, is a deep skepticism toward services-led growth. In this literature, associated with the influential work of McMillan, Rodrik, and Diao, labor that shifts out of agriculture into services is presumed to be moving into low-productivity, low-value activity rather than into transformation. Behuria adopts that vocabulary directly, framing contemporary development as a drift from low-value agriculture to low-value services. The word services thus enter his analysis already coded as subordinate, as evasion, as a second-best that cannot sustain a country. This is a principled and empirically serious position, since few services-led economies have ever sustained catch-up. But it is a prior, and it does much of the book's evaluative work before Rwanda's particulars are weighed. A reader should hold it in view on every page. From that foundation Behuria builds a consequential thesis. Rwanda has made services the fulcrum of its whole strategy, more explicitly than any other African state, partly because a services model lets the RPF avoid depending on a domestic private capitalist class it distrusts, since independent wealth could finance rival political coalitions. The cost is a new and deeper dependency, because a services economy requires a pristine international reputation, so political contestation now migrates abroad. His identification of the Rwanda Social Security Board as the discreet functional substitute for the development bank that structural adjustment dismantled should be required reading for anyone trying to understand how a low-income state quietly rebuilt the levers of directed finance. What follows is offered as a strong book made stronger. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a citizen of Rwanda and chair the board of Akagera Medicines, which is named in the text. A Competing School Behuria's explanation runs on political settlements analysis, the framework he sets out in his second and fourth chapters and then applies to every sector that follows. Its claim is that Rwanda's economic decisions flow from the survival calculus of a narrow and centralized ruling coalition, cohesive enough to act but anxious enough to guard against any rival concentration of wealth. It is a powerful lens. But it competes with a simpler account. In the competitiveness tradition of Michael Porter, Harvard Business School, and the microeconomics of strategy, a government, like a firm, chooses where to compete by asking which industry structures are actually attractive to enter, given real constraints, with no need to posit a hidden political motive behind each choice. Where the two frameworks diverge, the evidence in this book tends to favor the simpler reading. If fear of an independent bourgeoisie were the master variable, we would expect the state to avoid the sectors that manufacture private fortunes. Instead, it built precisely those sectors and invited private capital in, seating a dozen private investors beside the RSSB in Akagera Medicines, and Crystal Ventures, the Rwanda Investment Group, and Prime Holdings beside it in the Kigali Convention Centre. That is the signature of a state entering an attractive structure first and drawing private capital from all sources in behind it, which is cultivation rather than suppression. Read through that competitiveness lens, Rwanda did not sit down and prefer services to manufacturing as a matter of ideology. It asked where a small, landlocked, post-conflict economy could build a competitive advantage, a defensible position, and the answer pointed toward hospitality, conferences, finance, and later health and technology. The constraints made the ranking almost mechanical. Heavy manufacturing in Rwanda carries a logistics penalty that is difficult to overcome, since goods move by truck through Uganda and Tanzania to distant ports before they ever reach a global market, and the cost of shipping heavy things out of the interior of a continent erodes any margin a factory might earn. (And in fact applies downward pressure on domestic wages.) Hospitality and conferences, by contrast, import the customer rather than export the product, and they compound a reputation the government was already building. On strategic attractiveness, services simply won. Two further facts sharpen the point. In the years after the genocide, international private capital was still afraid of Rwanda's insecurity, and there was almost no domestic private sector to speak of. So the barriers to entry into the attractive sectors could be lowered only from the public side. On this reading, a services-first path is not an evasion of transformation. It is a rational reading of where an economy so placed could win, executed by the only actor with the vision, balance sheet and the risk tolerance to move first. The genealogy of distrust Behuria's account of ethnicity is at its most vivid, and its most human, in the early chapters, and it is worth saying plainly that he does not treat the subject as an unstated shadow. He documents it directly. His history of the political settlement traces the fusion of private wealth and ethnic mobilization in unsparing detail, from the Bahutu Manifesto of 1957, through the purges that reached into the private sector under Kayibanda, to the grip of Habyarimana's inner circle, the akazu, over the commanding heights of the economy, the coffee, the tea, and the minerals. He records that Félicien Kabuga owned coffee and tea plantations and became one of the chief financiers of the genocide, and that Tutsi-owned businesses in that era lived in permanent vulnerability. He even names the businesspeople, some Hutu and some Tutsi, who funded the liberation war. Ethnicity here is explicit, on nearly every page, and he is careful with it, drawing on Wimmer to treat identity as something elites construct and instrumentalize rather than a fixed inheritance. This is the book at its most gripping, and it leaves no doubt that distrust in Rwanda had an ethnic genealogy written in blood. But then something changes... Then, as the book moves into the sector chapters on finance, agriculture, mining, services, and industry, the temperature of the prose falls. The distrust does not disappear. It is re-coded into a cooler and more clinical vocabulary, and it goes on doing the explanatory work. Bank loans, he notes, flow to trusted capitalists or party-owned firms. Tea estates and mining licenses are entrusted only to closely affiliated businesspeople. Manufacturing assets after 1994 went to those the coalition rewarded as loyal first-movers. Whole sectors are described as marked by elite vulnerability. An industrialist is quoted on the environment of distrust in the private sector, remarking that it was natural for the government not to trust him. By the mid-2000s, Behuria writes, increasing distrust of domestic businesspeople pushed the state toward government-owned firms, party companies, and foreign investors. And in the conclusion the mechanism reaches its coldest and most abstract form, a distrust of domestic capital that springs from the anxiety of the ruling coalition that rival coalitions could be funded to mobilize old and new grievances. Notice what happens to the language across those five hundred pages. The genocide and the ethnic history that produced the anxiety quietly leave the sentence, even though they remain its origin. A reader who opened the book at the finance chapter would never guess how much blood stands behind the word distrust. Two things happen to that mistrust on its way into the sector chapters, and both matter for how far the argument should travel. It is abstracted, its ethnic charge translated into the neutral language of cohesion and vulnerability. And it is generalized, widened from a specific fear of the akazu into a suspicion of independent capital as such, which is why the Asian-African industrialist who was neither Hutu nor Tutsi met the same wall. A distrust that began as a precise and rational reading of who had financed the killing hardens into a standing posture toward accumulation itself, and a standing posture tends to outlive the conditions that once justified it. That, in the end, is why the settlement logic overreaches. It is a cooled and generalized descendant of a real terror, carried forward to explain a biotechnology cap table on which the state has voluntarily seated a dozen international private investors. Companies in the book Among the hundreds of firms that could have illustrated Rwanda's ambitions, Akagera Medicines is given a prominent place. It appears by name as the lead example in the book's discussion of Rwanda's bid to become a pharmaceutical hub, carried from the industry chapter into the conclusion. The prominence is welcome. The difficulty is that the portrait is dated and miscategorized. Behuria describes the company as government-owned, drawing on a 2023 news report and its figure of roughly sixteen million dollars invested. Neither the label nor the number survives contact with the present. The RSSB is indeed the majority investor, but it sits alongside roughly a dozen private investors on the cap table, and the company has layered on top of that equity a substantial base of non-dilutive grant and concessional financing from the Gates Foundation, CEPI, the United States National Institutes of Health, and the European Investment Bank. In fact, the people of Rwanda control the majority of votes, but have put in far less than half of the financial resources. This is not a government-owned company or a parastatal in any ordinary sense. It is a Delaware, USA-registered multinational company, with partnerships in China, Europe, and throughout the USA. audited annually by international accounting firms, and a hybrid in which sovereign, private, and multilateral capital sit together. That is precisely the arrangement the book's four-box framework, manufacturing versus services, them versus us -- cannot cleanly hold. The valuation tells the same story of a stale snapshot. The company was worth about fifteen million dollars in 2019. Based on its latest financing it is valued at more than half a billion, an improvement to all the investors of greater than 10 times. In the years since Behuria's 2023 reference it has moved from that early figure to a far larger program of a dozen programs, filed more than 150 intellectual-property and formulation applications across multiple jurisdictions, and entered clinical trials. None of this appears, because the research window had already closed. The deeper irony, and it is a general caution about the book, is that most of the foundational work behind these milestones was done in the decade leading up to 2023, so the study captures the enterprise at the precise moment before a build began to bear fruit. The book's empirical core is heavily 2023 and earlier, lightly refreshed with a handful of 2024 and 2025 citations during final revision. Its more skeptical verdicts on the newest sectors deserve to be read with that timing in mind. Two refinements This points to the first of two larger refinements. Part of the reason the manufacturing standard dominates the analysis is simply that manufacturing is where the data lives. Manufacturing value added, output, and export volumes arrive in clean decade-long series that a scholar can chart, and several of the book's most persuasive figures do exactly that. Services value is far harder to see. The worth created by a convention that fills a thousand hotel rooms, by an air route that makes a supply chain viable, or by a regulatory reputation that attracts an international clinical trial is real, but it is diffuse, it accrues across sectors, and it seldom lands in a single national-accounts line. What cannot be easily counted is easily undervalued, and a services-first economy is therefore penalized by any assessment that privileges the well-instrumented sectors. Here Mkandawire's warning is worth recalling. He cautioned against the excessive levelling of the African political and economic landscapes and insisted that African experiences be examined for their own lessons rather than pre-judged against an external template. Behuria himself invokes Mamdani's instruction to study Africa as a process rather than as an analogy, which he calls the spine of his method. The imported manufacturing yardstick sits in quiet tension with that goal. The second refinement is a missing category rather than a missing fact, and it is where the Porter reading and Behuria's own material meet. Behuria reads the RPF's reliance on state-affiliated vehicles mainly as an evasion of rival domestic private capital. The more interesting story, which his RSSB chapter approaches without fully naming, is the state acting as investor of first resort, using its capital-formation institutions to enter attractive industry structures that neither domestic nor foreign private capital would build alone. The examples are everywhere. The flagship sits in plain sight. The Radisson Blu and Kigali Convention Centre, the physical anchor of the entire meetings-and-conferences strategy, is owned through RSSB alongside Crystal Ventures, the Rwanda Investment Group, and Prime Holdings. It was for a time called the most expensive building on the continent, a fixed cost with a payback period no private developer would have carried in a small landlocked market. Rwandan institutions built it so that a sector could exist. Africa Improved Foods, a fortified-nutrition manufacturer, was structured the same way, with the government anchoring a venture that global partners and development-finance institutions would join only once the risk was shared. RwandAir has been sustained through losses because its connectivity is a public input into the whole model. Akagera Medicines belongs in this same family. These are not retreats from capital formation. They are instances of the state performing the market-making function that Gerschenkron, the school's own founder, identified as the classic instrument of the late developer, creating the structure first so that private capital will follow. What the book gets right It is right to close on what Behuria gets exactly right, because he gets a great deal right. His insistence that politics, not economics, is the binding constraint places him in the company of Claude Ake, who argued that in Africa, the deepest problem was that development was never really on the agenda in the first place, because political conditions came first. That insight actually reinforces the strategic reading offered here. What shaped Rwanda's path was calculation under hard constraints rather than any ideological or ethnic preferences, and Behuria's method, which reads the economy through the priorities of those who govern it, should the right instrument for seeing that. A word on scope. The heaviest welfare stakes in this book are agrarian, in the chapter on coffee, tea, and the reorganization of rural land and labor, and that is terrain where the record is genuinely contested. Some scholars have questioned both the coercion involved in Rwanda's rural policies and the reliability of the poverty figures themselves, and Behuria is right to take that debate seriously. I do not adjudicate it here. My argument concerns the services and knowledge sectors, where my standing is real and the evidence is close at hand, and it should not be read as a claim that every part of the strategy has worked or that the official statistics are beyond question. Even on conservative readings, though, the direction of travel is true and favorable on poverty and on child survival, and Rwanda's parliament remains among the most gender-balanced in the world. An honest account has to hold those gains alongside the doubts rather than in place of them. I admire this book, both for its ambition and what it accomplishes and for the space it now creates for important discussions. The refinements it invites, a fuller reckoning with the value that services create but statistics struggle to see, and a category for the state as an informed and productive investor rather than a feckless calculating financier, are less corrections than the outline of the sequel. And the sequel should resist falling into the trap of the single story. Behuria is better placed than most to write it. Michael Fairbanks is a member of the President’s Advisory Council in Rwanda for 25 years, and a Bioethics Fellow at Harvard Medical School.

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The "single story" of Rwanda's rise