One of the least surprising things amidst all the noise generated by Michela Wrong’s new book Do Not Disturb – a 570-page racist hit job against the Rwandan leadership – is the fact Theogene Rudasingwa has raised his head, to opportunistically speak up in support of the British journalist’s countless slanders. This is Rudasingwa seeking attention in an effort to regain some relevance – an annual occurrence that always ends in futility. Reacting to yet another of the many brown-nosing reviews of Michela Wrong by fellow White Westerners – this one by a certain, British Sir Edward Clay – Rudasingwa gives Wrong his full endorsement, whatever that is worth. The self-exiled Rudasingwa gets space on one Prof. Nic Cheeseman’s blog site, “democracyinafrica.org” to do this in an article published this Tuesday, which basically says each and everything Wrong has written is unblemished truth. One can trust that if there is some personal gain somewhere, old “Redcom’ will say just about anything – including coming out in support of some Western person who feels it’s her right to dismiss all Rwandans as liars. That Rudasingwa finds no offense in racist insults which directly take aim at him, and his people, is consistent with his personality as someone with no sense of personal honor, no principles, nothing beyond personal gratification. Also, Rudasingwa is the last man that will take responsibility for problems of his own doing. He claims victimization by President Kagame for why he fled Rwanda years ago to self-imposed exile. Once in exile he goes further (like others like him that go to exile mostly to escape accountability for their own wrongs), always painting Kagame in the most negativist terms – usually those dictated by their new allies in the West upon whom their existences depend. Down the years of Rudasingwa’s exile we have seen how he has adopted the position that all Rwanda’s problems are the doing of Kagame. He has even taken sides with the extreme slander that “the RPF triggered the genocide.” In his latest article, which in large part is a self-serving screed (to show he had such high ideals he had to leave Rwanda because he could no longer work with Kagame!) he tarnishes those with anything good to say about the country as “apologists for Kagame’s regime.” It’s enough to make anyone that knows the facts cry. Theogene Rudasingwa some time back in the early 2000s faced corruption charges while director of cabinet at the President’s office. He had contracted a briefcase company, purportedly based in Nairobi, to supply some equipment to the President’s office. But the contract went bad and the Government lost a lot of money. It was suspected Rudasingwa in fact had a hand in the shell company. He was unemployed and disgraced, and that’s when he fled, to self-imposed exile. While there, something else that he never mentions – and that of course no one on Cheeseman’s blog site mentions – is that he participated in the forming of an organization to declare terrorist war against the Rwandan Government. This was the Rwanda National Congress (RNC) started by Kayumba Nyamwasa and Patrick Karegeya as the principle founders. It was perhaps inevitable that Rudasingwa’s dishonest, greedy, unscrupulous nature would take him down this road and even further down, to joining genocidaires in exile, revisionists, and other groups devoted to violent disruption of the peace and unity that Rwandans have built themselves in the 27 years following our catastrophe. This brings me to the story of “Redcom” alluded to earlier, which best illustrates who this man really is. For those in the dark, “Redcom” is an alias that Rudasingwa earned himself years ago, in the early eighties, for his prowess as a scam artist when he was a student at Uganda’s Makerere University in the 1980s. Rudasingwa lived a flamboyant, extravagant lifestyle, as remembered by his peers those years ago. He lived beyond his means and got deeply in debt. So he hatched an extortionate scheme that targetted fellow Banyarwanda students. One would receive a phone call from a mysterious, yet menacing individual, “Mr. Redcom CX-1200”. This scary person would inform the recipient of the call that “the intelligence services were on his case”, but that if the victim deposited a sum of money with him, REDCOM, he would fix the problem. The recipient of the call, almost fainting with fear, would agree to pay whatever he or she could. The most frightening thing in Uganda in those times was to hear that then-President Obote’s secret police was after you. But after some people had paid up, they got suspicious and reported the matter to the university administration. In a short while Obote’s intelligence, this time the real thing, was after Rudasingwa. The latter fled with alacrity to Kenya upon getting wind of it. The Banyarwanda students had a great laugh, and the tag “Redcom” stuck. Old habits die hard, they say. Redcom is still Redcom.
