Are you in the neutral gear?

Simple, understandable and not farfetched, it transferred the information and meaning, but above all, its significance was embedded in making the right choices and decisions that will, in the end, define who we are, the new Rwanda we want to build and the legacy we wish to leave behind.“The different gears of the car help you to manoeuvre the car forward and backward, but when the car is in neutral it cannot move, even if you step on the accelerator,” President Paul Kagame said while addressing the extended RPF National Executive Committee on Saturday.The middle aged men (in their late 40s) seated next to me nodded in agreement, turning and craning my neck in all directions I saw the whole crowd doing the same, they were all in agreement with the analogy.Indeed, on many an occasion most of us have opted to be spectators and dwindle in the neutral gear, we seldom engage other gears to accelerate, nor do we engage the revise gear to find ample space that provides us with a platform to find the right bearing. We enjoy the comfort and satisfaction that comes with being positioned and stationed in the neutral gear. Time and again, we ride in the falsehood that watching and doing nothing is the right choice. But our history and Rwanda’s detractors are proof that the neutral gear is a disastrous and very wrong choice.President Kagame’s speech was often interrupted by the thunderous applause from the crowd that yearned for more words of wisdom enshrined in the truth about our history and the right path for Rwanda toward attaining development and prosperity.As I grasped and contemplated on the analogy, I could not stop imagining where Rwanda would be if President Kagame had opted to lead this country satisfied with the least and allowed others to define our destiny and what we should be or become, in other words, leading us while positioned in the neutral gear.As a Rwandan, I believe that we have to make the right choice. However, we cannot make the right choice if we go for the neutral gear. The neutral gear is the ultimate ticket to drowning in the sea of detractors who strive day and night to wrongly shape our destiny according to their ill and malicious wishes. Consequently, we have to decide whether we want to leave to our children the legacy of being defined by others or a legacy of what we want to be.If we decide to choose the comfort and luxury of the neutral gear we cannot overcome the detractors that are out to tarnish Rwanda using different tools and ideologies built on a sinking ground compared to the current solid ground that the leadership of this country has built.Scattered in foreign lands, Rwanda’s detractors continue to struggle with mounting a trumpet on a crumbling and unpopular bandwagon. The recent utterances of Rwanda’s detractors manifested in the perpetuation of the genocide ideology and promoting their selfish agenda is reason enough to remind us that watching and doing nothing is not the legacy that we wish to leave behind. The Rwanda we are building cannot be built in the neutral gear.

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Are you in the neutral gear?