RPF led post genocide Rwandans are busy setting Rwanda on track. They are no gimmicking democracy spin doctors!

Ntarugera Deo Koya,

political and cultural analyst/communication consultant

Goma, D R Congo                   August 18, 2010

Here are a few elements of my reaction to  Rwanda's Renaissance Goes off the Rails by: Lars Waldorf and Scott Straus.

RPF.jpgRenaissance Goes off the Rails by Lars Waldorf and Scott Straus is a blog  posted on August 12, 2010. Lars Waldorf is Senior Lecturer at the University of York and Scott Straus is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These two have published a writ meant to inform western and world politicians and decision-makers’ thinking and behavior as regards RPF led post genocide Rwanda. Obviously, this publication does adversely impact Rwandan political deviant and sycophantic characters. Said lecturers also intend to publish a book very soon to further substantiate their poor and loose academic postulations, which may legitimately help them climb their Academia’s ladder to the pinnacle. University lecturers always want to achieve their revered professorship before they die. Any form of steady publications, irrespective of whether or not there is treacherous spinning or plagiarism, will help get them to the top of their academic hierarchy. The intended book is titled:  Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (University of Wisconsin Press).

These young university lecturers, Lars Waldorf and Scott Straus, may well think they have the credentials to write their book, quite all right; but they are by all accounts ignorant of the real and dazzling “trajectory” of  Rwanda through the last 100 years. They will certainly go ahead and do their Google tricks, copy-paste quick book producing business et al, of course. Nobody will stand in their way. They actually seem to be virtually through with their so-called research work. As far as they are concerned,  “Remaking Rwanda: State Building…” is just another trifle they can cheaply do with  the stroke of their remote pen in their study rooms, their ivory tower of sorts! They are little mindful, if at all, of the rigors RPF led Rwandans have frightfully gone through for close to two decades, in their efforts to extricate their dear albeit moribund nation from the grave: Rwanda! It is none of the lecturers’ bother to know how and why Rwanda was first of all being murdered and buried in a haste in 1994. Let them go ahead and earn the academic insignia and thus increase their pay: after all they are just lecturers out to do their bit of spurious academic spinning! In the wake of clerics in their churches, lecturers have been out there in universities, busying themselves to perform their best spin. Both categories are quite an interesting lot! They always try their best to outwit and outdo one another at that fancy fair sort of game. I have been in churches, and lectured in universities long enough, in Africa and Europe, to assert that there does indeed happen quite a lot of spinning and gimmicking in those would-be institutions of high learning cum spiritual/moral elevation.

To mind comes a British professor, Trevor Roper is his name, who did once go out of his way, in 1961, and told British university students yearning to learn African history, that Africa was in sheer darkness, and that darkness was not the subject of history! Bless Trevor Roper wherever he is, Heaven or Hell, or else Purgatory! In a region of my heart of hearts, I can hear good souls chorusing  their “Amen” !   

RPF led post genocide Rwandans are busy setting Rwanda on track. They are no gimmicking democratic spin doctors!

Rwanda, as the one of the few surviving ancient nations, has for the last one hundred years, nightmarishly gone through the unparalleled and unprecedented most gruesomely marred colonial and post colonial  history, a mere glimpse of which was universally caught in April-July 1994. A wantonly massive crime came about then in Rwanda, which was no surprise for global leaders, strategists, diplomats and political science scholars (with the exception of the two above named western university lecturers who were certainly too young to know anything of world affairs!). After lengthy, undue and apparently intractable negotiations between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the international community, said crime was eventually acknowledged as ‘genocide” in November 1994!! It is obviously clear that said genocide could have conveniently passed unacknowledged and unrecorded in human memory, if the RPF had not defeated the genocidal government armed forces, which were to all intents and purpose openly aided and abetted by the international community.  I may recall at this juncture that the genocidal government of Rwanda had for decades been highly regarded by the West as a good example of democracy on the African continent! What’s democracy? What’s the use of genocidal democracy? In the wake of a mammoth genocide issuing from counterfeit democracy, what matters imperatively is restoring a sense of proper humanity, Rwandanness and civic responsibility amongst Rwandans. RPF led post genocide Rwandans are precisely busy setting Rwanda on track. They are no gimmicking democratic spin doctors; nor are they suffrage sellers/purchasers!

 No nation on earth, so documentedly known to have had a befitting political/social & economic organization spanning over ten centuries like Rwanda, has ever been crushed by ruthless colonization alongside malignant and genocidal decolonization like Rwanda. Post genocide Rwanda government of national unity has painstakingly been battling to salvage what can still be salvaged of this terribly crushed nation, still in visible tatters here and there; and willing nations of the world have taken an appreciable part in that uphill task.

The RPF led Rwandans have had no prescribed recipes or antidotes to minister to their genocide-stricken and moribund nation! No such recipes exist as such, indeed. And any well meaning person, Rwandan or not, will pay due respect to the wonderful achievements of the RPF political experiment that must be allowed to further seek ways and means to set Rwanda on proper track. The RPF experiment has, notwithstanding its novelty, gone a long way towards rebuilding Rwanda, the region and the wider world. Individuals and institutions that seem to have a short memory may go out and say this or that about President Kagame, but the flame that has been ignited by the RPF in and around Rwanda will certainly keep alive for much longer than myopic western political thinkers can foretell! Western scholars had better harness their minds in other directions. “Remaking Rwanda” is certainly no business for European thinkers.

European thinkers should for instance try and re-think how to readjust their 19th century inherited notions of liberal politics and economics. And they must note that the world is no longer strictly hinging upon Euro-American ideas/ideals, values and philosophies. Other forms of alternative modernities are seeing the light of day, and they must be allowed to thrive unhampered. Who knows what the globalized world will look like tomorrow or next? The world of man has been in perpetual mutations ever since the first human family came into being, in and around the territory of modern Rwanda, universally known and referred to as the cradle of humanity. Having a short memory as regards appreciating the history/trajectory of Rwanda as a polity, might be forgivable and possibly allowed because amnesia is no man made pathology, which in the course of time may be diagnosed and possibly cured. However, anyone having subterraneous and mischievous intentions directed to the derailment of the functional RPF endeavors in Rwanda, will not be vouched for. There is no universal blue print for democracy. Besides, European democracy is visibly decaying. A noted European Union diplomat, Belgian Louis Michel, recently said in public that if there is anyone willing to practice genuine democracy, they should go and take democratic lessons in Rwanda. That was said shortly after Dr Paul Kagame had gotten his first win as President of the Republic of Rwanda in 2003.

Come to think of it, how can you genuinely assert that a nation is really democratic when only 30 per cent of the country’s population turn up for the polls to elect their topmost leaders? Elderly British scholars and friends did confide to me in September 2003, with evident concern and dismay, that there is a lot of spin doctoring that goes on in the course of their major national elections; and these elections tend to be little cared for by the British masses! Only 30 per cent of the total population turns up to elect their Prime Minister!  Does this not in the end of it all mean a tendency to negate democracy itself in this oldest European democratic nation dating as far back as from the time of the Magna Carta in the 13th century?(…).

Well, when the British masses end up losing their faith in the very practice of democracy, as my seasoned scholar friends dismally asserted, what do we have left of it in the end? Furthermore, when the greater bulk of the people (70 per cent) do not trust their spin doctor aided politicians, it may technically not be unreasonable to ask the question as to whether there is any western democracy’s future left for Rwandans, Africans and global posterity to contemplate.

Ntarugera Deo Koya

 

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