Rwanda votes, with President Paul Kagame expected to extend his long rule

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Rwanda votes, with President Paul Kagame expected to extend his long rule

By Kimiko de Freytas-Temura
Updated

Nairobi, Kenya: Rwandans went to the polls on Friday in an election that was widely expected to extend the long rule of President Paul Kagame, who has guided the country with a steady hand following a genocide two decades ago.

Kagame appears to be hugely popular at home and has been widely praised abroad for bringing stability to his traumatised country after a 1994 genocide left hundreds of thousands dead. But there is no viable opposition in Rwanda, and dissenting views are frequently silenced.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame casts his ballot. He is widely expected to retain power.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame casts his ballot. He is widely expected to retain power.Credit: AP

Victory would allow Kagame to remain in power until 2024 and, under recent changes to the constitution, would give him the option of running for two more five-year terms after that, although he has suggested that he would not do so.

Kagame, sometimes described by his admirers as the African version of Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, received more than 90 per cent of the vote in Rwanda's past two elections, and he had virtually unanimous support in the referendum two years ago that allowed him to run a third time.

The vote count starts at a polling station in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Friday.

The vote count starts at a polling station in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Friday.Credit: AP

Only two opposition candidates - Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party and the independent Philippe Mpayimana, a former journalist - are running this time, but neither is seen as a significant threat; a third challenger, Diane Rwigara, who had been considered Kagame's strongest opponent, was disqualified in July.

The likely re-election of Kagame has raised concerns that Africa's "forever presidents" club will gain a new member, and that other leaders in the region will feel reassured that they, too, can cling to power.

In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, President Joseph Kabila is delaying constitutionally mandated elections so that he can prolong his 16-year tenure. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni is still in charge more than 30 years after he came to power promising to replace his predecessor's brutal dictatorship with democracy.

Supporters of Kagame say his extended mandate cannot be compared to that of other rulers in the region, given the great trauma of his country's recent history: a state-organised attempt to exterminate one of the two main ethnic groups when Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in 1994.

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Rwandans start to vote in a polling station in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Friday.

Rwandans start to vote in a polling station in Rwanda's capital Kigali on Friday.Credit: AP

Still, the election in Rwanda stands in stark contrast with what is happening in nearby Kenya, where citizens are set to vote next week after vibrant campaigning by candidates.

In Rwanda, a history of political repression and attacks on dissidents "stifles political debate and makes those who might speak out think twice before taking the risk," Amnesty International wrote recently in a report.

David Himbara, who was Kagame's economic adviser until 2010, when the two men had a falling out, has accused authorities of manipulating statistics to make Rwanda appear wealthier and more advanced than it really is.

Rwanda has one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, expanding by eight per cent annually, according to the World Bank. But it is still very poor: More than half of the population lives on less than $US1.25 a day. "He says he has built an economic lion, when Rwanda is a midget in the region," Himbara said.

Although Kagame has sought to compare himself with strong leaders in Asia who transformed their economies, "in Rwanda's case, you have the suppression of human rights that is not delivering economic development," Himbara asserted. "That trade-off is not working."

Despite the criticism, Rwanda has made spectacular strides under Kagame, who is known to be cerebral and introverted, since he led rebel forces into Kigali, the capital, in 1994 to oust the Hutu-led government after a three-month rampage in which more than 800,000 Tutsis were massacred.

Twenty-three years later, the country is a darling of international donors, praised for its advances in health care and education, as well as for improving the rights of women, who make up a majority of the Cabinet and parliament.

Although Rwanda is still poor, lives have improved significantly since the genocide. There is an emerging tech hub in Kigali. Streets are clean. Kagame has banned plastic bags.

The government says the poverty rate dropped to less than 40 per cent in 2014 from nearly 57 per cent in 2006, a remarkable feat compared with the situation in some of Rwanda's neighbours, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, which is still plagued by Tutsi-Hutu violence. The authorities in Rwanda are aiming to transform it into a middle-income country, along the lines of Kenya or Indonesia, by 2020.

More than a third of government revenue comes from foreign aid, but Kagame has been hailed by much of the world's elite as a "visionary" (former US President Bill Clinton) and "among the greatest leaders of our time" (Bill Gates), for using that assistance well.

At the same time, analysts and those who know Kagame personally say that he has not groomed a successor, nor put in place a system that would ensure that Rwanda's advances outlast him.

Opposition activists and journalists, who have accused Kagame of running a "police state," are routinely jailed. Dissidents have been assassinated, even abroad, according to human rights groups. Kagame's former intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, who was a friend of the president's but became one of his fiercest critics, was killed in South Africa in 2014.

Naked pictures of Rwigara, a 35-year old opposition candidate and a trained accountant, appeared online just days after she announced her candidacy against Kagame. The National Electoral Commission eventually disqualified her over irregularities involving the signatures needed to run.

Rwanda, she said in a recent interview with The Guardian, "is like a pretty girl with a lot of makeup, but the inside is dark and dirty."

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and the director of the research organisation Africa Security Initiative, said that a country's leadership should not change just for change's sake. "But the danger of perpetuating a one-man rule," he said, "is - what will happen when he is gone?"

Part of the reason Kagame appears so unwilling to let go is that building Rwanda is his life's work, said Stephen Kinzer, author of A Thousand Hills, a biography of the Rwandan president.

"He is convinced that there is much more to do, and that at this point, he is the best person to do it," Kinzer said. "I find difficult to imagine him shrugging his shoulders and walking away and saying, 'I'll leave it to the next guy'."

Kinzer recalled a conversation he had with a Rwandan. "In Africa," the man told him, "the moment it becomes clear who the next person is, you're finished."

In the absence of a successor, O'Hanlon said, the president needs to create a political system that will promote institutional stability, and a multi-party system to lessen the probability of another genocide. Lee, the former Singapore leader whom many are quick to compare Kagame to, took the title of minister mentor toward the end of his career, part of an effort to at least try "to figure out a way to pass over power".

At the same time, democratic change in Rwanda should be gradual, Kinzer warned. "The only year when there was some measure of free discourse in Rwanda was the year that led up to the genocide."

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There is still a sense among Rwandans that "as long as this guy is in power, nothing bad can happen," he said. "That is not a bad guarantee, considering what is happening in the neighbourhood."

The New York Times

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