Afronline – The Voice Of Africa

Nairobi — On June 20 as we drove to President Paul Kagame‘s country home in Muhazi, we encountered what was once a very common sight around Rwanda. A group of prisoners, in garish pink (Rwandese prison authorities have a hopeless fashion sense) were walking single file — as soldiers would do — back to a nearby prison. Many of them participated in the 1994 genocide.

The first thing you noticed was that they did not have an armed guard keeping an eye on them.

Now, I am suspicious of people who argue that “every country is different” or is “unique” and therefore we should not generalise, for example, about Africa.

I am suspicious because when politicians make that argument, they are doing so to avoid being judged by the international community.

And when the international community makes it, it is because it’s running away from the responsibility to intervene and stop a dictator from oppressing or robbing the citizens of his country.

All human beings and countries are, essentially, the same.

The differences among countries are mostly of form and style.

In Rwanda, if you speak to RPF intellectuals, you will hear the words “Rwanda’s case is unconventional” used very many times. Even President Kagame uses them.

But even I have to make a small concession here and admit that Rwanda is indeed very different from most — if not all — African countries in some aspects, and the prisoner story is one of them.

The first time I encountered these unguarded prisoners was in 1996.

I was driving into Kigali in the company of a graduate school friend who had since returned to Rwanda and was a senior aide in the president’s office.

There were over 200 prisoners, some of them former military men, mark you, working in a field guarded only by a solitary armed soldier.

I was surprised, and asked my friend what was going on.

He explained: “You see, in old Rwanda, everyone was part of an open or secret cell. These structures are carried forward in the prison, and every prisoner is part of a cell.”

“Now, what you have to do is figure out the cells and the leaders, and you cut a deal with the leaders when you are taking the prisoners in their cell out to work. If he gives his word that the prisoners will not escape, they won’t escape. You don’t need a guard,” he said.

“If he says ‘no’, and you insist, however many guards you have, they will try and make a break.”

They say that when you get five Kenyans in a room, you get five political parties.

If you end up with five Rwandese in a room, you get five secret cells (at least, according to the RPF, in the “old” Rwanda).

This is one reason so many people were killed in the 1994 genocide.

The command to kill Tutsi spread quickly and efficiently because of the cell structure, and Hutu men killed their Tutsi wives and children without a second thought, because what the cell demanded, the cell got.

One gets the sense that this cell structure and discipline has, in a reversal of misfortune, helped Kagame turn Rwanda around.

However, it also makes Rwanda an inhospitable country for the noisy, often chaotic, freewheeling party politics of countries like Kenya.

Some of the things that happen in Kagame’s Rwanda are very unAfrican indeed. A few examples will do:

In late 2007, the government initiated an aggressive malaria prevention programme. The results?

In 2008, the number of people reporting to health centres with malaria dropped a record 66 per cent.

The only other country that came close was Ethiopia, which managed a 33 per cent reduction. In 2009 there was a drop of 75 per cent from the existing base.

As you read this, Rwanda has a problem many African, Asian, and Latin American countries would die to have — a surplus of malaria medicine! By the end of 2010, to use the slogan, Rwanda may well have kicked out malaria. In three years flat.

Continue reading on AllaAfrica.com

By Charles Onyango-Obbo – The East African (Source: AllAfrica.com)