On Kagame’s campaign trail

Why Rwanda’s election campaigns are different and what others can learn from it

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda |  I am in Rwanda for the presidential election campaigns. The campaigns here are different. There are no billboards everywhere of candidates and posters do not litter city walls and buildings. Rallies are not theatres for quarrels and recriminations with politicians making emotional appeals to voters. Instead, President Paul Kagame’s rallies are festivals where people dance and celebrate the country’s good fortune of having a leader who cares about them.

Rwanda stands as a shining example for the rest of the world for post genocide reconciliation. Why has it been so successful? Because the leadership in this country sought solutions out of their experience. All too often, poor countries implement solutions based on a theory published in a book at Harvard, Oxford or Stanford explaining the experience of Europe or America. Then such textbook solutions are transplanted to other societies as presenting a universal blueprint. This often leads to disaster because it disregards the different experiences and structural conditions.

Post genocide Rwanda has innovated a governance architecture based on her experience and history. Consequently, the country is now stable, peaceful, harmonious with growing prosperity. However, these innovations in her governance do not meet the textbook requirements our “masters” in the Western world demand from us. Hence, Rwanda has been in conflict with the lords of human rights and democracy. They claim to know how every country, regardless of circumstances and history, should be governed. They insist to the leaders of Rwanda that the country’s political system should mimic Belgium or Sweden. Any deviation from the universal blueprint is an aberration and should thus be condemned.

Yet the election in Rwanda is taking place as Israel is conducting a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. To the Western world, Israel is a democracy because it ticks all the procedural boxes they want. Like present-day Rwanda, the Jewish state was born after a genocide. That genocide was a product of 19^th century European ideology of a nation state. This is the idea that the state should reflect a particular community of people with a shared culture, language and history. Across most of Europe wars to create nation-states were fought involving mass murder and mass evictions of those seen not to belong. In Europe’s offshoots in North America, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) and Israel, the modern nation-state was a result of genocide of native peoples. We should, therefore, not be surprised by the actions of the Jewish state.

Israel lives under textbook democracy; the idea that political leadership should be contested in an atmosphere of free expression on every issue including identity. Context does not matter. Free expression of feelings during electoral competition is the foundation of democracy. Thus, Israel politicians seeking votes have every incentive rely on identity. They pit Jewish interests against those of Palestinians. The campaigns are structured to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian. At every election, Jewish extremists gain ground over moderates. Consequently, the solution to the Palestinian question, is a two-state solution even when all evidence shows that this is practically impossible. Sadly, even Palestinians share this view. Israel is unable to reimagine itself a state where people of different identities can coexist. This was also the reason why “experts” in 1994 prescribed a two-state solution for Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.

This European ideology of the nation-state was transplanted to Africa through colonial rule. To govern our societies, European colonizers politicized identity. Even where there were no different ethnic groups, like in Rwanda, they invented them. Hutu and Tutsi speak a common language, share a common culture, live in same villages and have a common history. The differences between them were in occupation and status and were not immutable. A Hutu could become Tutsi and vice versa. The European colonizer made them permanent with catastrophic consequences.

The state born of the 1959 “revolution” that led to the independence of Rwanda pitted Hutus against Tutsi. Hutu supremacists created an apartheid state in Rwanda replicating the colonial state because they had internalized its ideology. Thus, they treated Tutsis as second-class citizens. Let us remember that apartheid was the generic form of the colonial state. When the RPF launched the struggle against this apartheid, the Hutu supremacists pursued this ideology to its logical conclusion – genocide. Adolf Hitler had internalized this ideology and saw the destiny of Germans as based on the genocide/enslavement of Jews and Slavs. Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremists in Israel today believe the security of the Jewish state lies in the extermination of Palestinians.

The consequences for Israel are catastrophic. Palestinians inside Israel are treated as second class citizens. Those in the occupied territories are subject to apartheid and military rule. The people who suffered Nazi terror now impose similar mistreatment on others. This breeds resistance from the oppressed Palestinians thereby making Jews in Israel insecure. Politicians competing for votes exploit this insecurity to advocate for sadistic violence against Palestinians. The latest Israel response is genocidal. This genocidal campaign is promoted through Israel’s “democratic” institutions. This ethnic cleansing is a modern European ideology of creating a nation-state. We should thus not be surprised that Israel, made up largely of European Jews, pursues this ideology.

Like Israel, the current state in Rwanda was also born after a genocide. But unlike Israel, the RPF rejected this European ideology imposed on Rwanda through colonial conquest. The idea that Hutu and Tutsi are separate people was a colonial construct that cannot be found in the myths, legends, language and oral history of precolonial Rwanda. RPF seeks to govern Rwanda as one country with one people enjoying equal rights and opportunities under the law. But RPF cannot wish away the consequences of an ideology that was incubated for over 90 years. So, it created a political system that prohibits identity as a basis for political contestation. You are free to call yourself a Hutu or a Tutsi, but that is your personal issue. It cannot form the basis of your position in the political community called Rwanda. Neither can it be used to promote your political interests.

Thus, political campaigns in Rwanda cannot be based on identity. This is because her history shows that such an approach is a recipe for disaster. Indeed, the 1994 genocide was incubated and facilitated by textbook democratization. When Western powers forced the then government to democratize, and in the context of a civil war waged by the Tutsi-led RPF, Rwandan society was polarized. Hutu politicians sought to cultivate political support by appealing to identity. This led to rise of extremist politics. Hutu parties tried to win popular support by calling for the massacre of Tutsi. Textbook democracy became a poisoned chalice.

The message was clear: unrestrained political contestation leads to ethnic appeals. With time, these grow into a murderous monster. Upon taking power, RPF instituted a political system that not only rejected identity as a basis for political contestations, it also rejected the politics of winner-take-all. After elections, all competing parties must share power, ending political exclusion and taking steam out of political contests. Politicians are careful not to attack each other with venom during election campaigns because they know after elections they will sit in the same cabinet. Secondly, everyone knows that regardless of their numerical strength at the polls, they are not excluded from political power. These innovations have taken heat out of campaigns by removing emotive anger of identity politics that animates election campaigns in many democracies. This has led many to dismiss Rwanda’s democracy.

In nearly countries in Africa, Asia and even in Western democracies, those in power win support of particular communities by awarding positions of power, prestige and status to influential elites. These elites act as the bridge between the president or ruling party and their co-ethnics. This exchange is a form of wholesale politics: by appointing a few notables from a particular ethnic or religious community, the ruling party or president is able to secure the votes of the ordinary masses in that community. This undermines incentives for building political legitimacy based on the provision of public goods and services. It also leads to corruption. This is because the exchange relationship between the ruling party or president and these influential elites is allocation of material favors i.e. opportunities to make money through corruption. Hence corruption becomes the way the system works, not the way it fails.

In fact, when the RPF took power, it tried this long and tested system. So, they appointed a Hutu president, a Hutu prime minister; a Hutu this and that. The Tutsi-led RPF sought to legitimize itself by hiding behind these Hutu faces in top positions. The problem was that the Hutu faces of this coalition government did not share a common vision of Rwanda with the Tutsi leaders of the RPF, and more specifically with President Paul Kagame. Therefore, there were many conflicts in the government over where Rwanda should go. The Hutu elites knew how much RPF depended on them for legitimacy. So, presented every disagreement with RPF in ethnic terms. Many would resign, knowing that such act would strip RPF of legitimacy.

The alternative to hostile stalemate in the government was for Kagame to allow these Hutu elites to enrich themselves at public expense. They would use their official loot to consolidation their political power. Kagame was not willing to accept the necessity of such a bargain. Knowing him, I think he was unwilling to accept such a bargain as the basis of politics in post genocide Rwanda. This is because deep down inside him, Kagame has strong, sometimes [I think] inflexible moral convictions. He decided to end the pretense, come out of the mask and become the president. That decision set Rwanda apart from the rest of Africa.

Kagame sought to build his and RPF’s political legitimacy on the delivery of a large basket of public goods and services to all citizens. This would be done anonymously through arms-length institutions. It would not matter whom you know or didn’t know. As long as you are a Rwandan citizen, the state would serve you without discrimination. This is what political scientists call “impersonal application of public policy”. It marked a fundamental departure of how political power is organized, how it is exercised, how it is distributed and how it is reproduced in all of Africa. It also set Kagame apart from all his peers in Africa.

This innovation has worked well for Rwanda. I was just reading a study by Reginas Ndayiragije and Marijke Verpoorten based on data collected by Bert Ingelaere. They found that ethnicity does not matter to Rwandans if their needs are not met. Despite being written using European tropes (like calling the government a “regime”), their insights are illuminating. For instance, they found that the “Hutu majority have overtime reported feeling more represented by government”. “This,” the authors add, “is despite it being largely made up of a Tutsi ruling elite.”

And “what has made the ruling elite legitimate among the Hutu?” The study says: “We found out that the Kagame regime (sic) has rolled out policies that seek to improve state-citizen relations and highlight the state’s capacity to deliver. The government has invested in public goods such as universal healthcare that include both Hutu and Tutsi.”  Nearly all governments in post-colonial Africa have embraced this European ideology of legitimacy through ethnic and religious balancing. Rwanda teaches us that this formular is not written in the stars as our fate. Israel and Africa should learn from Rwanda.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug