Rwanda decides: 99% want to extend its thirty-year rule

Rwandan President Paul Kagame won nearly 99% of the vote in the last election, but his performance in Monday’s election showed little room for improvement.

The size of his victory in 2017, along with his 95% wins in 2003 and 93% in 2010, raised some questions about whether the election is truly democratic.

The former refugee and rebel leader confidently dismissed the criticism.

“Some people think 100 percent is not democracy,” Mr. Kagame told thousands of cheering supporters at a campaign rally in western Rwanda last month.

Referring to elections elsewhere, without naming specific countries, he added: “Many people were elected with 15 percent of the vote… Is this democracy? How can this be?”

The President stressed that what happened in Rwanda was Rwanda’s business.

His supporters agreed, waving the red, white and sky-blue flag of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and chanting “They should come and learn”.

The slender 66-year-old father of four, who stands just over 6 feet tall, looms solemn and commanding among the crowd. He sometimes smiles and tells a joke or two, but the bespectacled leader often wears the look of a disappointed elder.

He has a soft, thoughtful way of speaking that forces his audience to pay attention, and he is usually very direct when he speaks, rarely beating around the bush.

Even when he was using more cryptic or diplomatic language, he would use innuendo to let people know what he was talking about.

Mr Kagame’s life was deeply affected by the conflict between Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.

To overcome this, the Rwandan government now insists that people identify as Rwandans rather than a particular ethnic group.

Mr Kagame has been president since 2000 and is running for a fourth term, but has been the de facto leader of the east African nation since July 1994, when his rebel army overthrew the extremist Hutu government that had masterminded that year’s genocide.

He initially served as Vice President and Secretary of Defense.

Many of his supporters, including some Western politicians, credit him with bringing stability and rebuilding Rwanda after the genocide that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Some have accused the then-rebel army of revenge killings, but his government has always said they were isolated incidents and those responsible have been punished.

The president does not shrink from criticizing the West, but he has also at times used guilt over failing to prevent the genocide to win Western support.

Rwanda was also a partner and financial beneficiary of a now-disbanded British scheme to send asylum seekers to the country.

“Of course I will vote for PK,” said Mary Jenny, a university student, who referred to Mr. Kagame by his initials.

“Look how well I did in school. If he wasn’t president, I probably wouldn’t have done well in school because I was insecure,” she told the BBC.

For her, the answer to who she would vote for was obvious, but there were two other names on the ballot for the nine million registered voters to consider.

Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party and independent candidate Philippe Mpayimana will both run again in a repeat of the presidential election seven years ago.

However, in the last election they received just over 1% of the vote.

Other political parties support Kagame for the presidency.

Opposition politician Diane Rwigara, an outspoken critic of Mr Kagame, was barred from contesting the election for not producing the correct documentation, which she saw as a pretext to stop her from running.

Mr Kagame, who has also been accused of silencing other potential opponents through jailing and intimidation, has told Al Jazeera news channel that he is not to blame for a weak opposition.

His powerful spy network is alleged to have carried out a series of cross-border assassinations and kidnappings.

They are even said to be targeting their former boss, former intelligence chief Colonel Patrick Karegeya, who fled Rwanda after falling out with Mr Kagame.

In 2014, he was murdered in an upscale hotel suite in Johannesburg, South Africa’s main city.

“They literally hanged him with a rope,” said David Batenga, Col. Karegeya’s nephew.

Mr Kagame has not distanced himself from the shooting and has officially denied any involvement.

“You can’t betray Rwanda with impunity,” he said at a prayer meeting shortly afterwards. “Anyone, even those who are still alive, will face the consequences. Anyone will. It’s just a matter of time.”

The president sent troops to the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo for domestic security, claiming they were hunting down Hutu rebels. Rwanda was also accused of supporting the M23 rebel group there—despite overwhelming evidence, including A recent report.

“To be honest, it was a farce,” said Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian political scientist who specializes in the Great Lakes region, reflecting on the results.

“Of course, I don’t know what’s going to happen this time, but previous elections have been like a circus.

Citing the latest report of the European Union Observer Mission in 2003 and the Commonwealth Observer Mission in 2010, he claimed: “What I meant is that the National Electoral Commission categorized the votes instead of counting them.”

The Rwanda Electoral Commission says on its website that it holds “free, fair and transparent elections to promote democracy and good governance in Rwanda.”

“For me, the upcoming presidential election in Rwanda means nothing,” said Dr. Joseph Sebarenzi, the speaker of Rwanda’s parliament, who lost his parents and many family members in the genocide and now lives in exile in the United States.

“An election is like a football game where the organizers are also the competitors, choose the other competitors, and order people to watch the game, where everyone knows the predetermined winner but must act as if the game is real.”

Mr Kagame, an avid football fan who closely follows English Premier League club Arsenal, disagrees with the assertion.

He was born in 1957 into a wealthy family in central Rwanda, the youngest of five children.

But before he was two, he became a refugee in neighboring Uganda, fleeing persecution and massacres in the late 1950s with his family and thousands of other members of the Tutsi minority.

Although he was just a baby at the time, Mr Kagame said he still “remembers looking over to the hills next to us. We could see people burning houses there.

“They were killing people. My mother was desperate. She didn’t want to leave this place,” the president told Stephen Kinzer, an American journalist and unofficial biographer.

The killings came after Belgian colonists changed the ethnic groups they supported, backing an emerging ruling elite of the majority Hutu ethnic group, some of whom had been abused under the Tutsi monarchy.

Rwanda gained independence in 1962.

In the late 1970s, Mr Kagame made several secret returns to his country.

In the capital, Kigali, he frequented a hotel in Kiyovu, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The hotel’s bar was popular with politicians, security officials and civil servants who came to chat over beer after get off work.

Mr. Kanazawa wrote that the future leader would sit alone at a table, drinking orange soda, to avoid attracting attention and listen to their conversation.

These visits home strengthened his interest in the art of espionage.

He received military intelligence training in Uganda and participated in the successful Ugandan rebellion led by Yoweri Museveni, who seized power in 1986. Mr Kagame also received further training in Tanzania, Cuba and the United States.

He then led a rebel force composed mainly of Tutsis into Rwanda in 1990.

“(The training) is useful. Cuba, in its war with the United States and its links with Russia, is quite advanced in intelligence. There’s also political education: What is the struggle for? How do you persevere?” he told Mr Kanazawa.

He sought to sustain the struggle through economic development – Mr Kagame believed Rwanda could emulate Singapore or South Korea and achieve development within a generation.

Although Rwanda has failed to achieve its 2020 goal of becoming a middle-income country, Professor Reintjens said “it is a well-governed country”.

“Rwanda’s problem is political governance, where there is no level playing field, no space for opposition, no freedom of expression, (which) threatens to undermine the gains of good technocratic governance.”

But Kagame insists that the large crowds of supporters at his rallies are just a reflection of Rwandans’ trust and love for him and their desire for him to continue as leader, even though he has said he will groom a successor by 2017.

Thanks to constitutional changes, he could theoretically remain in power until 2034.

Speaking about problems during his time in office in a live interview on national television last month, Kagame said the “specific circumstances of each country” were important.

“(The West says) ‘Oh, you’ve been there too long’. But it’s none of your business. It’s the business of these people here.”

Thousands of miles away in the United States, Dr. Cebarenzi said he did not know what the future held for his home country, affectionately known as the Land of a Thousand Hills, but added: “History shows that in countries where the head of state is more powerful than state institutions, changes in power can turn violent, leading to post-regime chaos.”

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

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