Paul Kagame: Spring of the patriarch

Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, won his fourth term as the leader of the country with more than 99% votes last week. The outcome of the election was never in doubt. Mr. Kagame, 66, beat his own previous record of 98.79% votes, which he polled seven years ago, to continue his three-decades long rule of Rwanda,

“The results that have been presented indicate a very high score, these are not just figures, even if it was 100%, these are not just numbers. These figures show trust, and that is what is most important,” he said after the election.

Even though Mr. Kagame became the President of Rwanda in 2000, he was the country’s de facto leader since 1994, as its Vice President and Defence Minister. Mr. Kagame is widely recognised for ending a genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which around 8,00,000 people were killed by government-backed extremists.

Rwanda was already in the clutches of a civil war when a plane carrying the then-President, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down over capital Kigali in 1994.

Habyarimana belonged to the majority Hutu community, and Tutsi rebels were blamed for killing him. Hutu extremists killed Tutsis across the country for months.

After months of violence, Mr. Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), which was founded in 1988 in Uganda, played a key role in ending the genocide.

Economic development

As the de facto leader since 1994, Mr. Kagame has championed economic development in Rwanda. One of the areas where the East African country has made remarkable progress under Mr. Kagame is the healthcare sector. Mr. Kagame is often credited for improving the standards of the country’s medical sector. His administration has emphasised building community-based healthcare services to reduce the “walking time” to the nearest health centres. The walk that previously took an average of 95 minutes was reduced to 47 minutes in 2020, the World Health Organisation noted.

Mr. Kagame also oversaw faster economic growth. Rwanda’s economy grew by 7.6% in the first three quarters of 2023, according to the World Bank, even though efforts towards poverty reduction had mixed results.

Through the Rwanda Education Quality Improvement Programme, the Kagame regime aims to improving learning among students. “The future of billions of children and young people across the world depends on overcoming the challenges of inclusion and quality of instruction, particularly as we recover from the pandemic,” Mr. Kagame said at the 77th UN General Assembly in 2022. Focal points of his government’s educational initiatives include digital literacy for all by 2035, and for Rwanda to become a high-income country by 2050.

The focus on economic development is only one side of the story. Critics accuse Mr. Kagame of being a ruthless dictator. In 2015, Rwanda amended its Constitution to allow Mr. Kagame to extend his rule by a seven-year term that started in 2017, followed by two more five-year terms.

A major blot on Mr. Kagame’s term was the blame for the death of Patrick Karegeya, who was Rwanda’s former chief of external intelligence. He was found dead in a hotel room in Johannesburg on January 1, 2014. He had fled to South Africa in 2008 after falling out of favour with Mr. Kagame’s regime and had helped found the Rwanda National Congress, an Opposition group in exile.

Reporters Without Borders calls Mr. Kagame a “predator” and says that even three decades after the genocide ended, “censorship continues, and self-censorship has become the rule, for those who want to avoid becoming government targets”.

Mr. Kagame’s alleged autocratic policies, however, do not take away from his seemingly positive imagery at international platforms. He is the current chairperson of the Commonwealth. He headed the African Union from 2018 to 2019, and the East African Community from 2018 to 2021. Rwanda also has significant female representation in Parliament, with 61.3% women in the Chamber of Deputies and 37.4% in the Senate.