Che Guevara once said: “The outcome of the struggle in Rwanda depended on the struggle in the Congo, since it involved greater confrontation with imperialism”.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front throes are to be found in the failure to confront colonialism and neo-colonialism within and outside Rwanda. The predominately young women and men who founded the RPF suffered from this common trauma: the loss of nationhood and the failure to recover it. This trauma has resulted into specific features of the current RPF which are themselves at the origin of some of the common misunderstandings about modern Rwanda. This paper aims at highlighting the path of the Rwandan Patriotic Front from a national liberation movement towards a political party. This path is marked by a dual legacy of a new State Doctrine as well as a set of diverse policies. The opponents of the RPF are not questioning its policies but the new State doctrine upon which the modern Rwandan State functions. The RNC/FDLR alliance wants to legitimize the State through ethnic balance of power while the RPF led coalition has established State legitimacy on the basis of service delivery.
A. From Liberation Movement to Political Party
The Rwandan Patriotic Front and its armed wing the Rwandan Patriotic Army were by nature more than just a political party. By virtue of their ambition and actions, they were a national liberation movement. The political consciousness of RPF cadres was first molded by old generations of Rwandans who used to praise the pre-colonial Rwanda as land of milk and honey, hadn’t there been the Belgians. This nostalgic narrative was supplemented by a short-lived flirt with communism, which proved to be a dead-end. Thus, the old generation of refuges had no ideological or practical means to mobilize all refuges as their dire situation dragged on for more than 4 decades.
It is important to understand the ideological disenchantment in the minds of Rwandans long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the proclamation of the end of history by Fukuyama. For the future RPF founders this has resulted into a pragmatic world view where ideology is by no means an end in itself. In other words working methods of modern statehood were more important than ideological purity. Ultimately, politics without sovereignty was understood to have been the Achilles heel of modern African States and the restoration of the State became the outmost priority. This is why RPF founding cadres turned to liberation struggles in their host countries with the pragmatic goal of gaining battle experience.
This nationalistic origin is at the source of some misunderstandings in today’s Rwanda. How can a national liberation movement become a political party? In other words how can other political parties compete with a movement that pursues national liberation, since no political party can claim to be against national liberation without entering into the realm of a civil war?
The famous RPF 8 point program was indeed more a cure to State building than a political manifesto of a political party. The RPF had successfully mobilized other political parties around the State reform agenda and had gained major concessions through the Arusha Peace Agreement. Indeed, as western diplomats reported at that time, the regime of Habyarimana had successfully been sidelined. As a measure of last resort, the regime of Habyarimana applied the well tested politics of genocide, meaning the criminalization of political debates through ethnic mobilization. Some ill-informed commentators think that RPF was not winning the political game, yet RPF had gained all political concessions it could wish, the rest was a foreseeable exit of Habyariman’s clique.
Whereas the RPF had started a liberation campaign in 1990, by 1994 it was forced into a war of ending the genocide. In other words it was forced into an apolitical role of restoring law and order. The RPF had to substitute State Authority since the entire administration had collapsed. This of course isn’t new, students of history will recall that General Charles de Gaulle did the same: to avoid that the allies would fill the administrative void left by the Vichy regime, he asked members of his liberation army to present themselves as local government leaders. In a similar way General Charles de Gaulle is today a national symbol and not just the flag bearer of the French Right Wing Party.
In Africa, some of the most stable and economically prosperous countries are run by parties that came out of liberation movements: Mozambique, Botswana, Angola, South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia. Let us now explore the presence of the RPF on the Rwandan political scene.
The RPF and its opponents: beyond a political space
The RPF as we know it today cannot be easily branded. On the one hand it champions right-wing conservative politics such as self-reliance, national dignity and liberal economic policies and on the other hand it champions left-wing progressive policies such gender equality, liberal reproductive health and strict environmental protection.
There is another peculiar challenge posed by the RPF: its emphasis on working methods has resulted into dry political slogans focused on the know-how instead of a self-flattering revolutionary ideology. This radical pragmatism, as some are calling it, is difficult to sell in modern political debates that are narrowed down to a color (blue vs. red).
To be fair, the interests of Rwandans cannot be easily subdivided into trade unions vs. employers, the majority of Rwandans are subsistence farmers out of lack of better options. Land ownership has been democratized; everyone owns a land title and large land owners such as General Nyamwasa have been asked to give back to the community. Thus, there are no conflicts between large land owners vs. farmers like in Latin America. Land related conflicts are rather to be found within families.
The agenda of creating economic values that can become shared political interests is an agenda requiring more dedication. The tax base is limited and development aid is skewed towards dependency. It requires a turnaround strategy while using funds that are earmarked to maintaining the status quo. The agents of change (population) are unskilled and with enormous socio-economic challenges. Faced with the challenge of dedication, some have chosen the ethnic shortcut: mobilizing people alongside ethnical lines is cheap and doesn’t require neither political program nor experience. Everyone can be do ethnic politics. This is the line chosen by disfranchised large land owners such as the current champions of RNC. However, their opportunistic alliance with FDLR reveals a deeper trend in modern Rwandan political discourse: nihilism.
Nihilism in modern Rwandan political discourse
As stated earlier, it is important to understand the ideological disorientation in the minds of Rwandans long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the proclamation of the end of history by Fukuyama. As for all black men, coping with the idea that older generations were not skilled enough for the modern world has produced a malaise. For the ruling elite within Rwanda, since 1959, their parent’s destitution has led them to negate anything related to ancient Rwanda. The ruling elite proclaimed to have a Catholic worldview but none of their action was marked by an adherence to Christianity, what had sat in is in reality a tropical Nihilism founded on self-degradation: Hutu power defined Hutus as people proud of poverty and base motives; the harsh reality of subsistence farming was romanticized and even elevated into the coats of arms; the President defined civic duty as committing all sorts of hateful crimes (Mukore!).
The self-denial and nihilism is also evident in the conduct and discourse of FDLR/RNC, currently the most vocal anti-RPF group. RNC denies the history of the genocide and frequently prophesize a terrible outbreak of violence in Rwanda. RNC actually confirms in its propaganda what it stands accused of: throwing grenades at public spaces. FDLR/RNC constantly proposes a return to point zero for Rwandans, according to them the past five decades since 1959 have not existed. In short, RNC/FDLR proposes another State doctrine whereby the State derives its legitimacy from an ethnic balance of power as opposed to service delivery (championed by RPF).
The modus operandi of the RNC
The RNC propaganda of a Rwanda on the brink of collapsing sounds bizarre to an objective observer: Rwandans enjoy an unheard off socio-economic progress and it is unlikely that what the RNC top figures have failed to achieve at the height of their might within the government can be achieved as refugees outside of it. However, the RNC has opted for a more sophisticated approach. In his instructive article “Somebody else’s civil war’’, Michael Scott Doran explained well the political modus operandi of terror. Terrorism is defined as “violence used in order to create fear; but it is aimed at creating fear in order that the fear, in turn, will lead somebody else — not the terrorist — to embark on some quite different program of action that will accomplish whatever it is that the terrorist really desires. When a terrorist kills, the goal is not murder itself but something else — for example, a police crackdown that will create a rift between government and society that the terrorist can then exploit for revolutionary purposes”.
In other words, the RNC is well aware of its material and ideological weaknesses but it intends to create a mood of fear and paranoia that would result into a rift amongst RPF cadres or between the RPF and the society. The same strategy is used at international level, where the RNC has deployed to create a bad mood between development partners and the government of Rwanda.
In a recent BBC documentary, the RNC has co-produced a self-indicting pamphlet that denies the existence of the genocide. The RNC/FDLR alliance is well aware of its inability to change historical facts and the gross allegations made in the documentary are easy to debunk. Thus its goal can’t be just bringing out an ‘untold story’. The aim of the RNC /FDLR is to keep Rwanda’s internal and external sphere at ransom. It hopes to destabilize Rwandan political actors and confuse parliamentarians of budget contributing countries to propel them into actions that RNC/FDLR will later qualify as indicators of their narrative of a Rwanda in decay. What does this have to do with the well-being of ordinary Rwandans? It doesn’t aim at proposing better ideas on how to reduce poverty and achieve a middle income status. On the long term such political moves only reinforce RPF’s stance on self-reliance
RNC-FDLR does not want to become an actor within the Rwandan political space, it aims at dismantling it. RNC-FDLR has positioned itself as opponents of the State and not the RPF. The question is then how the State will assert its constitutional order and what the RPF’s role will be.
II. From State efficiency to Private Sector led Growth
A. Defining the political space
Who should organize political debates?
Given the political weight of the RPF, some have suggested that it would be good to have an alternative political movement for the sake of competition to power. Asked about this question the RPF Presidential Candidate, Paul Kagame, gave a clear answer: ‘I am not responsible for a strong opposition’. Indeed, there are plenty of countries where a staged democracy resulted into chaos. It would be a contradiction for a liberation party believing in people’s not agency to stage another party, nor is it the responsibility of the State to create political parties.
Informally, some western individuals have taken up the task of creating an opposition party to RPF as their holy mission. The problem is again that politics that are not home grown are a dead end.
The question is however whether progress is at all possible without dissent. The answer for anyone with experience in managing people is no. Therefore, since progress is taking place in Rwanda, we should assume that there is a competitive political debate, simply because good ideas have always come out of a competitive debate, even single sources of wisdom such as Oracle from Delphi had to be interpreted.
Granted, a homegrown way of organizing political debate through extensive consultations (inama) and direct participation of citizens may not appear attractive for international analysts who only value what they know.
What is clear is that there are two types of forces trying to reshape the political space in Rwanda: the first type is the grand RPF led coalition of political parties trying to deliver on Vision 2020 and thus shaping the political space around a debate on service delivery and poverty reduction; the second type is the one aimed at ethnic mobilization as structuring force of the political space and thus reigniting genocidal politics. This dichotomy is not influenced by different policies but different State doctrines; it is the attempted continuation of the Rwandan civil war. It is important to note that both State doctrines have been tested with different results, socio-economic growth at the one hand, genocide and poverty on the other. Thus, the Rwandan State will respond to this questioning of its Ordre Publique through police and if need be military action. This strategy is bound to fail since RNC-FDLR is challenging the most reformed and reliable institutions in Rwanda: the security organs. However, Rwanda is a country on the move and the forces that have shaped the Rwandan political space in the past are no longer constant variables.
The forces shaping the Rwandan political space
Regional Integration: One of the fundamental differences between RPF and the former regime is its pivot towards the East as opposed to Central Africa only. RPF has led Rwanda towards regional integration to a point of no return within the EAC but also within the pan-African context. Today, all Africans enter Rwanda without visa and EAC citizen are free to move and work in Rwanda. This has placed Rwanda’s future in the Indian Ocean basin away from being only defined as gateway to the Eastern DRC. It is true that some have recently tried to destabilize Rwanda within the region by raising ethnic tensions in Tanzania. It has resulted into the deportation of several thousands of Rwandophones by Tanzanian authorities. It is also true that the DRC will remain a headache for the foreseeable future, since there is well tested screen of fog consisting of expanding the political conditionality of Rwanda to the stability of the DRC. Lastly, it is also true that regional instability will increase if Alain Juppe makes it to the Elysee Palast. Nonetheless, the world is increasingly looking for regional stability as a way to halt the advance of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, Islamic terrorism is increasingly draining the West into asymmetrical and exhausting warfare which is eroding the power of the West to the benefit of China. It won’t be long until the USA realizes that European ethnic politics in Africa are a highway to nowhere. While the West is lost trying to define bedroom habits in Africa, the East led by China, is taking up all African ports as well as railway and pipelines. One can reasonably predict a geopolitical paradigm shift in favor of reforming African countries, since the world’s leading economies need a continent that is growing.
Demographics: Another force shaping Rwanda’s political space is the youth bulge. It is very amusing to see political figures like former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu agitating politics of the 1960s whne the majority of Rwandans 4 decades are separating him from the majority of Rwandans. The RPF has always made a point of being youthful in its leadership and style. The constant generational renewal of its leadership has prevented entitlement amongst cadr, unlike so many political movements; there are no “originals” in RPF. It is not clear how the young generation will shape Rwanda’s political space. The current youth has already benefited from senior positions within the private and public sectors, openness to the world through fiber optic and more access to education. They now need more jobs and this will require further economic transformation and Urbanization. The political space in Rwanda needs to provide solutions of current and future challenges; it cannot be oriented towards the past.
B. A tale of the future
Rwanda has already successfully managed to leapfrog from a heavily indebted failed State to an efficient State whose Eurobond was 9times oversubscribed. However, the forces that have shaped this are not necessarily sufficient to shape Rwanda’s future. The big challenge for Rwanda is now to move from a public sector led growth towards a private sector led economy. Rwanda’s private sector is till narrow and dominated by micro enterprises. Thus, RPF stands again in front of the challenge to fundamentally transform the status quo.
The RPF has demonstrated an unparalleled ability of State efficiency in the post-1994 crisis management. This has given the RPF credentials to leverage on for future elections. Ironically, however, it has also resulted into the RPF being swallowed by the burden of incumbency which has added another layer of pragmatism to an identity already sobered by the genocide and pre-genocide ideological disenchantment. The current RPF cadre is less vocal in political slogans than in action plans (imihigo) to tackle post-harvest losses and quality of education. The risk at hand is to see RPF cadres adopting a civil servant mindset, which is marked by procedures and risk aversion, as opposed to a more revolutionary mindset aimed at turning around the economy.
A recent article in Foreign Affairs pointed at the importance of leadership in economic turn-around, indeed Ruchir Sharma demonstrates “Why Markets Now Use Politics to Predict Economics”. Leadership in achieving a private sector led growth will be the defining role of any political party in Rwanda. The RPF has started this journey, away from the international limelight, but some scholars have already studied it in a study published in 2012. Experiences from other developmental States show that the political scene can be dominated over decades by a party which is organizing competitive debates within party structures. While people debating about the future of Rwanda’s political scene are limiting the debate around the issue of a third term, what is important to note is a reasonable prediction that RPF will remain the major structuring political party.
There will always be attempt to destabilize an RPF led Rwanda. Ironically, the more unfair and arbitrary these threats will be, the stronger RPF stronger will emerge as guarantor of dignity. As the RPF Chairman recently said: “no one owes you a thing, you are on your own and you should own it. You should own your story, own everything about it, shape it the way you want and the way you deserve”. He further added: “With every challenge put on our way, we get stronger, not weaker”.
President Paul Kagame’s personality as General, Statesman and Philosopher of a new African Self-Assertion stands above party politics within Rwanda. Through his mind-shaping leadership, he has opened a new era and not just an agenda. This new era is unfolding with measurable veracity; the ferocity of some critics only confirms that Rwanda’s future is indeed not a fairy tale but a constant quest for freedom.
Africa is a rising lion 