Yesterday Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame flew to Dakar, Senegal to meet President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and his Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko. He will then proceed to Conakry, Guinea, to visit interim President, General Mamady Doumbouya.
The young Senegalese statesmen freshly elected to lead the country of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Abdou Diouf and Cheikh Anta Diop, certainly have big shoes to fill.
As for the young coup leader in Guinea, although popular with his people who yearned for change, regardless of it’s shape or form, Dumbuya has little experience in politics, and indeed in my interactions with West-African intellectuals, all seem to give little chance of success to the young leaders.
It is therefore essential that their elder brother, who has been at it for a long time, reaches out to guide them. This is the Africa we want!
Throughout Maki Sall’ tenure, Senegal had been Rwanda’s closest ally, and together they accomplished big things, including the construction of Kigali and Dakar Arenas, the launch of Basket Ball Africa League (BAL), the passing of a potentially game-changing Continental Free Trade Area, and the construction of
Biontech pharmaceutical plants in Dakar and Kigali, to name but a few. Senegal and Rwanda are projected to be the fastest-growing economies on the continent.
Furthermore, Rwanda maintained excellent relations with Guinea’s former President Alpha Conde, who once declared during a previous visit of his Rwandan counterpart: “I have no fear in recognizing that Paul Kagame is my model of governance”, and indeed the Rwandan’s last trip to Conakry in the aftermath of the coup was to ensure Dr. Conde and his family’s safety.
However Rwanda’s Paul Kagame doesn’t act like France, or America: You see, while he would intervene to ensure the safety of deposed leaders and their families, he wouldn’t to maintain unwanted leaders in power; that’s the prerogative of the people of each country!
Isn’t it a luxury, for leaders of our time, to have an elder who can guide their first steps into the presidency? Paul Kagame is considered an African elder. A few years ago, he was appointed by his peers to reform the African Union, a task he completed, with the creation of, inter-alia, the Africa Peace Fund, fully replenished to date.
However, Kagame is no Gadaffi, who used to “buy” alliances and legitimacy. He leads a small African country written off 30 years ago. He forgave people who killed his relatives. He is a man who has not bent on his principles, thirty years on.
When Donald Kaberuka, then Rwanda’s finance minister was finally elected to lead the African Development Bank, in a dead-heat contest that required a vote rerun, he was advised by Kagame to use his first days in office to tour countries that had opposed his candidacy, to appease their leaders and promise to fund their project. After that, he had a successful tenure which saw him voted 2013 African Man of Year for his determination to build infrastructure across the continent!
I learned from Chadian and Ethiopian colleagues that on their deathbeds, Late Idriss Debby Itno and Meles Zenawi told their children and successors: “If anything happens, go down south and seek guidance from my young brother Paul, he’ll know what to do and you must do as he says…” And indeed upon assuming power, the successors immediately visited Kigali to speak to the Rwandan leader.
But Paul Kagame is forced, at times, to part ways with long-time allies out of principle. For instance, he was forced to cut ties with Benjamin Netanyahu, while keeping good relations with Israel President Reuven Rivlin. Early before the conflict in Gaza, he decided to distance himself from the Israeli Prime Minister, due to his corrupt tendencies. Recently it is with Isaiah Afewerki, president of Eritrea and an old friend and supporter of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (PRF), that Kagame disagreed, after the latter had sent his army into Tigray, Ethiopia, which committed exactions and refused to leave, to date.
Amid the Tigray conflict, Afewerki’s ally, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed flew to Kigali and asked President Kagame to tell his Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) allies to lay down weapons.
– “you are the one they listen to, I am going to defeat them!”, he said.
– In that case, replayed Kagame, “you must reach out to them and negotiate, for lasting peace is achieved when you and your foes sleep peacefully in the same land. That’s how we have done it in Rwanda, and that’s the only advice I can give”.
Abiy left disappointed. Later he came to the same conclusion, on his own, called for negotiations with his Tigrinya countrymen, and last month, the Ethiopian leader brought his wife and the mayor of Addis Ababa to pay tribute to victims of the genocide against the Tutsi and for his capital’s Mayor to learn from Kigali’s urban’s urban planning. Rwanda’s relations with Ethiopia are in good standing, as the horn country looks to join the East African Community.
While “countries have no permanent enemies but permanent interests” as the adage goes, Paul Kagame has permanent principles, which, in time, have come to be known to all his peers.
He does not believe in negative solidarity either. The African leader flies to America to meet Donald Trump, then to China to meet Xi Jinping, and to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin all on the same trip. Sometime in July 2018, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping almost met in Kigali on two separate state visits in the same week. While Rwanda strongly supports Israel’s right to exist, it has sent aid to the besieged people of Gaza.
With Paul Kagame there are no permanent enemies. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s partnership with Paul Kagame saw the two countries mend an old enmity. The Frenchman, now reconverted into a corporate lawyer, has since been associated to brokering billion-dollar international deals and prosper, while François Holland his successor who opposed Kagame lives in oblivion. Hollande’s successor Emmanuel Macron immediately renewed ties with Kagame and has since ripped unmeasurable benefits. So did Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique.
Using its meager resources, Rwanda funded its entire operation in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, to rid the rich coastal nation of Islamist insurgents and return displaced families to their homes. Some support from the European Union came much later, but it hasn’t met even a third of Rwanda’s financial and logistical contribution, and this, without counting the price in Rwandan lives laid down to bring about peace to the Mozambican people.
Par ricochet, French company Total Energies was able to recover its 20 billion dollar investment to explore Liquefied Natural Gas, previously abandoned following the beheading of its staff by the Islamists. Mozambique is set to become the fastest-growing economy globally, for the next five years, and on..
Burundian Evariste Ndayishimiye and D.R. Congo’s Felix Tshisekedi too sought Kagame’s counsel in their first years in power. Their countries prospered as a result. Thisekedi was elected Chairman of the African Union merely a year into office, invited to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), introduced to foreign investors during the Africa CEO forum in Kigali, and invited to the World Economic Forum – although his delegation might have bolted with hotel bills, at least if we believe swiss hoteliers…
Relations soured when the Congolese army decided to rearm Rwanda’s genocidal outfit of FDLR which launched an attack on Rwandan Northern Province, killing people and destroying property. Ndayishimiye’s Burundi too was doing well. Rwandans had been encouraged to trade with their southern neighbors, frequent its beautiful capital city on weekends, and infuse the country with much-needed foreign currency.
The honeymoon was cut short when Burundi decided to harbor anti-Rwanda rebels of FLN who attacked and killed people in Rwanda’s southern provinces and later closed its border with Rwanda. Today Burundi is dangerously descending into bankruptcy, its traders, starved of foreign exchange, unable to import fuel.
From Kristalina Georgieva at IMF, Mussa Faki Mahamat at AU, to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at WHO, all have received in Paul Kagame a strong campaigner for their election. Gianni Infantino told me that Paul Kagame played a big role in his election as FIFA president. You see Africa, strong of its 54 countries, wields a huge voting constituency in international institutions and Paul Kagame has the trust of his peers, to whom he has consistently devised golden counsel!
It is not too late, it never is with Kagame, for Burundi and DRC to reunite with the man. They can only rip benefits from such rapprochement, after all, in the state that their respective countries are at present, they have nothing to lose, and in his own words, “show me a person who has opposed us and prospered as a result..”
Paul Kagame walks the talk. While our world faces major crises such as poverty, terrorism and migration, which all have a direct causality, he has been at the forefront of mitigating each one of them. Not only has he lifted millions of Rwandans out of poverty, the Rwandan army has deployed far and wide to pacify nations marred by terrorism. Amid a highly mediatized refugee crisis in Europe, Rwanda increasingly appears to be offering the only solution, even if provisional.
Rwanda has sent chartered planes to airlift refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan or Libya. In the ongoing Sudanese armed conflict, Rwanda hired buses and negotiated a safe passage for African refugees stuck there to be driven up north into Egypt. “Take everyone with you, do not leave any African behind”, Rwanda’s Chargée d’Affaires in Sudan was ordered. Once they were safe on Egyptian soil, Rwanda sent airplanes and flew all of them to Kigali. “You can stay and live here, or you can go back to your countries, but please do not go back to places where there is war”, refugees were told.
Apology: People who read this letter, one month to Presidential elections in Rwanda, will think me a sycophant or immodest. I must apologize, chauvinism is unrwandan, elders always tell us. In fact, Paul Kagame does not need my help to win elections in Rwanda, nor does he require my endorsement to wield geopolitical soft power. Indeed to put things in perspective, one must look at the world’s map, and see the size of Rwanda. It doesn’t possess Qatar’s endless gas fields, nor does it DRC’s world’s mineral reserves; it only has a visionary leader who wishes to work with others to build a better world for us all.
Like most of my pieces, it is merely a bottle thrown at sea for future leaders in his position, and indeed in their various other capacities, once faced with similar predicaments to have a map to the path less traveled, that is the advancement of Africa and the world; a privilege Diomaye Faye, Abiy Ahmed, Debby Itno jr. currently enjoy with Kagame, for in the words of Frantz Fanon, “”Each generation must, out of relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
“I met President Kagame on a cruise ship, at a fundraiser organized by Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State under Clinton”, journalist Steve Clemons, founder of SEMAFOR once told me;
“He was standing on the edge, away from the crowd. He was quiet, observing the proceedings..
– Hello Sir, I am Steve Clemons….
– Oh, nice to meet you, I am Paul Kagame, he answered,
– I am a journalist and I run a media agency called SEMAFOR, what do you do?
– Yes, I am President of Rwanda…
“I had hardly ever heard of Rwanda, but I was struck by the simplicity of this man. We have remained friends ever since..”