Rwanda mischief at border signal that times have drastically changed

At the weekend, a friend of mine constructing a hotel in the Silver Springs suburb south of the city, was getting ready to pour a concrete slab over a fairly large building and was planning to travel all the way from New York to “supervise” this costly phase of construction. The fact that this is a smart building means miles of cables are already buried in the foundation and in the walls to connect to the National Backbone network that delivers Internet signal (broadband) to major population confluences made it tricky.

I offered up my classmate and childhood friend, a city architect, to deliver him a “digital” floor dressing in a fraction of the time that it would take to push wheel barrows up the alley on dangerous scaffolding. He does this routinely across Kampala’s rapidly changing skyline.

One small thing, my friend had travelled to Kigali to visit our classmate, a former NSSF executive. JB, like a good number of our classmates, was born in Uganda and returned to Kigali as an adult to form the backbone of the Rwandan renaissance under Paul Kagame, a tightly wound tale of extraordinary progress, modernised Kigali, but also a number of failed military adventures and domestic political frustration.

Years ago, a call of this nature would be improbable if not outright dangerous. Visitors to Kigali often complain of trouble roaming using their foreign issued cellphones. People from Rwanda government have a government-issued phone that must remain on their person for the duration of their foreign travel. Beady pellets of sweat sometimes accompany “office” consultations forcing government apparatchiks to excuse themselves to attend to it. But this time, there was no sign of the sort of the tension now mounting at the border. My friends were happily engaged in banter. They didn’t possibly perceive that rumours in security circles had suggested a sort of “uprising”, which was crushed forcing Rwanda to close the border.

In 2018, due to international outcry, Rwanda was forced to loosen restrictions on the Opposition allowing renegade groups like the Democratic Green Party to enter Parliament. The outcry over political prisoners like Diane Uwigare and Ingabire Victoire, who appeared in court in shackles dented Rwanda’s image carefully crafted of a rapidly modernising State.

More pressure has come from outside its borders. Burundi is now stable, and Bujumbura offers excellent photography shots of glittering new buildings. Like Kagame and Museveni, Nkurunziza has extended his stay in office a few times, but this too is a phenomenon on its last legs. In fact, Museveni is considering adopting a parliamentary system of government to cater for Uganda’s diverse tribes and polity. In Africa, like everywhere else, people compete for office to deliver the “bacon” home, to access State resources to siphon them off to their relatives. Uhuru in Kenya has shown it is not a big deal to add a few more sirens and convoys to achieve this objective.

The DR Congo just completed a fairly credible presidential election recently and made announcements of the nature likely to put Kigali on “pressure”. Last week, they announced release of all political prisoners in one month. My brother in law called me in a state of bemusement a few weeks ago after a Congolese businessman bought two container loads from his Supreme flour establishment of wheat headed for the DRC.

Monday I tracked down a young female lawyer tracing her to a nasty car accident in the DRC. The lawyer survived a nasty car accident while travelling at night in the DRC headed towards Mpondwe after offering legal services in the DRC. At international meetings, Congolese are learning English and contributing. You will find that while “Nalwoga” and “Namutebi” spend meetings shopping at foreign malls, Congolese are looking to practice their English.
These rapid changes have challenged Rwanda, which favours tighter control unlike Uganda where people drink up to morning bashing Museveni yet doing nothing about it.

Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law
and an Advocate. [email protected]