That time of the year is back again. The time when Rwandans reflect upon their rescue from years of bad governance hardships that resulted in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi – a genocide which only the then Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), now Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF), was able to halt, winning the four-year Rwanda liberation battle that ended on July 4, 1994.
On 19 July 1994, a broad-based National Unity Government was set up in Kigali, and continues to govern Rwanda up till now; today with President Paul Kagame at the helm – a man who even led the liberation journey.
And if the then RPA forces − who were under Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) political wing − did achieve that liberation, it was not just out of the blue. There are a range of explanations to their victory. One sound example is found on page 219 of the book “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” by Philip Gourevitch, an American war reporter.
“The RPF guys had this impressive clarity of purpose about them”, Gourevitch quotes James Orbinski, the Canadian doctor who worked in Kigali during the Genocide, as saying.
“These guys – their uniforms were always ironed, they were clean-shaven, and their boots were shined. You’d see them walking around behind their lines, two guys holding hands, sober, proud to be there. They fought like hell. But when they came into a place, you didn’t see the usual African looting”, Dr. Orbinski is further quoted in the book as adding.
On the previous page of the book, President Kagame, by then Vice President and Minister of Defense, also has something to say – apparently alluding to what, among others, has brought the forces under his command to victory.
“In all my capacities, in the RPF, in the government, in the army, my primary responsibility is to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately”, President Kagame is quoted as telling American journalist Gourevitch, some months after the halt of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Just drawing from these words of President Kagame, I think they still have an even greater resonance as Rwanda, under the theme “Celebrating Africa’s Renaissance, Working towards Self-reliance”, celebrates her 19 years’ liberation anniversary.
The President’s “primary responsibility to help develop people who can take responsibility indiscriminately” somewhat depicts the resilience of a nation that has managed, all of a sudden, to rise up again from the ashes of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, and now ranks among the world’s fastest growing economies, according to a World Bank report released early this year.
In fact, Rwanda’s GDP per capita is reported to have risen from $593 in 2011 to $644 in 2012, with one million Rwandans being lifted up the poverty line and poverty dropping by 11.8 percent since 2006. And the national budget is now home-grown at 60 percent – something quite unheard of in Rwanda’s fiscal history.
In the education sector, the progress is laudable, too. Official government figures suggest that there are now far more schools, universities and higher learning institutes than at any other time in the history of Rwanda.
And in the health sector, the same figures suggest, the infant mortality has fallen by 41 percent since 2006 while well over 80 percent of Rwanda’s population estimated at 10.5 million is part of a health insurance scheme and therefore access quality healthcare services.
Well, those examples are just a tip of iceberg. But they are that enough to prove my point: that a resilient, purpose-driven nation that Rwanda is, will even withstand any hurdles on its continued development path − just in the same way the country has managed to build up again after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, the worst and last tragedy Rwanda has suffered.
And eventually, like Gourevitch writes of that well-disciplined rebel army (the then RPA) that struck many with regard to its determination and organization and was able to halt the Genocide being carried out against the Tutsi in 1994, chances are that even the country it has inherited will keep shining in the world throughout its continued, spectacular, all-sphere development journey.