Editor,

RE: Context is key in any democratic dispensation; my two cents – (The New Times, February 26)

I often wonder whether those who push to supplant Rwandans’ will as to how and by whom we are governed with their own preferred choice for us understand how their action is paradoxically the very antithesis of the democracy they pretend to want us to have.

In fact, what it really boils down to is colonialism; in other words, a situation whereby a foreign power or foreign interests exercise full or partial control over another country’s political choices.

Many of our ancestors paid a heavy price, some including with their very lives, in order to ensure we pulled ourselves from that kind of political subordination by Western countries.

It seems it must perforce remain a never-ending struggle to ensure they don’t again return us under their heavy thumb, even as they falsely claim they are only interested in us enjoying democracy.

Real, durable democracy grows organically from a people’s own specific history, culture and their own unique context and political experience. It can never be developed on the basis of others’ history, culture and context.

Attempts to cut and paste from other people’s democratic governance models for grafting onto a political reality that is radically different from that of the source are destined to fail because the new host body will find it almost impossible to deal with the usually many flaws in the transplanted system, something that the source polity has, over time and through normal political evolution, learnt to easily cope with.

Mwene Kalinda