Editor,

RE: "Kigali Convention Centre is worth every penny spent on it” (The New Times, July 27).

Those questioning the project are saying, in a nutshell, that a poor country shouldn't invest in major development projects before it could ensure that every citizen has enough to eat.

In other words, if you were a household, before you set aside seeds for the next planting season, you must first make sure everyone is satisfied.

What that ignores of course is that without putting off satisfying yourself today by foregoing consumption to set aside seeds for tomorrow's planting, you won't have anything at all to feed your family come the next harvest. In which case you will be reduced to perpetual begging; exactly the position those who proffer unsolicited advice as to how we should organise our affairs would like to see us in.

We are the best judges of how to sequence our capital investment and recurrent expenditures to reflect our essential needs today and to create the productive capacity that will reduce our external dependence over time.

And while we are at it, perhaps many of those so prompt to offer unsolicited advice might explain the growing problem of homelessness and the crisis of the working poor in a large and fast growing swathe of the rich west even as the 1 per cent gets richer than Mammon.

Mwene Kalinda