Editor,

RE: "How democracy sponsors distort democracy” (The New Times, July 3). What interest would they have in helping ‘to preserve the independence of the National Electoral Commission and the sanctity of the electoral process’ or for that matter your countries’ independence when what they want is to control them?

Nobody gives you freedom or independence. You take it, and strive each and every day to ensure you keep it, including in the face of efforts by internal compradors to hand it back to those whose abiding interest is to control your affairs from behind the curtains, even as they claim to desire only your independence!

Notice how the representatives in our countries of the same people who become hysterical at the idea that a foreign power might have or might influence their elections (even without presenting the slightest shred of evidence), see nothing wrong with brazenly jumping with all feet smack into our electoral processes. And they wonder why such rank hypocrisy has lost them any credibility across the world!

And why their involvement with any candidate — at any rate here in Rwanda — represents a kiss of electoral death to that candidate even if his or her chances of success were always almost zero in the face of an incumbent whose track record has Rwandans in their overwhelming majority clamouring for even more of the same?

Mwene Kalinda