Editor,

RE: "Rwanda emerges from the elections even stronger” (The New Times, August 19).

The number of heads of state and government as well as high-level delegations representing their countries from all over Africa was only the icing on the cake. It was also an unequivocal rebuff of those – mainly highly conceited Western busybodies, but also their embarrassingly servile local African echo-chambers – who have made it a habit to give unsolicited lectures on how we should organise and manage our own affairs in accordance with their dictates, as if they know better than ourselves what our concerns should be and how best to resolve them.

In reality, however, it isn’t our concerns that bother them but the idea that we are determined to plot our own course free from their oversight, and that we are presenting our fellow Africans a dangerous example that we can only prosper if we unshackle ourselves from the West’s heavy and stultifying neo-colonial control.

But the real cake on which the highly-attended inauguration was the icing is the near total consensus of the Rwandan electorate through its overwhelming participation in the recently concluded presidential plebiscite and its almost unanimous vote for the incumbent that our country is on the right path and that that is attributable to the visionary leadership of President Paul Kagame and his peerless strategic management of our national affairs.

Were I these busybodies, I would reconcile myself with reality rather than, like a later-day King Canute ordering the tide from rising and lapping at his royal robes, continuously try to stop the tide of Rwandan self-emancipation from foreign political control and its march towards social and economic progress. Attempting to stop the inevitable is an exercise in futility.

MK