A few months ago, I met a UN expat at an international conference who kept saying "President Kagame is so smart.” Though I acquiesced many times that he was indeed really smart, the UN guy seemed intent on repeating himself. And after so many back and forth of "Yes, he is really smart” and "No really, he is very smart”, he asked if I had visited the SDG center for Africa in Kigali. I had not. "Why have you not visited the center when your president has worked so hard to bring it to your country?” he responded, rebuking me.

"I have been to 30+ countries in Africa and not one is like Rwanda,” he added, proceeding to draw parallels between these countries and Rwanda. In almost all the other countries, he claimed, working with local leaders was tedious. The first leader he approached would refer him to the next who in turn, referred him to another that usually never showed up for work. The UN employee would leave a note under the door, only to find it at the same exact spot, a week, two weeks later. Rwanda, in contrast, he said, took ownership of every project it was involved in: starting from the appropriate ministry all the way down to the cell and up again to the ministry. At every stage, citizen and leaders were consulted and involved, marking an unprecedented level of ownership and consensus in decision-making.

What my new acquaintance probably did not know is that Rwanda was not always as efficient as it is touted to be today.

Thirty years ago, in a land far from home, a group of young men and women, weary of life in exile and the hardships associated with it, gathered and launched a liberation movement. The mission of the movement was the quest for dignity and the reclaiming of a people’s citizenship rights that had, for decades, been denied to them. It was time to head home.

There he goes, just a young man, to fight a war in a strange land. He reckons he might not make it out alive, but having a place to call home is worth the risk.

There she goes, just a young girl, to solicit funds for the struggle. She’s lost count of the doors slammed in her face. On long and exhausting days, she denies herself food and drink, lest the struggle be delayed.

Far from the battlefield, the young man’s mother, on her knees and in tears, pleads with God every night, "Will you please keep my child safe?”

When the war was over and the genocide stopped, a message was sent out. "Intsinzi!” it said, "Come ALL home.”

And so, all came: men, women and children. To desolation and devastation. To lives to mourn and orphans to raise. To people to feed and a nation to heal. And to reunions that sadly never happened.

With broken yet grateful hearts, they picked the pieces, these young liberators tasked with nation-building despite their having no prior experience. The task at hand seemed unsurmountable, but the still determined heroes didn’t falter. "If not us, then who?” they reasoned; and began the work.

So, they tried and erred, and tried again until orphans were fostered and widows sheltered. Until children were enrolled in school and adults were back to work. Until being Rwandan meant more than any other identity we might have held on in the past.

The young freedom fighters grew older and bolder, and took on ambitious plans. Giving to all the very rights denied to them, championing the cause of women and children, providing universal health coverage, reviving an economy, giving monthly stipends to the most destitute, rewarding their best and brightest with scholarships at home and abroad on the basis of merit only. And finally, connecting our small nation to the world, because landlocked never meant airlocked.

How the young man grew to become a globally respected servant leader is not the result of accident. And it is certainly not due to special favors. In life as in nation-building, his guiding principles remained the same: to refuse to live within the limits of one’s potential, to claim responsibility for one’s own destiny, to be single-minded in purpose and most importantly, to never give up the deeply-held conviction that Rwandans are worthy of respect and dignity.

And if we live by these tenets, while united as a people, the time is not far off when prosperity will be added to us.

Thirty years on, as we look back in gratitude and reflect on the gains Rwanda has achieved over the last two decades, the only worthy legacy would be for every youth to not be complacent, but to put their strength, time and intellect to the highest use: to the service of man, to the uplifting of humanity.

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

The writer is a commentator based in Kigali.