It is said that President Kagame gave one of the shortest speeches in history before the UN General Assembly, estimated to be less than eight minutes. But in the few words were packed the essentials that would have taken hours to emulate in detail.

One message that stood out was that Rwanda was preparing to receive at least 500 refugees and asylum seekers who have been in custody in Libya. They had been intercepted while trying to cross by sea to Europe.

Their lives in the hands of various Libyan armed groups were not for the faint-hearted and some were even sold on open-air slave markets. They were the lucky ones; those who could not make it across ended at the bottom of the sea.

It would be safe to say that there are no Rwandans among them, but Rwanda offered to take them in on humanitarian grounds and in the name of African solidarity.  No other African countries offered to help apart from Niger.

While there are some genuine refugees, especially from the Horn of Africa, most migrants in Libya are economic refugees seeking greener pastures across the seas, so the thought of transiting through a country with poor economic conditions similar to those they fled is not very welcoming.

However, the first 75 asylum seekers who land in Kigali today evening can rest assured that even though Rwanda’s economic status is not at par with the countries they had intended to move to, they can at least rest assured of one thing; they will be treated with the dignity they deserve and have been missing for some time and share the little Rwandans have without complaining.