At a recent conference in Nairobi, the moderator asked me a question: Why does President Kagame keep running? Indeed, this question has been asked in various forms, along with calls for Kagame to anoint a successor and prepare for a transition to another leader. Some critics have even predicted doom for Rwanda as a result of Kagame’s "overstaying” in power. Many commentators miss two important points: context and leadership standards. Allow me to explain.

Challenge of citizenship

All countries in the world have social grievances and divisions within their societies. Nation-building aims to address these issues by creating a single, indivisible identity that supersedes all others: citizenship. The quality of leadership everywhere is therefore measured by the ability of leaders to ensure that the glue that holds society together and preserves this identity does not detach.

When the leadership fails to do this, the consequences for society vary. As former President of the African Development Bank, Dr Donald Kaberuka has observed, such a development can lead to state failure or fragility. I would add that each of these outcomes poses different threats to human life.

What’s more, the consequences of bad governance in, say, Uganda or Tanzania, will not be the same as those of bad governance in post-genocide Rwanda. In other words, the risks that poor leadership poses to a society also vary, mainly because of the history and nature of the grievances.

All African states are fragile to differing degrees. The manner in which states were created, the arbitrariness with which borders were drawn, and the historical manipulation of communities within those borders through colonial divide and rule policies have rendered the notion of citizenship more complicated than anywhere else. Citizenship requires that different identities within the geographical space of the state become subordinate to a shared national identity. However, the tendency has been to subordinate national identity to sub-national identities and for these to drive the agendas of leaders and group aspirations. It follows that all these sub-national grievances are latent conflicts. All that is needed to activate conflict is incitement and the opportunity for groups to arm themselves against would-be compatriots. Combined with a history of leaders that are unable to rise above their sub-national identities to inspire and rally others to embrace a common identity, the potential for crisis is ever present. And here, adversarial politics easily becomes the means by which otherwise latent grievances are activated. The results can vary from mere skirmishes to genocide at the extreme end of the continuum. This then becomes the price of poor-quality leadership that fails to forge and nurture citizenship.

This historical context, however, is not sufficient to explain why Kagame keeps running. What complements it is why Rwandans keep asking him to run, to which we shall return shortly.

Setting high standards

Despite this shared history of latent and active conflicts which has produced fragile African states, in many countries where leadership is renewed or changed via the ballot, there seems to be no way around ‘competitive’ politics that does not entail ethnic mobilization and incitement. Indeed, most political leaders in Africa have opted for ethnic mobilisation and competition in the name of multi-party competition. They are able to ride on ethnic divisions with little risk that their countries will suffer the consequences of similar behaviour in Rwanda in the early 1990s, which plunged the country into genocide in 1994. Countries without a history of genocidal ideology in their politics can afford to play with fire. For Rwanda, these political ‘games’ exacted a very heavy price: more than a million people died during the genocide against the Tutsi. As is often said, once bitten, twice shy.

A tragic past has significantly raised the standards for leadership aspirants in Rwanda. The tragedy of the genocide raised the stakes for leadership, where a process of introspection in 2000 pointed to Kagame as someone with the personal attributes to match what was required of a leader in such circumstances. He rose to the occasion and has come to embody the standard that Rwandans demand of their president. For Rwandans, therefore, the question of transition is not simply about replacing Kagame. If it were only about replacing him, he would have left long ago. The key question is whether potential successors can live up to the rigorous standards of leadership that have emerged from the conditions in which the country found itself, some of which persist to this day. Rwandans would prefer to tread carefully on this issue.

This does not mean that anyone believes Kagame is immortal, that he will be around forever. Still, addressing the challenge of Kagame’s immortality cannot be detached from the need to address the challenge of how to ensure that the high standards society has set are maintained after he is gone.

Perhaps there is someone with Kagame’s attributes, or even better. But why risk a gamble if you don’t have to? Only those who have not experienced the very ugly consequences of bad leadership, as Rwandans have, would consider experimenting and venturing into the unknown. Clearly, as long as Kagame remains alive, physically fit and willing to serve, he will remain the first choice in the minds of Rwandans for whom elections are about maintaining high standards of leadership, not changing leadership for the sake of it.

This will remain the case until someone within the RPF or the RPF-led coalition is identified as possessing the attributes the country needs in a leader, attributes that Kagame has come to embody, or is seen as having the potential to provide quality leadership given the context-specific challenges, some of them existential, that Rwanda faces.

And so it goes that, as long as the objective is not simply to replace Kagame, and as long as a replacement who meets some threshold of standards is yet to be identified, President Kagame will continue to run. Some will even argue that it would be irresponsible for him to not continue to serve, simply to satisfy those that treat leadership change as a game of musical chairs. Outsiders who love to judge should know that, for Rwandans, asking Kagame to keep running is about their reluctance to gamble carelessly.

This article was originally published in The Pan African Review.