Members of the civil society have urged all parties involved to ensure people whose properties are affected by a public infrastructure projects are expropriated before the said project can begin to avoid the recurrent injustices.

While appearing before parliament recently, Claver Gatete, the Minister of Infrastructure said that all institutions have been informed that effective 2022, no project should begin before all affected are duly paid their compensation.

He was responding to the issues raised from the annual report of the Human Rights Commission which detailed that expropriation arrears keep coming up in every annual report.   

"For all the upcoming projects, expropriation will go first and we will start construction activities after all expropriation fees have been disbursed,” said Minister Gatete.  

"Together with the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, we will start mobilizing all funds for construction after feasibility studies and expropriation processes have been completed,” he added.

In an exclusive interview with The New Times, Emile Baganizi, the Deputy Director General of Rwanda Transport Development Agency (RTDA) said that the development will help his institution in different ways.

"It will help fast track our projects, because we will be quicker, and we won’t also receive those complaints because at times they impede our work and affect our timelines,” he said.

However, some activists who spoke to The New Times said that it didn’t require a new directive because that is what the prevailing laws stipulate, and instead urged the government to ensure this is put into action.

"This has been said plenty of times, even before 2014, but nothing has changed really,” responded Marie Immaculee Ingabire, the Chairperson of Transparency International Rwanda.

"It is even stipulated in the law that people should be expropriated after being given all the expropriation fees, and that a project should start with enough budget to run it till the end,” she added, citing that it is not respected.

Ingabire proposes that more steps should be taken, including punishing heads of institutions which will commence public projects before affected residents are fully expropriated and paid.

Similar sentiments were shared by Evariste Murwanashyaka, the coordinator of CLADHO, an umbrella association of human rights organisations in Rwanda who says that there is nothing new in the development.

"It is not being announced for the first time, it has been declared even in the past years, but we kept receiving the same claims. So, we advocate that for this time, it would be put into practice not only in announcements,” he observed.

Contacted for a comment, Madeleine Nirere, she also hailed the development which she said would be the way forward.

"It is a very timely decision, but the same was taken even long ago, this should be how things are done, because you can’t expect to relocate residents without enough fees for them to settle in another place,” she told this paper.

A total of 46 cases of complaints regarding expropriation arrears were reported to the ombudsman’s office in the fiscal year 2020-2021, and they make up 12 percent of the total cases received by the watchdog.