Prof. Paul Rutayisire, a historian at the National University of Rwanda, has called on Rwandans to put behind  the bad politics that were sowed by the colonialists and embrace good governance practices in order to develop. During a public lecture on Rwanda before and after independence at Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Rutayisire said the country would have developed faster had it not been for bad governance . "We need to know that colonialists imported bad governance. However, it’s up to us to change that,” Rutayisire said. "You cannot achieve good governance without including the ideas of citizens. We had poor governance that promoted the social classification of citizens that caused fleeing of many.”Rwanda gained her independence from Belgium on July 1, 1962.