Women rights: With the liberation came ownership

I am overjoyed to be back home in time for the 20th anniversary of the overthrow of the genocidal ‘Abatabazi’ government by the brave men and women of the Rwanda Patriotic Front. I’m happy, first of all, because there is simply no place like home and, secondly, because I anticipate a huge party on July 4th and, as anyone who knows me will attest, I love a good party. We are constantly urged to work hard and stay focused, but as they say, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. And we deserve to let our hair down and dance a jig of celebration. We have security, progress and a leadership that is respected globally. As a small nation of little financial means located in a global ‘red zone’, that is a no mean feat. There are many benchmarks to measure our progress. We can use per capita growth, GDP increase, increased school enrollment, falling infant and maternal mortality statistics, dwindling HIV/AIDS rates and increased agricultural production. However, a story I read on Sunday reveals Rwanda’s transformation in stark terms. According to the Department of Lands and Mapping, women own the majority of registered land in the capital, Kigali. This jaw-dropping information was revealed on Friday during the Department’s launch of the land registration month. Statistics show that while couples own most of the registered plots (148,793), individual women account for 73,862 leaving individual men with a miserly 51,615. To understand why these statistics are so breathtaking, one has to understand that for almost as long as our nation had existed, in whatever form, women were treated as worse than second-class citizens. They were not allowed to own businesses without the express permission of their husbands and when it came to inheritance their male siblings took everything, leaving them destitute. How things have changed! Women are represented at all levels of power, from the national level down to the household level. And nothing says this more than their ownership of land, the primary means of production. With the skyrocketing Kigali property prices, it is only simply a matter of time before women become the majority owners of Kigali businesses, especially when they begin to leverage their property to access financial services. It is an exciting time to be a woman in Rwanda. And we men will gladly match you, stride for stride. We are living in exciting times indeed. On another note, the recent news that the University of Rwanda confirmed the admittance of 9,360 applicants must bear some some scrutiny. Not because I think the process was shady but rather because what that high number means for the country’s development agenda. Provisional figures show that College of Business and Economics will take the vast majority of the applicants (38 per cent) while the colleges’ of Science and Technology will take 20 per cent, Medicine and Health Sciences (7 per cent), Arts and Social Sciences (15 per cent), Agriculture, Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine (20 per cent) and College of Education (11 per cent) lag behind. While I have nothing but good wishes for the students as they begin their academic journey, I have to ask this question. Do we really need more business and management graduates than teachers? Does it make sense to have so few veterinarians and agronomists, especially when agriculture is the backbone of our economy? Has any country in the world developed because it had a bunch of managers and bankers without the requisite number of teachers, nurses, trained farmers and engineers? It is my belief that admission into certain programmes should be in-line with the country’s Vision 2020. We need more coders, engineers, doctors and, I say it again, qualified teachers. What I want to see in the next couple of years is an admittance policy that ensures that the colleges of sciences, agriculture and education have the majority of students. Sunny Ntayombya is a New Times journalist Twitter: @sannykigali

Opinions

Women rights: With the liberation came ownership