Two days ago, a friend posted a comment on Facebook that saddened and angered me at the same time. In the post, she details not only the defilement of a twenty-two month old infant, which is bad enough. But what makes the event even more tragic was that although the alleged pedophile was arrested, he was shortly released from police custody pending trial. I don’t know if the suspect committed the heinous crime for that is for the courts to decide. However, I must ask; how was he able to be released from custody in the first place? An alleged pedophile? I would have assumed that such a person would only be released on bail following a court ruling; so the question I must ask is, who in the world authorized his release? I know that my friends in the national police and other judicial officials read this newspaper quite often, so to them I ask this question. Was what happened in this case part of normal judicial procedure or was someone fiddling with the law? If it was the normal way of doing business, what is the point of going to court and asking for bail? And if someone committed some illegality, what shall be done about it? ******************* The state of the Rwandan Franc vis-à-vis the all-powerful dollar is quickly becoming the talk of the town (although as a conversation starter it still is inferior to the one about the state of the electricity and water sector). The Central Bank governor, John Rwangombwa, took to The New Times on Monday to state that ‘there was no dollar scarcity’. I will not presume to understand finance as much as the good governor; however I must ask, if there isn’t a scarcity of dollars, then why is the Franc weakening against it? It’s about demand and supply isn’t it? Anyway, what he did mention was the high import bill and low export sector. We cannot do that much about the import bill (especially when it comes to things such are vehicles, household appliances and industrial raw materials) but it would seem to me that even the little we should be doing to decrease our import bill we aren’t doing. For example, all the offices in the country, big or small, provide coffee for their staff. Guess what kind of coffee they provide? Not Bourbon coffee, not Maraba Coffee; rather they provide for their staff Nescafe instant coffee, a low quality, Swiss brand that more often than not will give you a headache soon after consuming it. I look around our supermarket shelves and search for products that could be termed ‘purely Rwandan’ but other than hot sauce and Inyange products, there is little else. And if there are any products that are ‘homemade’, nothing about tells me, the customer, that. In the US for example, producers go out of their way to sell the fact that their products are ‘Made in America’. An advert for a milk producer will incorporate the flag, a farmer in the Mid-West, the Bald Eagle and an All-American family. They will not only attempt to sell you the milk, they will be attempting to sell you ‘America’. There is a hot sauce that I love called ‘Sabana’. It’s a great, local condiment that can go toe to toe with Tabasco and beat it where flavor is concerned. But if you look at it, nothing tells you that it is made in Rwanda. Nothing makes you want to buy it. It doesn’t appeal to the patriot in you. Honestly, only our coffee brands have been able to sell themselves as national ‘champion’, which is sad because I know we have much more to offer than just coffee. The writer is a journalist
