Deliberate lies won't change Rwanda's role model status

Editor, RE: “Poverty rose by six per cent? You racists, tell that to the birds” (The New Times, November 4). Your description of Filip Reyntjens and the France24 is only fair; this professor has a pathological hatred for our country and government to the extent that he now sees everything to do with Rwanda in a negative sense. So many credible international organizations have given Rwanda the rating in various areas of development very respectable performance that are well researched, but Prof Reyntjens cannot believe our institute of statistics does even exist or is comprised of credible professionals that are not expired. He cannot believe Rwandans can even do that job. The other day during the Pan-African Trade Union conference, virtually every member present were saying that Rwanda is another miracle economy and they came from 22 different countries including some from Belgium, Sweden, and Brazil while others were mainly from Africa—and they all commended what Rwanda did as worthy emulating by other countries. So Prof Reyntjens is only negatively obsessed against Rwanda. Karemera *********** The vacuity of what France24 wants to push is reinforced by the fact they feel the need to wheel this desiccated old Habyarimana crony out of the attic to bolster their case. Only in the West—with its ingrained prejudices about Africa and Africans—would someone who doesn’t know has seen nothing first-hand of today’s Rwanda, continue to be referred to as a Rwanda expert. Come to think of it, and as a general observation, the citation of non-Africans as authorities on developments or the history of various African countries or polities smacks of an attempt to continue to impose foreign views of our history and present as the official reality. We must refuse such foreign impositions of our history and our present reality. No, neither Speke nor Burton discovered what, in their conceit, they called Lake Victoria. The locals knew and had known that body of water from antiquity and called it by various local names, among just a few, “Nalubaale” or “Ukerewe”. And, no, neither the German Count von Gotzen nor any European discovered, let alone, founded Rwanda. This ancient state existed within much larger borders than currently, long before the colonists erupted in our midst and proceeded to subjugate us, turn us against each other and, finally, to pauperize us, all that to their own benefit. It’s time for us Africans to put a stop to being these people’s playthings. They are only able to do it because too many of us are complicit in their games, and have always been, including in our own enslavement and colonization (a form of mass enslavement of entire societies without the trouble of having to transport them from their native lands). And finally, only visitors from outer space would give any credence to what any French media organ has to say about Rwanda. Mwene Kalinda

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Deliberate lies won't change Rwanda's role model status