Editor, RE: “Africans need to work hard to develop their continent” (The New Times, May 17). At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter how others try to rationalize to themselves how we Rwandans could extricate ourselves from the deep void in which we had dug ourselves just 22 years ago and move resolutely forward while they themselves stagnate or, even worse, slide backwards on the development journey. What matters is for Rwandans to understand that we cannot afford to let our effort flag; that we must remain focused on working harder and smart to put even greater distance between us and the edge of the abyss from which we have crawled by dint of our efforts and the vision of those who led us out of there. Success always attracts as much admiration and would-be emulators as well as envy and denigrators, almost in equal measure. If our efforts and achievements, modest as they still are, provide an inspiration to fellow Africans who are then able to mobilise the same focused energies to improve their own prospects and even surpass our success, that will represent an additional reward. If there are those who are unable to grasp that whatever progress we have notched up over the last two decades is fully attributable to a visionary leadership and continuous sweat of a mobilised people but want instead to find facile and false explanations revolving around alleged Congolese resources or generous support from “donors suffering from guilt for not having prevented or stopped the Genocide against the Tutsi”, as some love to bandy about, there is little we can do about it but let them wallow in their delirium and simply continue to focus on those things we control and on which we have been acting. As President Paul Kagame aptly observed at the ‘Meet the Leader Session’ at the WEF last week in response to a question as to how Rwanda manages to keep its capital so clean, does cleaning your home also require donor support?! Rwanda is succeeding mainly because its leadership has been able to mobilise us around a few critical choices related to reconciliation, unity, security and a determined anti-corruption stance to ensure very little public resources are diverted to private pockets. It has then built on successes and achievements in these areas to ensure that the little we receive from external partners or from our own internal resources go as far as possible, limiting wastage to the very minimum possible. Many of our fellow Africans are much better endowed than us with natural resources and even strategic locations on the continent. But until they make progress in the same basic areas as Rwanda has done, progress on the wider development front will continue to elude them, making them prone to persistent social conflicts that always arise from winner-take-all competition for control of state machineries as only such control gives access to resources needed to prosper while the losers can barely survive. And then those conflicts are used by racists and others with historical prejudices as confirmation about Africans’ so-called atavistic nature. Mwene Kalinda
