For the past one week, Rwanda Cooperatives’ Agency has been on a campaign to among others sensitise members on proper management of cooperatives and also impart basic management skills to the coops’ leaders, to ensure they properly serve their intended purpose. The cooperative movement has over the past decade or so, changed lives of hundreds of thousands of households in this country and has no doubt had a significant impact on the country’s economy. We have seen businesses worth hundreds of millions coming up through cooperatives; a case in point being the commercial complexes built in a Kigali suburb that was infamously known as Agakinjiro and which has rebranded to Agakiriro. Such tales go beyond Kigali, to even the remotest areas, where cooperatives have tremendously changed lives for the better. However, there is still a long way to go; much as people are sensitized to join these cooperatives because of the benefits that come with it, it is important that these cooperatives are properly managed, to ensure members’ hard-earned contributions are put to good use. Over the years, there have been stories of those entrusted by members to manage cooperatives instead turning them into personal property; using members’ savings for their selfish interests, leaving those members in the cold, despite the sacrifices they make to ensure they remit their contributions on time. We saw in 2016, members of Ferwacotamu – the federation of cooperatives that brings together over 25,000 taxi moto operators – petitioning parliament asking the House to probe what they called the gross mismanagement of their organization. Again, earlier this week, during the campaigns by RCA, members of the taxi-moto cooperatives raised similar complaints, while it was established that some of them may not have been keeping any books of account. All this must stop. Members should get the worth of their savings and managers must fully account to them and such errant managers should not just be fired; they must face the law in case their actions are found to have had a criminal element – like embezzlement. Equally, members must be sensitized to demand accountability from those they entrust to manage their cooperatives.
