2020 will be hard to forget much as many may wish to. As a country, it was supposed to be a great year, at least on paper. It was in 2020 that the country was to host its biggest conferences ever, attract the biggest number of tourists ever and launch the Kigali International Financial Centre among other grand steps. The year was expected to be characterized by the economic growth witnessed in the last decade or so which has continued to attract local, regional, and global investments. As fate and Covid-19 would have it, things took a different turn, boy did they. What started off as distant news of a City in China few had heard about fast became an everyday reality which also influenced our vocabulary. It’s laughable that in the initial days, it was thought that Africans were immune to the pandemic due to their melanin. Words like ‘isolation’, ‘sanitizer,’ ‘social distancing’ fast became a common feature in day to day conversations. Measures that most thought to be impossible such as lockdowns and reduced personnel in offices came to be as did the closure of borders. 9 months after the first case was reported, the country and the world have been through days that could only have been imagined in fictional books. For the first time, places of worship were physically closed and turned to online platforms and so did education services. Curbing the spread of the virus became the key priority which to some extent saw economic activity contract. In later months, efforts to turn around the economy have been rolled out including the Economic Recovery Fund. Despite a turbulent and unpredictable year, we all made it through. Despite the tough and unfamiliar times, all was not lost. There were a few wins including the capture of a top genocide fugitive and a terror group financier. The country also did not waste the pandemic as the lockdown period was used to make adjustments such as increasing the number of classrooms as well as teacher vetting and recruitment. A majority of meetings and summits scheduled for 2020 were not cancelled but transferred to 2021. In the true spirit of not wasting a crisis, the country also made advances in aspects such as cashless payments, e-commerce, and virtual forums among others. 2020 may have been a tough year, but we are still here and hopefully better for the lessons learnt. May 2021 be kind.
