Last Tuesday I was on my way to one of President Kagame’s campaign rallies, this one scheduled for Kirehe in Eastern Province. I reached the designated place, where we were to catch the media bus to the venue, only to be told it had just left. I called the coordinator of our media team, asking where they had reached. It wasn’t very far, he said, and we agreed they would wait for me at the busy Giporoso junction. I drove there as fast as I could (keeping within the speed limits though, otherwise goodness knows how many fines I would’ve collected). About a quarter of an hour later I was at Giporoso, spotting the bus waiting for me next to a little mosque. I had no time to find a proper parking place so I left the car in the first space by the roadside, where I saw it would be safely out of the way of other traffic, jumped out, locked it and hurriedly went to join the others. This is something I wouldn’t have dared do not very long ago. No one left a vehicle unguarded in a public space like that, because barely a few minutes later the owner would walk back to find the side mirrors gone, the blinker lights gone, and anything else that petty thieves could pry from it. If one were to leave their car for pretty much the whole day, like I did, well, they probably would find the headlamps and tires gone too. But this is Rwanda, and things always are evolving, for the better. Even in our biggest city, in a place like Giporoso, a junction teeming with humanity, including some of the hungrier elements of our society, I never worried that any harm would befall the car. It seems a simple thing to report on, yet it is something quite significant. It is an incident reflective of how well the Kagame administration runs the country, and we take for granted things that most people elsewhere only dream of. In Rwanda we are truly spoiled because the good has become so completely ordinary we hardly notice it. We take it for granted that when we get home power will be on (something that only those that have known what it is to live with no electricity or with lengthy power cuts truly appreciate). Yes, power cuts occasionally do happen in Rwanda but usually it will be ten minutes max, before its back. One phone call to REG usually does the trick. We take it for granted that a soldier, or a policeman actually is your friend and there is no reason to be wary of them. In this society we understand that a soldier is your shield against any and all forms of insecurity, while a policeman is a disciplined individual that will reliably answer your call when in distress. Now, only those of us old enough to have lived in neighboring countries (in the years of exile) appreciate the true miracle of seeing a soldier, or a bunch of troops, and experiencing not the slightest fear or worry they might be up to no good. Only a person that’s known what it is to scramble away in terror at the sight of a fellow in military fatigues will appreciate the miracle that Kagame has wrought in Rwanda. I swear one time in our years of exile I saw a bunch of grown men scattering away at the sight of a military jeep, with one locking himself in an outhouse, above a pit latrine. Citizens of Rwanda during the Habyarimana years lived in abject fear of soldiers and the gendarme, because these had the power of life and death over any one, except maybe their tribesmen from Habyarimana’s and his wife’s home regions. In those years, a soldier was known primarily as someone that meted out violence on anyone as they pleased, and doing extra-judicial murder as their bosses willed it. Senior soldiers ran extortion, or protection rackets, putting the squeeze on targeted business people, who paid them a cut of their profits to be able to work. Things like these now are like a bad, distant dream. The miracle of the Kagame, and RPF-Inkotanyi years moreover extends into all spheres of life, with a modernizing government implementing policies that’ve eased the daily transactions of life in ways scarcely imaginable before. Honestly, I know of no other place where a citizen – seated in their house and working on an internet-connected computer – can apply for a passport, download the required documents (ID, marriage certificate et cetera), and seven days later get an sms message from immigration authorities informing them their passport is ready. Now, those that don’t know Rwanda would be forgiven for thinking such a thing can only happen with very high-profile people! Well, someone as humble as a fruit vendor in Musanze can do it. In a country where, pre-1994, a Rwandan had to ask their local authorities for permission to travel out of their home district (commune), this is nothing short of an 180 degree turn in their life circumstances. Someone during this campaign period summed things up this way: you would be out of their mind to think of substituting a government that performs like this with any other! When we got back from the Tuesday campaign event at Kirehe, sure enough there wasn’t even a scratch on my car where I had left it. We are truly spoiled, I reminded myself of that going away.
