Truly, what did we ever do to deserve a neighbour like the Democratic Republic of Congo? It is a question any good Rwandan will often find themselves asking, with every item of news out of the Congo that stems from that country’s state of lawlessness, chaos, violence, and disorder. Any good Rwandan will find themselves appalled that DRC's rulers rather than devise internal ways to solve their problems, they choose to externalise them, with Rwanda being the perennial scapegoat. It is unconscionable that Rwanda finds itself in a constant battle to stave off the chaos and bedlam that the Kinshasa regime is bent on exporting here. It’s as if they look over their border and think: man, those Rwandans, who do they think they are? Let’s give them a dose of our own bedlam, we can’t bear to see them progress and develop! Thus, we see their ruler Tshisekedi integrate the FDLR genocidal militia – whose mission is to destabilize Rwanda and bring mass murder – into his national military, while loudly announcing plans to overthrow the government in Kigali. So our military goes in permanent standby mode, alert to neutralise the threat before it crosses the border into our territory. Tshisekedi’s troops, working with FDLR, target communities in the east for pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and all sorts of crimes against humanity. That results in a constant flow of refugees to neighbouring countries, including thousands into Rwanda. The government has no choice but to manage the situation the best ways it can, providing shelter, sustenance and other primary needs for the refugees. Congolese regime propagandists churn out propaganda to buttress the lie that their failures in fact aren’t their fault but Rwanda’s. And so, Rwanda constantly finds itself having to defend itself against the mis, and disinformation. Rwanda invites observers to come to the borders to verify, in person, who the real culprits, say of violent cross-border incursions, are. Who fired their weapons across into the other’s territory. Whose unruly troops are looting, raping, killing civilians. Hint, it is the government responsible for all the carnage but which has the audacity to yell, Rwanda is aggressing us! But this world being what it is – i.e. a place where most powerful countries are motivated much more by what’s in their immediate material interests than truth, or justice, or any ideal like that – there hardly will be condemnation of Tshisekedi or his cabal. However much the truth stares everyone in the face, that Kinshasa is the true source of regional instability, and DRC a safe haven for all sorts of illegally armed militias, Islamic militants, and more cutthroat groups, there will be next to no criticism of DRC. On the contrary, the powerful will be ganging up with Kinshasa against Rwanda; and against the Congolese communities that are victim to their government’s campaigns of pogroms and genocide. That is the reality of the world. The cabal that rules the Congo has what the powerful want (we know what that is without going into too much detail) and that’s all that matters to them. Long story short, as long as this is the status quo, Rwanda will always be treading on eggshells. We will suffer gross acts of verbal provocation and worse, like cross border raids by unruly DRC troops into our border communities, but we’ll be obliged to manage it with minimum fuss and never escalate (well, as long as the neighbour from hell doesn’t escalate to frontal military assaults against our defences). We will be abused, called all sorts of names by unhinged trolls in the pay of Patrick Muyaya (close Tshisekedi henchman and spokesperson), who will be trotting the globe smearing the Rwandan leadership and tarnishing the country as a whole. As usual Rwanda will have to take it diplomatically, and not retaliate in kind. We will have to watch as Tshisekedi consorts with terrorist groups that want our death, and sponsor every party in the world that wants to badmouth Rwanda, its leadership, its achievements, its work in any sphere of human endeavour (think some American sports publication smearing Rwanda for initiating the Basketball Africa League!). Rwanda will have to take it all with equanimity. Bottom line however is, whatever we do to avoid problems with this unstable neighbour and its unhinged rulers, it will be a serious threat to our security and stability, into the foreseeable future. The only hope we have of mitigating the dangers is for Rwanda to continue, steadily on its upward trajectory of economic development. We can never afford to regress in any way, but have to transform into an economic, technological, and industrial powerhouse in the region. It is a truism that the more prosperous or rich a society is, the more technologically and industrially advanced it is, the less enemies it will have. Even those it has will be more wary of engaging in acts of hostility against it. One of the great dividends of development to a society is more security and stability. To its credit, the administration in Kigali’s always been aware of this, and has tirelessly worked on policies that will push Rwanda to attaining the goal, first of becoming a middle-income state, and later an industrialised one. It’s been laying the foundations for that, first achieving security and stability, building the social infrastructure, and is slowly turning the country into an attractive destination for foreign direct investment. Even then, the government alone will not get us to the desired status as an economic powerhouse. It is up to everyone, you and me – the individual civil servants that make the public sector function; the employees or staff of private sector businesses, from the big publicly traded firms to the smallest shops in the trading centers; the professionals in different fields – to pitch in, giving our best, in whatever our job or duty is. As Rwandans we must consider themselves lucky our government has done the heavy-lifting, putting in place the requisite conditions for economic transformation. We have the power lines, the good roads, piped water, the ease-of-doing-business, no red tape bureaucracies, much more. For the farmers, the miners, the manufacturers and more, the government has been busy finding export markets. Now it is up to us to become economic warriors, like citizens of the renowned Asian Tigers whose economic output the world came to depend on. We must understand that if others are walking, we can’t afford to do that. We must run! That is the mindset that the average Rwandan has to adopt.
