In my last piece in this space I wrote that for us to find true sustainable peace and stability in the face of belligerent neighbours like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda has to become an economic, technological and industrial powerhouse in the region. That’s because any country that overcomes extreme poverty to attain objectives like these becomes invaluable, to other nations, in the arena of international politics. It becomes a desirable ally for most countries whose private sectors look to do business in whatever neighbourhood that country is located. And, in our case, a country whose hostile neighbours will be far less inclined to antagonise, either with uncouth rhetoric of desires to militarily attack it, or actually attempt actual invasions. Of course the Rwandan military has shown its more than capable of repelling Congolese military adventurism, involving incidents like firing shells across the border into our territory, or Congolese fighter jets violating Rwandan airspace. The issue is that this kind of thing isn’t ending soon, with Congolese rulers likely to maintain their hostile, anti-Rwanda stance into the foreseeable future. They most likely will do their best to drag us into war, building their case with the usual propaganda and lies, their strategy being to gang up against Rwanda with a coalition of actors including Burundi, the Congo-based genocidal Rwandan militia FDLR which has outsize influence in the Congolese army, as well as groups of self-exiled Rwandans with negative agendas, such as the RNC. The unholy alliance is hellbent on destabilizing Rwanda, wreaking havoc, bringing back civil strife and genocide. Hence (much as there isn’t any way they can succeed the way things are in Rwanda right now), our best bet to end this threat for good is to transform into a Rwanda that is economically, industrially, and technologically dominant, to complement a powerful military. We simply have no other choice. The good news is that this administration has set Rwanda on the correct path. It devised plans and strategies, first to get us from extreme poverty to middle-income status, after which Rwanda would make the leap, to become something similar to a “Tiger” economy. That is, emulate the Asian states that a mere generation ago were highly impoverished “Third World” states that went on to become economic powers after building their industrial, and manufacturing bases. The big question is, how would Rwanda break the mold, to become an “African tiger”? In my view, we would need a combination of cultural shifts and mindset changes of revolutionary proportions, in the way we do things as a society. You see, there is so much a government, such as Rwanda’s, can do to build the foundation on which to achieve development, but if its human resource base isn’t up to the task, development will remain a pipe dream. If for instance a society’s labour force – the civil servants that make the public sector function, the workers that make private enterprise tick – is composed of people with cavalier attitudes to work, it will remain poor forever. We can talk all we want about the malign influence of foreigners overseas as the reason why sub-Sahara is mired in poverty, and has been forever. We can talk all we want about how evil imperialists have cheated us time immemorial, hindered our prospects of development at every turn, and so on. What we rarely ask ourselves is how much we hinder ourselves by the way we do things. It’s been for instance long commented upon that in Africa people are notoriously unable to be punctual. People arrive late at their workplaces. They arrive late at meetings. They won’t keep time when invited to inter-office functions. And they do all this as if it all is an innocent thing. When they are at work, they proceed to engage in much time-wasting activity, gossip, chat away on their phones on matters completely unrelated to work, things like that. Other people elsewhere too may fail to keep time, but to them that isn’t something “innocent”. It is a sin to be frowned upon, a bad practice that hinders productivity. Also, anyone will be deeply ashamed to be perceived to be wasting time. These two examples well illustrate the difference in cultural attitudes or mindsets that can lead to one place successfully growing their economy while another stagnates. There are a lot more examples of practices that, in addition to the bigger issues which dog the continent, that’s to say political instability, civil strife and conflict (and yes indeed the meddling of powerful economically developed states) keep sub-Saharan Africa down. We need to keep in mind that there are other societies that in the past have suffered brutal conquest and violent colonial subjugation, some for hundreds of years, but which were able to overcome that past and are now at a par with the richest, most powerful countries of the West. They were able to build their economies because their workforces were efficient, and laser focused on tasks at hand. I usually think how in so many of our societies people will abandon their workplaces, en masse, to go attend the burial ceremony for the grandparent of a colleague, and wonder about the total loss in productivity, if all events like this were tallied countrywide. However, when I look at Rwanda, I feel encouraged. The discipline that’s come about in public workplaces for instance, whereby wastage of time and public resources is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Strict accountability is becoming the norm, with bosses at workplaces becoming far more demanding, since these days they are actually answerable when they fail to deliver on what they were appointed for. These all are developments that need to be further built upon. If more of it is to happen, we can achieve truly big goals, and in the process build a much more secure future for ourselves.
