Recent data on poverty reduction clarifies the political debate on Rwanda

The recently published figures on the progress made in the development of the country, brings some clarity on the economic and political debate on Rwanda. In regard with poverty reduction speed, after lifting one million people out of poverty in only five years, Rwanda finds itself in the league of no other African country but Mauritius and East Asian countries. Although the nation still has a long way to go before becoming a middle income country, impressive progress has been made, both on social and economic issues. This progress is fast and accelerating, gathering momentum for substantial socioeconomic transformation: e.g fertility rate fell from 6.1 to 4.6 in five years; primary universal education was almost attained and access to secondary education doubled. This evolution is being made against the direst of conditions and arguably the lowest of starting points. Consider a backward country coming out of the most radical genocide, severely landlocked, overpopulated, with 90% of the population made up of illiterate subsistence farmers whose livelihoods had collapsed and who suffered from severe and constant hunger.When assessing post genocide reconstruction, people often make the mistake of believing that what needed to be reconstructed was only the consequences of destruction caused by 1990 civil war and the by 1994 Genocide. Rwanda already was a socioeconomic failed state before 1990, ranking at the bottom of the world on key indicators as shown by Human Development Reports. In 1988, on average Rwandans had only 79% of the required daily calorie intake, ranking fifth from the bottom of the global report. In 1989 only 28% of the population had access to health care, ranking fourth again from the bottom of the pile. The newly published data show that the poorest categories of the population are the ones benefitting the most from these dynamics of poverty reduction. Some critics, ignoring the fact that big cities all over the world play the role of economic catalysts for their entire country, were singling out the difference of development between Kigali and the rest of the country. This time they should be happy, for among the top five districts with less than 30% of their population living under the poverty line , two are from the North with Musanze coming third before the Gasabo district in Kigali and just after Kicukiro and Nyarugenge both also in Kigali. A number of critics of the government of Rwanda do acknowledge that socioeconomic progress is being made but in the same breath add that it is at the expense of political and civic liberties. Denouncing constitutional provisions fostering political cooperation and consensus building rather than confrontation and condemning cases of sanctioning of journalists and politicians violating the law, some of these critics go as far as denying state legitimacy in Rwanda. This claim of political legitimacy deficit ignores the fact that political unanimity exists nowhere and fails to provide any evidence for their claim which, to be valid, should involve more than a handful of isolated so-called political opponents. A group of scholars and activists, mostly Americans and Belgians nostalgic of the old Rwanda, systematically dismisses facts pertaining the socioeconomics evolution of the country to promote their intellectual lifeline: the oppressive inequality in Rwanda. This group gives academic credibility to the claim of political illegitimacy in Rwanda and seems to have managed to mislead some supposedly more detached analysts like those from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in their report “Risks to Stability”. By doing so, these critics dismiss an extensive body of evidence to the contrary view. Among others: the 2010 re-election of President Kagame with 93% of the vote and 97% of participation. But also for example the Gallup Poll report of 2010 showing that 92.6% of the population believe that the society is meritocratic; that 56% of Rwandans are satisfied with their country’s efforts to address poverty, “an extremely high rate” according to Gallup; and that confidence in the military and the judiciary stands at 98% and 84% respectively. In the same vein, we could also add that ,out of 3.5M refugees 1994, only between 70.000 and 100.000 still remain out-of-country and that many of them contribute to the remittances from the Diaspora that reached a staggering $166M in 2011.Beside the advancements made in the sociopolitical reunification of the country, in the absence of recent data on poverty reduction and inequality, one could intuitively explain the strong support for the government’s actions with the socioeconomic progress the country was experiencing. Nevertheless, uncertainty about how significant and shared this progress was remained. Considering where Rwandans came from, the dynamics of rapid improvement of the living conditions of the vast majority of Rwandans inferred by the recently released data gives further credibility to these various accounts of strong popular support. The author is an advisor in the Office of the President