Rwanda will not be hindered by detractors

A few days ago, my sibling chose to close his eyes to the reality around us and regurgitated what I had only seen before in the writings of misguided and uninformed foreigners or disgraced and dishonest former Rwandan officials, who failed to live up to the principles they helped found. He deliberately timed his unoriginal missive to the anniversary of the launch of RPF’s liberation struggle. In a series of articles, he tried hard to paint Rwanda as a country going down the wrong path. He got the attention he desperately craved, but his arguments and conclusions were as disconnected from reality as one could possibly get.I come from a family that is deeply committed to our country. Even when we lived as refugees in different countries around the world, Rwanda was kept alive in our hearts and minds. Having moved back when still in primary school, it was clear that though we were finally home, there was a lot of work to be done to make this country be one that all Rwandans could look up to. We looked to the RPF for leadership back then to take Rwanda out of the deep dark hole and build it into a country we were proud to call our own and we still do so now. Over the years, there has been no doubt in our minds that Rwanda would achieve its goals and become successful. It is obvious to any reasonable person that our optimism was well-founded. Rwanda has become a success story founded on a strong social, economic and moral foundation. Laying this out in more detail could turn this article into a double-page spread, so let me refrain from doing so. Suffice to say, the media (including quite often the foreign media) have covered the achievements the country has made in exhaustive detail and there is little excuse for anyone-especially a Rwandan- to be ignorant of those facts. It is fairly obvious that the government has delivered- from health to education to poverty and everything else along that spectrum. Furthermore, it has done so with a keen moral clarity.If Rwanda were perfect, we would all sit back and bask in the sunshine. Challenges remain as they do for every other country on the planet. However there is a reason those of us who want the best for ourselves and our country wake up every day to busy work schedules, family obligations and social demands. We do this because we believe in the ideals that the RPF fought for and that the Government is currently upholding. We have no intention of letting up because we know how far these principles have brought us and we have seen the very tangible difference in the lives of Rwandans in the last eighteen years. We believe this is the very path we have to take to reach the success which many who died during the struggle bequeathed us, and we have been proved right.It is clear that not all are up to this task. For those who choose to blind themselves to the good that is happening every day in Rwanda, and ignore how we have built systems to correct what is going badly - I have only pity. Some people might chose attention seeking self-indulgence in place of constructive debate, but Rwanda will not be hindered by those people.