Sneakers in Rwanda

 04 September 2017, 20:33 / Politics / Interview

"Is there a democracy without the word" western "at the beginning?"

Rwandan President Paul Kagame is a Tutsi survivor of an ethnic minority genocide in which one in five people died, a former refugee and a rebel. Over the 17 years of his reign, GDP has grown almost fivefold, and life expectancy has grown by 18 years, but the president fundamentally does not accept "stereotyped democracy"

Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda / Pascal Lauener / REUTERS

Paul Kagame, the soldier president of Rwanda, runs arguably the most organized and disciplined society in Africa. The flower beds are immaculate, the villages wear shoes (a special decree was issued for this), and local officials go out of their way to achieve their goals, whether it is to increase cassava yields or reduce deaths during childbirth. But while the system seems to run like clockwork, and the development plan - one of the most ambitious on the continent - is carefully thought out, Kagame cannot forget the chaos and violence.

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A Ugandan Indian, Ashish Thakkar, who started his business at the age of 15 with the sale of computer components, built a diversified holding Mara Group and attracted solid partners willing to invest in Africa. But at the divorce proceedings in London, Thakkar claimed a fortune of less than $ 600,000

Kagame himself is a Tutsi. He grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, where his parents fled from a previous Tutsi pogrom. Kagame received his political education in the bush - first as a soldier in the Ugandan civil war, then, in 1990, leading the remnants of the rebel forces in Rwanda. For over a year he hid in the impenetrable mountains of Virunga and learned to come up with a strategy in which there are no obvious moves.

It is this mix of planning and improvisation that underlies what is arguably the most daring experiment in nation-building and social engineering in Africa. And it bears tangible results. But opinions about him diverge sharply outside Rwanda, and sometimes within the country itself, although open dissent is rare here.

“This is not to say that we developed or grew under normal conditions,” Kagame says with restraint during a three-hour interview ahead of his inauguration for his third presidential term. We meet in the presidential mansion, which was once a prestigious hotel before the genocide. President - has a fragile physique, but indisputable authority. Although he speaks a little louder than a whisper, every word fills the space with weight.

 BB.

State in Central Africa

Area - 26 338 sq. km

Population (2016) - 11.9 million people

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