 Kayumba raised a number of legitimate issues like the perpetual flight of political dissenters from Rwanda. But he trivialized many others like Kagame’s stance on corruption. I felt sympathy for his claim that Kagame demeaned him and Patrick Karegyeya by calling them useless. I think Kagame made these comments out of anger rather than because he meant them. These officers served Rwanda under him for many years. If they were useless, it would mean Kagame has poor judgment of individual competence. I know Kagame to be a results-oriented leader who does not brook incompetence and/or corruption. Therefore they must have been competent and honest public servants who contributed significantly to the liberation and reconstruction of Rwanda. They may have made mistakes later, but that does not take away their initial contribution. It is a common human weakness that when someone falls out of favor, people want to erase their contribution. I hope Kagame will avoid this temptation. Many people were excited by the allegations Kayumba made against Kagame personally. But they were largely false, like the insinuation that Kagame owns executive jets in South Africa. The RPF holding company, Tri Star through a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) owns shares in the South African Company that runs an executive jets renting service. The SPV also owns two executive jets and leases them to the same company. The RPF government has never bought an executive jet for the nation’s president. So whenever Kagame is travelling, the government rents a plane for him. Because of the RPF investment in the South African Company, the Rwanda government gets a 50% discount on the price. Although there may be a conflict of interest here, RPF actually subsidizes the government on Kagame’s travel costs. Indeed, it is on the issue of corruption and Kagame’s personal integrity that I felt Kayumba missed an opportunity to project national leadership in the sphere of thought. There is no doubt that Kagame has one million personal weaknesses. But both friends and foes would agree that he has demonstration an extraordinary determination in fighting corruption unseen in Africa since Nigeria’s Gen. Murtala Mohammed attempted it in 1975. Sadly, Mohammed was killed on the 176th day of his presidency. Kayumba has always been presented to me by his admirers as an accomplished officer, an intellectual and an alternative to Kagame. I therefore approached his letter with anticipation as a testimony of a national leader, not an insignificant lieutenant. I may have placed my expectations too high, which would make this assessment of him is unfair. Kayumba comes across in his letter as a self-indulgent person concerned with himself rather than his country. For example, he began by saying: “When I left Rwanda, my intention was to reunite my family, start a new life. Forget politics, the military and diplomacy… I thought I would go into academics, consultancy or something different and actually take a lasting holiday from President Kagame… Unfortunately, this was not to be. My name is always in the media for all wrong reasons.” He then proceeds to argue that Kagame has personalized the state in Rwanda; that the objectives of the RPF revolution he fought for have been betrayed and that the country is now in peril. Yet his response to this national crisis is to not a vision of how to make Rwanda better. He just wants to “forget politics”, go into personal things like consultancy and academia and “take a lasting holiday from Kagame.” He was responding, not because of the suffering of millions of his fellow citizens, but because his name (sic) has been “in the media for all the wrong reasons”. This inflated sense of self gets worse when he continuously equates his personal misfortune to Rwanda’s destiny. For instance, he presents his flight to exile as a sign that Rwanda has not changed since the days of Juvenal Habyarimana. Yet the flight of senior politicians and army officers into exile (Seth Sendashonga, Faustine Twagiramungu, Emmanuel Habyarimana, Alphonse Furuma, Pierre Rwigyema, Alex Rezinde etc.) has been a worrying feature of Rwanda’s political life under the RPF even when Kayumba was Chief of Staff and later in charge of the National Security Services. If this phenomenon shows that RPF is despotic, why didn’t Kayumba resign in protest in the 1990s? Does it become so when he is personally affected by it? Possibly this practice has more complex origins. I was pleased with Kagame’s answer when he expressed puzzlement about its prevalence. I like leaders who express doubt and I fear those who think they know everything about social phenomena. In expressing doubt, Kagame showed his openness to alternative views. Yet Kayumba mocks this accusing him of being out of touch with Rwanda’s history. This is partly because Kayumba equates the Tutsi exodus of the late 1950s and early 1960s to his own flight. He had a political quarrel with his peers most likely as a result of an internal power struggle; that is why he ran away. To equate this to the flight of Kagame’s parents is absurd. What had poor Tutsi peasants who had never even thought of politics done to be sent to exile indefinitely? Surely, there must be a difference between a government that forces a few individuals to exile due to political differences (even though I think is a bad thing) and one that exiles an entire ethnic group and refuses them the right to citizenship for 30 years. Although Kayumba accuses Kagame of demeaning his colleagues, he proceeds to do exactly the same thing – this time on a larger scale. He refers to senior RPF leaders and RDF officers who called him to discuss his personal conduct as “opportunists” and “sycophants” whom he “despises” and “holds in contempt” and the meeting with them as “despicable.” It seems to me that when people are angry they express themselves rather strongly. If Kayumba could not hide his anger in a written response (where he had time to reflect), how about Kagame who was making extempore remarks at a press conference? Among those who talked to Kayumba is Tito Rutaremara (Rwanda’s ombudsman and a highly regarded elder), Gen. James Kabarebe (minister of Defense), Maj. Gen. Frank Mugambagye (High Commissioner to Uganda), Francois Ngarambe (RPF Secretary General) and James Musoni (minister of local government), Emmanuel Gasana (Commissioner General of Police) and Brig. Jack Nziiza (permanent Secretary Ministry of Defence). That he does not see value in the opinions of these senior colleagues, however strongly he disagrees with them, speaks volumes. More critically, by looking at the destiny of Rwanda only through his personal experience, Kayumba ignores the fundamental reforms that have taken place in his country over the last 16 years many of which he contributed to. Any political scientist would predict high levels of corruption and arbitrariness in Rwanda. This is because the institutional and societal checks against how Kagame personally exercises power are grossly underdeveloped. This reality has little to do with what Kagame has done. It has almost everything to do with the structure of Rwandan society – a large peasant population, a small private sector, weak state institutions, a small educated middleclass and a genocide that destroyed other centers of power. Yet Kagame’s Rwanda puzzles many; there is strict accountability of institutions and individuals. Even those who hate him would be impressed at how much Kagame has instilled a sense of accountability in the social consciousness of Rwanda’s public servants. And accountability in Rwanda is not simply about not stealing public funds; it involves performance by public servants against clearly laid out objectives. For example, a teacher in a public school or a nurse or doctor in a public hospital has to report on duty on time, is required to serve the citizen diligently and with respect: So the rights of patients are pinned on every wall in the corridors and wards of every public hospital in Rwanda; absenteeism, foot-dragging and false compliance that characterize most bureaucratic practice across sub Sahara Africa have been significantly curtailed. Kagame’s personal role in this reconfiguration of public institutions is a shining example for many Africans and non Africans across the globe. Kayumba trivializes this as demagoguery and playing to the public gallery. I found this unfair and also an insult to many Rwandans who have made extraordinary effort to build this institutional culture. In spite of his weaknesses as a person, even those who hate him would agree that Kagame has demonstrated a strong personal commitment to build a state that serves the citizen. Since 2003 Rwanda has been reconstructing the internal organization of the state in a process unseen in Africa before; building a public sector that espouses a collective vision, has a strong esprit de corp and a government that serves the people. It has also reconstructed state-society relations by initiating a transition of its people from being clients to becoming citizens enjoying equal treatment under the law. The transformational value of these reforms gets lost because our understanding of democracy in Africa is very superficial. Most debate tends to focus on the procedures of democracy rather than its substance; elections, party competition, number of newspapers etc. Though important, these aspects of democracy work only when undergirded by the kind of state that we do not see in most of Africa but we see evolving in Rwanda. In the absence of such a state, these aspects of democracy produce gangster politics that is now the hallmark of politics in Africa, especially in Uganda. It is true Rwanda under RPF has been bedeviled by major setbacks – like limited expansion of press freedom, persistent flight of political dissidents to exile and like all nations, it has its political intrigues as well. However, what Rwandans have achieved under the RPF, especially given the inherited constraints in that country is nothing short of miracle. Therefore, people do not rate the performance of RPF and Kagame as excellent because they think they are angels; it is by situating their achievements in the specificity of Rwanda’s context. I am sure that Kayumba was a major player in this great transformation. Equally, Karegyeya played a central role in building the foreign policy architecture of post genocide Rwanda. They did so because of the organisational strength of the RPF. So, they share alongside many others in its achievements and failures. Yet Kayumba wants credit for the achievements and apportions all blame for failures on Kagame. It would be unfair to deny Kagame’s personal contribution without which it is inconceivable that RPF would have won the war and registered the achievements it has. Kagame, like Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela or even Yoweri Museveni demonstrates the role of individuals in the destiny of nations. His achievements have been realized within the limits imposed on him by Rwanda’s circumstances and his own personal limitations as a human being. It is possible that the accusations for which Kayumba has been forced to leave his country were based on a misunderstanding of his intentions and actions. But he should not judge Rwanda only through his personal experience. There are many Rwandans who have been jailed for months or years on the basis of unfounded accusations. When Kagame calls for an investigation into a corrupt deal, some of his lieutenants, hungry to please him grab even innocent bystanders and throw them in jail. While I appreciate the personal pain, I also do recognize that the war against corruption cannot be fought without collateral damage, especially because of weak institutional capacity. Even for Kayumba, there must be people he sent to jail while in positions of responsibility who may have been as innocent as he thinks he is today. This is because leadership involves making many and difficult tradeoffs. If he did not reduce the history of the RPF and Rwanda to his personal misfortune, Kayumba would easily appreciate the complexity of Kagame’s dilemma. I hope from his exile, he gets time to reflect so that he can tell the story of Rwanda as a country facing the challenge of nation building and where Kayumba is not the whole but only a part of that story.
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