The countries surrounding Africa’s Great Lakes are not known for their democratic credentials. So it was with some justification that eyebrows were raised on Tuesday when Paul Kagame and his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) romped home with an unbelievable 95% landslide victory in Rwanda’s first-ever, multiparty elections.
Free and fair? Surely only Egypt’s unrepentant election-rigger President Hosni Mubarak — with his predictable 99% — beats that one.
Ah, but why be so cynical? After all, this is the man who healed Rwanda’s deepest national wound and united a people in the shadow of a grotesque civil conflict that saw 800 000 of them butchered in less than 100 days.
This is the man who reminded the Banyarwanda that whether they were Tutsi or Hutu, they had better learn to live together on this tiny, mountainous scrap of land if they want to be able to live at all.
Thanks to Kagame, East Africa’s former bloodbath now enjoys peace and stability, near double-digit economic growth and better health and education services than it has had for decades. If Kagame is popular with the electorate, that might just be because of what he has already done to put Rwanda back on the road to recovery.
No one ever doubted that Kagame was going to clean up in this election. His evident advantage was the main reason why opponent Alivera Mukabaramba — a rather quiet figure and the campaign’s only woman candidate — chose to withdraw at the last minute and support the incumbent.
Throughout the campaign, his rallies have been bigger and better than his lesser-known and poorer rivals — packed with tumbling acrobats, catchy music and those endless RPF tricolours flags. His access to state media has, in spite of apparent provisions to share it equally, been more consistent and his use of it superior because of his better resources.
And nobody, not even the most disgruntled Hutu, really wanted to rock the boat this time. Kagame’s presidential deal-breaker is that he brought peace at a time when peace seemed impossible and that he took real steps to repair Rwanda’s ethnic rift. If nothing else, the ability of this Tutsi-dominated government to engender near total support from a population, 85% of whom are Hutu, is testimony to the progress in Hutu-Tutsi relations that Kagame has presided over.
Yet critics point out that Kagame’s zealous crusade against ethnic ”divisionism” has all too often been used as an excuse to stifle or intimidate his opponents. The new Rwanda Constitution, passed by referendum in May and depicted by the RPF as an effort to stop genocide ever happening again in Rwanda, gives sweeping powers to the state to curtail any assembly that it deems to be divisive or a threat to national security.
Making full use of these convenient new powers, Kagame immediately banned the Movement Democratique Republicain (MDR), a party traditionally supported by moderate Hutus, many of them also victims of the 1994 genocide for being Tutsi sympathisers, on the grounds that it was fostering ethnic hatred.
Kagame’s crusade didn’t stop there. On the eve of the poll, Rwanda’s ”strong man” arrested 12 ardent supporters of the only credible opposition candidate and one-time leader of the banned MDR party — Faustin Twagiramungu — for allegedly ”plotting acts of violence”. This was the culmination of weeks of threatening Twagiramungu and his supporters for being too pro-Hutu.
None of Kagame’s accusations hold water. Twagiramungu has always been a moderate Hutu and much of his time under Habyarimana’s Hutu extremist government was spent trying to undermine the Hutu stranglehold on power and introduce genuine multiparty democracy.
He repeatedly points out that he doesn’t even have the ethnic Hutu vote, since a lot of them blame him for changes that led to their fall from power. Needless to say Twagiramungu came away from Monday’s election rejecting the results on the grounds of fraud and intimidation — and not without reason.
What made it all the more regrettable that Kagame felt he had to use such unsavoury tactics was that he so obviously had this election sown up from the start. His iron-fisted intolerance of his opponents has raised the question whether the 46-year-old, who has been a soldier for most of his adult life, is really ready to have Rwanda returned to democratic, civilian rule.
Meanwhile, the European Union’s 70-odd election observers shipped in to monitor the poll said they were very impressed at how smoothly everything went, ”in a calm and orderly fashion”.
At the very least, then, Rwanda’s first democratic election since the genocide — a landmark along the country’s road to reconciliation — was a peaceful affair. That is progress.