By Estella Jones
The people of Rwanda are demanding that the Constitution be amended to allow President Paul Kagame stand again in 2017.
It is easy to find this demand on the streets of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. But you will also find opposition, albeit in hushed tones.
The debate is raging. The person whom it concerns the most, Kagame, insists the debate must go on. Part of the debate has turned on the very prohibitive wording of Article 101: “…Under no circumstances shall a person hold the Office of the President of the Republic for more than two terms.”
Recently, more than 3.5 million signatures were presented to parliament, which last week voted overwhelmingly to start the process of amending the Constitution. It’s quite evident that only one outcome is likely – article 101 will be deleted or changed to read differently.
Other than a complete deletion of the two-term limit provision, one option being floated is to insert a clause providing for a referendum on a third term for a specific leader. One way or the other, it is a foregone conclusion. Here is why.
On Wednesday, I interviewed the chairman of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), also minister for natural resources, Dr Vincent Biruta. This ministry, like most government offices in Kigali, is housed in a plush building with a corporate outlook and clear signs of an evidently-functional public body, unlike the filth and neglect that attends government offices in many African countries.
I told Minister Biruta that it was rather strange for his party, supposedly the main opposition political party, to endorse the process of removing term limits so Kagame stands again yet they can’t beat him in an election.
“It’s the people, not us the leaders,” he reasoned. He continued: “they believe that they cannot as yet trust another leader other than Kagame. He has been such a high-performing president and the people want him to continue.”
I reminded Dr Biruta that the mark of leadership is the courage to stand above the wishes and sentiments of the masses. If masses were the ones to always dictate what should be done, then the very notion of leadership would lose meaning.
At any rate, I added, he, as the leader of the second largest party, should be pushing for alternative leadership and a culture of sustainability and continuity, instead of putting all hopes in one mortal being.
President Kagame finds himself in a very precarious situation. He is a man known to rigidly stick to his beliefs and principles. Will he hold out or will he succumb to the “demands of the people?” He has been on record for making two very important statements.
First, that he would not seek another term after serving the two constitutional ones. Second, that it is not true that no one else is capable enough to take over from him; and if it were true then, that would mean he, as a leader, has failed and should for that very reason step down.
Sources close to him say he regrets not taking the issue of succession seriously and not preparing ahead of time. Now 2017 is in sight and Kagame finds that, even without the popular demand for him to stay, he is not quite ready to relinquish power.
His controversial involvement in the Congo, coupled with some internal dynamics, make it risky for him to leave power without sufficient guarantees that he will not end up somewhere in detention as happened last month to his chief of intelligence, General Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, arrested and still held in London.
Kagame’s Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) was birthed and groomed in Uganda. Its affable and highly-regarded founding leader, the late Major General Fred Rwigyema, was Uganda’s deputy army commander. Rwigyema’s RPF successor, then Major Paul Kagame, was a senior Ugandan intelligence officer in what was then called Directorate of Military Intelligence, headed by the then Colonel Mugisha Muntu.
It is possible that at the time Rwigyema and his compatriots launched their struggle to return home, on October 1, 1990, they were seeing glimpses of the rot that the NRM government eventually fully became.
When Museveni’s misrule shot through the roof in the late 1990s, with glaring scandals of malfeasance in the privatization of state corporations, shoddy deals in military procurements and ghost soldiers, Kagame must have watched keenly.
As president of Rwanda, he had a perfect living example of a government next door, and one grossly mismanaged by his politico-military mentor, with clear lessons on how not to run a government. He had to strive to be different. Today, Rwanda has achieved what Uganda can’t realize under the decadent regime of General Museveni, notwithstanding Kagame’s much-talked-about poor record on civil liberties and individual freedoms.
Now enter the term limits debate. Perhaps again committed to being different from Uganda, at the time Museveni was manipulating the constitutional amendment process in 2003-5, including bribing MPs to remove term limits, Rwanda was promulgating a new Constitution with an article stating unequivocally: “under no circumstance shall a person…”
General Museveni must be keeping his fingers crossed that General Kagame yields to the “demands of the people!”
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