In any relationship, a little rain must fall, even Romeo and Juliette, had the odd disagreement. So, it was bound to happen, that sooner or later, there would be a tiff between a Western commentator and Victoire Ingabire. But who broke protocal, to trigger this dissension among the anti Rwanda ranks, and is Ms Ingabire risking nipping at the hand that feeds her?
An unspoken mutually serving understanding, has long been established between Ingabire and Western Rwanda detractors. They support and amplify her posturing as a “prominent opposition,” champion of democracy and human rights, and in return, she parrots their anti Rwanda rhetoric, the objective of which is to undermine the country’s leadership, which with both she and they, regard as a barrier to their design for, or perhaps more apposite, against, rather than for the country.
Bemoaning his poor memory, French philosopher and essayist, Michel de Montaigne, comforted himself with the saving grace that at least, unlike the mendacious, he did not need to remember the order in which to put whatever he had to say, he simply needed to tell the truth.
The dissembler on other hand, needs must have a good memory, lest he or she trip themselves up. Ms Ingabire is in need of an excellent memory, especially when talking to Western media, commentators, diplomats and even some politicians, about her country of her birth.
She often gets carried away, in her excitement to tell Western detractors, exactly what she knows they want to hear. Warming to her theme recently, deriding Rwanda’s national reconstruction, she breathlessly informed her audience, how there were no roads outside Kigali. This despite the fact that one of the most notable achievements of the Rwanda government, has been the building of feeder roads, linking the nation to itself, in a way it has never been, among other advantages, enabling farmers to access markets for their produce.
Ingabire’s bizarre, outlandish claim, brought to mind one of her Western champions, American journalist and author, Anjan Sundaram, and his book, Bad News, supposedly on Rwanda, in reality more about an imagined country, which he hoped would be turned into a film, earn him a good payday, the truth be damned.
In the book, Sundaram who throughout, refers to Rwanda, as “The Repression” claims that ordinary citizens are not allowed to travel on the shiny new roads. No one seems to have informed these ordinary people, as without exception, they see the new roads as their roads.
There is the narrative that Ingabire and her Western champions weave about Rwanda, and then there is the real Rwanda. The two are never even within shouting distance. This however does not prevent us hearing more about of the former, and rarely if ever, about the latter.
On this occasion however, the normally harmonious dance between the “prominent” opposition figure, and her promoter, seems to have faltered. Who played the discordant note?
One of the many African “experts,” a Martin Duffy, writes in E-International Magazine, prominently featuring Ms Ingabire. He is, we are reliably informed, a veteran of many elections in Africa and Asia, and has been to several in Rwanda.
Presidential and parliamentary elections July 2024
He now tells us that President Kagame, was “ostentatiously elected for a fourth term…and was ceremoniously inaugurated to continue his rule.” The Rwanda of the narrative and the actual Rwanda, are thus estranged from each other, right from the start of the article. Any acknowledgement that Paul Kagame, who governs, rather than “rules” Rwanda, was overwhelmingly popularly elected for a fourth term, would not tally with that other Rwanda, of the Western narrative. The election was “ostantatious” Duffy explains, because “the polls were immediately criticised for disqualifying genunine opposition.” There are no prizes for guessing whom he regards as “genuine” opposition.
For Mr Duffy, as for all Western Rwanda detractors, all the other ten political parties in the country, are dismissed as of no consequence. This is clearly absurd, but it does in a way make perfect sense, if seen through the lens of Rwanda’s detractors.
Under a political arrangement, known by Rwandans, as the Politics of consensus, nine of these parties chose to endorse the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) candidate, who also happened to have been the incumbent. Duffy and others of his persuasion, would have to acknowledge that a combination of such a system, and a candidate with unrivalled popularity, can naturally lead to the outcome that we saw. But that would contradict the caricature of Rwanda, they would rather draw.
To vindicate and perpetuate the caricature, Duffy goes searching for “a motley crew of what might count as opposition, in the wake of this apparently unanimous victory.” The “motley crew” of opposition, of which he does not seem to have much regard, were, we are told, “angry,” and expressed their anger on condition of anonimity, naturally.
“We are worse than a dictatorship – this man does not even have any immediate succession plan and the only way he would ever be stopped is with a bullet – the same way he forced his way into power. Things have never been so far, and it breaks our hearts to know there is no hope” one is supposed to have said.
To be fair to Mr Duffy, it is not beyond the realm of the possible, that with a diligent search, he could have alighted upon someone who would evince such views. After all, there are still some Rwandans, who look back nostalgically to a Rwanda, where your worth was based not on your humanity, but your ethnicity.
Predictably, many of these would have been in positions of privilege, wielding power, sometimes the power of life and death over others, and most importantly for them, they had material advantage. Such Rwandans are however not easy to find, they hide in plain sight, and in spite of themselves, cannot help but acknowledge that they now live in a nation that values every Rwanda, even them.
Far from lack of hope, Rwandans, even the most disadvantaged overwhelmingly see their country as heading in the right direction, with almost all of them seeing the future as bright. But no doubt Duffy’s respondent was despairing of the hope of ever returning Rwanda to a past after which he nostalgically hankered.
To find someone with such a sentiment, Duffy, as with those who have come before him, and no doubt after him too, will have had to ignore the overwhelmingly prevailing opinion among Rwandans of all walks of life, until, like one falling upon the proverbial needle in a hystack, he found his anonymous respondent. He has to ignore the Rwanda that is, in a desperate search for the Rwanda of his preferred narrative.
He will, in short, have had to turn a deaf ear, and a blind eye to the facts, to the truth. He will have had to dismiss all the election observers, who had nothing but praise, not only for Rwanda’s elections, but the election campaign. For if there is anything upon which nearly all Rwandans agree, yes, even up to 99.9 percent of them, is that they have the government they want, and their preferred choice for head of state.
How then to negate all of that, and superimpose the detractors’ preferred narrative on Rwanda, over the actual place. For Duffy as for all the other detractors, part of the answer to that, is often to take the well trodden path to Victoire Ingabire’s door.
As her Western promoters would have it, great effort is expended to “undermine Ingabire’s credibility.” To make her look “politically inept,” we are told, she has been imprisoned, subjected to “dirty tricks” and her “base” intimidated by police. “There was a large scale, if subtle campaign to undermine her political influence, culminating in her being formally excluded from running on 13th March 2024.
Who, reading that, would not feel at least, some sympathy for Ms Ingabire, and who would not accept that she was indeed a plucky woman, standing up for what she believes in, against extraordinarilly difficult odds?
And that is exactly how the narrative against Rwanda has been constructed, brick by dissembling brick, over the last thirty years. Ignore the facts, and with a propaganda campaign worthy of Goebbels, repeat half truths and falsehoods, over and over again, in the expectation that they will be taken for the truth.
Does Duffy know why Ingabire was imprisoned? Does it matter? Does he care that she is the defacto leader of the diehard adherents of the genocidal, so called HutuPower ideology? One of the charges that landed her in court, then prison, was giving material support to the self-styled Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
Now designated a terrorist organisation by the UN, the armed group, which is led by the former Rwanda military, and the Interahamwe militia, has been operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), since their defeat by the RPF forces, in 1994.
Although not the force they once were, they still pose a threat to Rwanda’s security, and have been one of the most murderous armed groups, that have terrorised the population of the DRC, for the past three decades. Some of the most damning evidence against Ingabire, was found in her home in the Netherlands, after a raid by the Dutch police.
But none of this concerns Duffy and others like him. Her importance to them is less her fitness as a Presidential candidate, or lack of it, and more as a tool to demonise the Rwandan leadership. Perhaps Duffy demonstrated this a little too obviously. Perhaps, as someone used to being lauded as “the prominent opposition”, she objected to being referred to as part of a “motley crew of what might count as opposition.”
Perhaps she felt that Duffy simply took her too much for granted. Whatever the reason, unusually for Ingabire, she was keen to distance herself from an article that attacked Rwanda, tweeting that “I want to clarify that I did not give any interview to the journalist who authored the article, titled ‘Worse Than a Dictatorship: Rwanda 2024 General Election…Any mention of an interview with me and quotes in that article are false.” Well over to you then Martin Duffy.
Will Ingabire and Duffy kiss and make up? Almost certainly. They are united in their mission to disparage every Rwandan achievement, their visceral antipathy to and apparent panic, about the leadership that drives those achievements. They are unlikely to allow a little disagreement get in the way of their anti Rwanda mission.
