Q&A: New book puts fresh scrutiny on 'donor darling' Rwanda

Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is under the spotlight of late.

“Do Not Disturb,” a new book by British journalist and Africa correspondent Michela Wrong, is more than an investigation into the assassination of Patrick Karegeya, the former intelligence chief-turned-opponent of the Rwandan president who was murdered in a Johannesburg hotel room at the end of 2013.

It is also an implicit questioning of why more people have not been disturbed by events in the central African nation over the past 27 years. Accusations of repression at home, assassinations abroad, and mass killings of Hutus before, during, and after the 1994 genocide, are all explored, as well as doubts over Kagame’s near-unanimous election wins and the accuracy of official economic statistics.

Wrong told Devex that “aid is always political” and said more should be done to link donor support to improvements in political freedom in the country. Citing World Bank figures that official development assistance accounted for 59.5% of Rwanda’s central government expenditure in 2019 — compared to 44% for Uganda, and 17.2% for Kenya — she said: “I really don't see how you can justify giving a government the huge amounts of aid that Britain and other Western donors do and then sit back idly as the Rwandans rig their elections.”

Wrong — who reported from Rwanda in 1994 and has written extensively on Africa — said that the trajectory of Karegeya’s life, from his childhood friendship with Kagame in Uganda to his death by strangulation in South Africa, struck her as an obvious story. Yet, as she worked she noted a “staggering lack of interest” on the topic from other researchers.

“There were reasons for that,” she said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You mentioned there were reasons more people weren’t writing about Karegeya’s case. Can you give a flavor of those?

Patrick Karegeya had fallen out of favor with Kagame, gone into exile, set up an opposition group, been denounced as a terrorist, and then killed by the Rwandan state. And what became very clear to me was how many other people in the Rwandan community had also either been harassed, intimidated, disappeared, been beaten up, ended up in jail on trumped-up charges inside Rwanda, or constantly persecuted once in exile.

You look at that and you think, this is a sensitive area, and if you want to stay on good terms with the government in Rwanda, not one you're going to stray into. If you're an academic who wants to keep studying Rwanda, if you're a journalist who wants to be able to get media accreditation, if you're a diplomat, there are certain subjects you just stay well clear of.

I decided early on when I was researching this book that I would not be able to go back to Rwanda once the book was underway. And I won't be going back to Rwanda. That means there's a part of Africa I won't be able to report on, so it's a loss. But for me, the book is worth the loss. 

There is this sort of understanding, I think, in the development world — and that's a world that includes journalists, academics, aid experts, aid workers — of “these people are amazing, and let's just say wonderful things about their development record.” And if there are some human rights issues, “well, of course, it's a turbulent region, they've been through hell and come out the other end, what do you expect?” There is that sort of community consensus that an overly critical eye is not appropriate in the case of Rwanda. My book takes that on very directly, and as a result, will not be popular in certain quarters.

And the thing that everyone is basing that argument on — i.e. that the government is getting great results on human development — is also questioned in your book.

Absolutely. That was very interesting, and that's a fairly recent development. The consensus is beginning to be questioned more and more openly by experts, who often will write anonymously, they are that scared of that consensus. They are saying: “It's not that the money has been totally wasted, but there's been an awful lot of funding that has gone Rwanda's way, and the idea that Rwanda is a shining model for the rest of the continent really doesn't bear examination.”

It's a very small country, which has put the very large amount of money it's received since 1994 to pretty effective use, but it is by no means a miracle case. I think we tend to forget that this is a country of less than 13 million people, with a population only slightly larger than London.

Rwandan economist David Himbara, who once worked as Paul Kagame’s private secretary but is now a critic in exile, has estimated that Rwanda has received over $20 billion in aid since 1994. I'm no expert, but if you had that level of aid to spend on 13 million people since 1994, I would expect the roads to look good, and the telephone masts to be up and running, and the capital city to be neat and tidy, wouldn’t you?

You make the point in the book that the president of Rwanda from 1973-1994, Juvénal Habyarimana, was also a “donor darling,” just for different donors.

I would recommend a book by Peter Uvin called “Aiding Violence.” In it, he examines very, very critically the record of the donors who supported Habyarimana. Switzerland, France, and Belgium were the big donors then. And they thought Habyarimana was wonderful, and he delivered on what were the then equivalents of the Sustainable Development Goals, the white SUVs were on every hillside, driving on all these very nice roads, primary school attendance rates were really impressive, and it was all so much better than in neighboring Zaire.

Uvin looks at the aid programs and the reports those experts wrote back to headquarters and says, “How naive can you be?” because what they eliminated from their assessments was any political content. So the fact that tensions between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis were getting increasingly poisonous [prior to the 1994 genocide], and the daily acts of violence that the Tutsi community was subjected to, and the prejudice they faced in getting jobs or appointments, just didn't really make it into the reports back to headquarters.

There is a strong parallel between the fact that the donors managed to completely miss the build-up to the genocide, and the fact that they are now routinely underplaying Rwanda’s human rights record, and Kagame’s record on political freedom, freedom of the press, rigged elections, all of that. It’s very disconcerting that the donors can be so unbothered by those elements.

What is new in this book, and how much of it is a summary of what people perhaps already knew but preferred not to think about?

I think the thing that shocks people — and it shouldn't because a lot of the stories surfaced in the press over the years — is the nature of the government program to take out, harass, kidnap, silence, and just intimidate Rwandan exiles abroad. The relentlessness of that program, and how far it spreads, to Australia, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Europe, Britain, and, of course, many African countries ...

I don’t think development ministers around the world have sat down and thought, “Oh, wow, that's kind of shocking actually, what Rwandan intelligence is doing around the world.” They should.