Rwanda is a remarkable success story. From the tragedy of the 1994 genocide, Paul Kagame — former military leader and current Rwandan president since 2000 — has crafted a business friendly economy that beats all its regional rivals and many other emerging economies in socioeconomic statistics. By promoting investment that delivers development and focussing on issues that matter to the general population, such as improving health systems, the country has appealed to those on the centre-left who like to see foreign assistance working and those on the centre-right who similarly like to see the private sector allowed to flourish. In my own area of work I found Rwanda superior to the rest of the region. I even co-authored a paper in 2013 with the Rwandan Health Minister on how Rwanda did a better job than most other African nations in ensuring medicine quality, notably in the fight against tuberculosis. 

All the while there were undercurrents that the successful leadership of Kagame was not benign, as those who opposed the regime alleged all sorts of underhanded and anti-democratic acts. Kagame won 99 percent of the vote in the last election, so the opposition is either non-existent or fatally undermined.

But many policy wonks and especially institutions that admired or worked with Rwanda generally overlooked such stories. Perhaps most worrying of all is the media censorship over Rwandan failures. Last week an army officer’s sentence was reduced to 15 years from 21 years of imprisonment. His original crime: merely criticizing the regime. No healthy country imprisons people for simply speaking their mind.

Without exposing the bad, the good news
from Rwanda will almost inevitably decline over time. The regime already thinks
it’s irreplaceable and the wider world may believe that too. Africa has many
examples of apparently benign dictatorships turning into tragedy or at least
chronic underperformance (Zimbabwe and Uganda are respective examples). 

Michela Wrong is a veteran journalist who
has covered Africa for decades for myriad media outlets and even written important
books on Eritrea, Congo and elsewhere. She tells me that it’s striking how
often what would normally qualify as an important story — the kind of story no
self-respecting international news organisation would allow itself to miss —
simply doesn’t get covered if it sheds unflattering light on the Kagame regime.
I asked her for specifics and she said:

“The most obvious example of this was the inquest into the assassination of Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s former head of external intelligence, who was strangled in a South African five-star hotel on New Year’s Eve 2013. In January 2019 the case opened in a courtroom on the outskirts of Johannesburg, a city where every news agency and broadcaster, from AP to Xinhua, AFP to Reuters, the BBC to DPA, has an office. It was a story on a par with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in terms of international interest, massively diplomatically embarrassing to the Rwandan government — the South African Hawks hold it directly responsible — and the court room was a ten minute taxi ride from various well-staffed newsrooms. When I turned up, I was astonished by the pathetic press turnout. At first I assumed that the victim’s family and lawyers just hadn’t been very efficient at getting the word out, but if anything, press attendance got worse as the days passed and more and more hugely awkward details — all of them wonderfully quotable as they were being revealed in court — were brought to light. A massive opportunity missed.”

She told me about other examples, growing even
more animated when she suggested that “trying to get a story about Rwanda which
isn’t another sycophantic account of the cleanliness of the streets and the
number of women in parliament into the mainstream international press, good
luck! It won’t be easy.”

Ms. Wrong says there are two key reasons
for this. First, journalists at the major news organisations:

“know from bitter experience that Rwandan officials keep a careful tally of exactly who writes and reports what — an effective blacklist — and if they are to be able to return to Kigali to report on an African Development Bank meeting, an election, or one of the many conferences staged there, an article drawing attention to Rwanda’s human rights record will mean they risk either having their media accreditation request refused or — more humiliatingly — being deported on arrival. Other African regimes do this — Ethiopia has always traditionally been an enthusiastic blacklister of reporters — but none more efficiently than Kigali. The knowledge that you are dealing with an aggressive and sometimes bullying regime shouldn’t in theory sway editor’s decisions about coverage, but of course it does.”

The second factor is a groupthink that has
developed on Rwanda. This is a result of both the guilt-driven sentiment that
any country that has endured a genocide is somehow off-limits when it comes to
criticism and the aid industry’s gritted-teeth determination to see it as a
glowing model of successful development, come what may. As other development poster
boys fall by the wayside, Rwanda remains a precious example of what an
authoritarian government can deliver in terms of socioeconomic improvement.

Ms. Wrong concludes:

“For donors to have to acknowledge that those impressive statistics — and even their validity is now being seriously questioned — go hand-in-hand with rigged elections, jailed opposition leaders and the harassment and assassination of dissidents abroad is more than many can bear. So Western allies put their fingers in their ears and sing loudly when these stories crop up and if trusted sources do that angrily and consistently enough, a lazy and overstretched media industry will eventually start portraying Rwanda in similar terms. In private conversations in corridors with analysts, economists and diplomats, there’s no shortage at all of scepticism, anger and concern. But it’s breath-taking how rarely those concerns will ever publicly surface.”

Without accurate media coverage, Rwanda’s administration will probably continue to only be viewed in positive terms, and so it will continue business as usual. There is much to admire in the country, but it remains a dictatorship. It will surely end badly.

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