Rwanda's real opposition: Now you don't see them, now you do
By Frederick Golooba-Mutebi
Posted Saturday, February 8 2014 at 13:33
We are not where we want to be or need to be. We still need to work
very hard." So said President Paul Kagame about democracy in Rwanda
over the past 20 years, in an interview with this newspaper.
The statement is significant, if only for signalling his agreement
with people who maintain that there is a democracy deficit in Rwanda,
and who sometimes give the impression that it is their responsibility
to push his government to embrace democracy.
On the other hand, though, it is the kind of honesty one should expect
from any leader in the Great Lakes region where all the countries are
democracies in the making.
That is if one believes that democracy is not simply about periodic
elections where leaders of political factions or parties compete for
power and, as usually happens in parts of Africa and elsewhere in the
developing world, incite their supporters to maim and kill those of
their rivals.
There are, of course, people who believe that a democratic country is
one where there are regular, winner-takes-all elections, and political
competition means participation in elections by two or more mutually
hostile political parties.
In Rwanda, this second view of democracy as being about competition
between mutually hostile parties brings together political parties
that call themselves "the real opposition'" to the Rwanda Patriotic
Front-led government on the one hand and, on the other, international
actors, among them donors, human-rights groups, media and academia.
In case you're wondering, in Rwanda political organisations that claim
to be "the real opposition" are either those that operate in the
country and have failed or refused to enter into power- and
responsibility-sharing arrangements with the Rwanda Patriotic Front
and the seven other parties with which it governs, or those in exile
who, for all kinds of reasons, are unable to operate on home soil.
Their view of themselves is meant to distinguish them from the other
parties in government, which they and their supporters dismiss as
"satellites of the RPF."
I do not seek to debate whether the "satellite" label attached to
parties that co-operate with the RPF is justified or not. Instead, I
would like to highlight a striking and self-defeating aspect of the
relationship between Rwanda's "real opposition" parties and their
international supporters and sympathisers.
Attributes of the "real" opposition parties include their small,
sometimes miniscule, size; lack of resources; internal fragmentation;
and failure to formulate and articulate agendas that speak to the
concerns of ordinary Rwandans in ways that those of the RPF-led
multiparty government do.
One outcome of their failure to make political headway has been
frustration. It has pushed some individual party members to resort to
conducting themselves in dramatic fashion. Two recent examples come to
mind:
On September 5, 2012, news broke that Alexis Bakunzibake, the first
vice-president of a faction of the PS-Imberakuri party led by jailed
politician Bernard Ntaganda, had been abducted in Kigali by armed
individuals travelling in a jeep with tinted windows and escorted by a
police patrol vehicle.
The news first appeared on the website of another "real opposition"
party, FDU-Inkingi. According to security sources, the news unleashed
a barrage of queries by, and pressure from, international actors who
seemed convinced that Bakunzibake was in the hands of security
agencies, even that they might already have killed him.
For some time thereafter, statements by government representatives
that they had no idea where the man was, fell on deaf ears. And then,
early this year, the same Alexis Bakunzibake who it now appears staged
his own disappearance, reappeared.
And he did so with a bang: He and Major-General Victor Byiringiro,
president of the DRC-based Democratic Forces for the Liberation of
Rwanda (FDLR), a group led by people accused of participating in the
1994 genocide, had, signed an agreement establishing a common front,
FCRL-Ubumwe.
And then there is Omar Leo Oustazi, formerly of the Democratic Green
Party of Rwanda, the country's newest political party. Mr Oustazi who
was "secretary-general" before the party was officially registered,
disappeared on January 18, 2013, setting off another round of pressure
and a torrent of rumours that he too had been "disappeared" and killed
by the government.
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Rwanda-s-real-opposition--Now-you-don-t-see--now-you-do-/-/434750/2197716/-/b6qn8j/-/index.html
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SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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