Dear Rwandans in the United Kingdom, who form the membership of ‘Rwandese Community in UK’, and all hard working and peace loving Rwandese wherever you reside and live I would like to Wish You all a Happy 2014.  Can I also take this opportunity to step back and share with you a few words of wisdom as we reflect on the challenges that 2013 presented to our communities.  I will base my reflection on the enduring solidarity our community in UK has demonstrated to preserve its vision, aims and purpose, despite the perverse influence of the ‘tourists’ from ‘hell’ who are currently touring UK in the new Kagame’s High Commissioner ‘couple’.  Just to quote from a key member in our community, “… I think Ernest Rwamucyo was by far a better diplomat than this new egoistic William Rucicyuma by miles.  He and his wife were civilised, respectful and had humility unlike this pompous guy and his wife who are full of themselves.  …”   Suprisingly this key member of the community deals with him as even it is business as usual, paying back with smart deceit.  Communities are measured based on how they respond or contest adversity, manipulation or to predators.

Weak communities succumb to perverse influences by predators that prey on its internal cohesion, a source of their strength and political space (room for manoeuvre), so as to introduce or nurture an environment where coercion and servitude flourishes.  In such environments, like the one created by the RPF junta back home, the community members’ strategic preparation for the future, in terms of personal investment and securing rights backed up by correlative duties, is continuously postponed for survival and security in the present––the Faustian bargain.  The servitude (ubuhake) arrangement takes root and is complemented by ‘cheap promises of good jobs’ or threats to relatives back home.  The irony is that the community is a collectivity of individuals who made a conscious choice to leave Rwanda, our motherland, in the first place, and have embraced British values and rights.  It is not surprising that it was in Oxford, on 18th May this year, that Kagame, the cult myth, tested his first real engagement with demonstrators in the full glare of the media and with full endorsement of the authorities.  Ours (UK) is a free country where lawful or authorised contestations by the citizenry are supported and encouraged.  It’s not RPF’s Rwanda where the master is a cult, “changwa yicha agakiza”.

It is axiomatic (self-evident) here in UK that we cannot conceive of a community or association without some established acknowledgement of need, and a notion of rights to ensure the meeting of need. In other words, rights and perceptions of need have to reside somewhere to fulfil the conditions for calling a collectivity of people a community.  Otherwise, we are only looking at anarchy and war; i.e., such a state of insecurity that no one’s interests can be met, so that there is no reason for that particular collectivity to exist.   It’s no surprise therefore that predators like the High Commissioner, William Nkurunziza, and his wife, Leonia, the tourists, has been plotting to create havoc in our community.  I can argue that the insecurity conditions support the interests of a few powerful people (Akazu) and some of their followers for a while.  As stated by these self-centred, selfish individuals on many occasions, the followers are used and dumped as ‘waste’ after their ‘sell by date, just ask the likes of Remy Mutambuka or Yvonne Abera.

 

Communities are premised on varying degrees of ethical and moral dimensions.   The vision of the founding members of the Rwandese Community in UK was to incorporate a strong degree of these dimensions, in all processes of meeting the needs and entitlements of its members.  Another dimension of our community also offer a key basis of membership, and with membership goes rights, which are connected to prevailing presumptions about needs and entitlements.  The wisdom behind this was to challenge the conventional ‘orthodoxy’ of the archaic ‘master-servant’ (ubuhake) community relationships that our historical perspective had meted out on our ancestral country and something the ‘political elites’ in Rwanda try hard to promote as the ‘dominant orthodoxy’.  Communities can be characterized by reciprocity and hierarchy, sometimes simultaneously. For social actors, the experience of community is variable, according to circumstances of conflict and unity, of fission and fusion. In other words, they are fluid, not fixed, and our understanding of them has to depend upon an actor-oriented epistemological perspective.  This tourist, William Nkurinziza, a so called ‘political elite’ himself, fails to grasp and understand the fact that here in UK that master-servant (ubuhake) relationship, his epistemological perspective, has no place and will be challenged unreservedly. He is ‘so called’ because a real political elite worth the name or title would possess an instinctive ability and intellect to comprehend the orientation of our community and the clear possibility of dire consequences of trying to do otherwise as William has agonisingly come to learn.

 

Given the vested interest of these so-called elites in structural inequalities, we need to distinguish between relationships that allow manipulation of communities and those that safeguard them.  Relationships that William Rucicyuma is perversely fidgeting to introduce in our communities based on ‘anarchy and division’ promotes their mentioned archaic ideology of master-slave (Ubuhake) structural setting so that some individuals are ready to accept or support his ‘velleity’ (inclination), because it can never work here in UK, in return for loyalty and other “dependent” favours which has contributed to the reproduction of the inequality that exist in Rwanda under RPF and former regimes.  He stupidly ignores the fact that we are located in country where democratic values are cherished and loyalty is not based on personal interest but rather on altruism, the whole reason our founding members of the community developed that vision.  Our sophistication and know-how provides us the means for challenging and addressing those misguided plans and anyone who might collude with this ‘tourist’ to work outside the accepted ‘rules of the game’.  In this country, UK, the citizenry have the means and power to unleash the legal machinery if the need arises.  So everyone is warned that our legitimate and elected community leaders have our mandate and support.  No tourist or power, imaginary or real, will undermine this mandate.  Even their tricks of clandestinely attending some of the meetings arranged by branches are fully monitored and closely scrutinised, to assess whether they have crossed the Rubicon, so that we unleash the full force of our given rights.

 

I cannot end without commenting on the rife rumours and speculations on who leaks information to Inyenyeri news.  As mentioned in an earlier article, all Rwandese in our community are bound together in ways that one cannot imagine with a naked eye.  This even becomes more complicated in the ‘ubuhake’ arrangement because transparency is fast eroded by fear and manipulation. The “patron-client” or ‘master-servant’ dependencies, William Nkurunziza Rucicyuma has introduced in the High Commission, and is trying to extend to the community, has provided a fertile environment for intrigue, frustration, insecurity and fear among Mission staff and everyone in trying to find solace is guardedly spilling the beans, perceived or real.  Sometimes we have been made privy to information or plans that you are left wondering whether these guys running the Mission are worth the titles.  All these combine to destabilize the moral dimension in terms of trust, loyalty and responsibility, entailing a world of cheats, free-riders and predators. We have known people in the community who thrive on this kind of arrangement as long as it does not adversely affect their legal obligations in this country, where they have sought refuge, based on real threat or economic. The trade-off is to let the community be warned of what predators like William Rucicyuma and co. are up to while at the same time manipulating Rucicyuma and co. for perceived favours.  That is the smart way of curtailing the excesses of these individuals who are full of just ‘pomp’ and ‘air’ but short on substance and out of touch with the reality on the ground.  No wonder his style and intrigue couldn’t be tolerated when he worked in RIEP, the now RDB.  You can’t eat the cake and have it at them same time.  We are all being patriotic to some degree otherwise we would spill more.

 

As we join the New Year 2014, we wish to thank everyone in the community for standing up to the predators, masquerading as individuals of high esteem, and for sharing any information, however small, that has thus far helped to make us stronger as a community in the face of manipulation, during 2013.  Let us also thank individuals like Jimmy Uwizeye and Linda Karimba who despite the sustained humiliation and smear campaign by the new ‘tourist’ have maintained their learning skills to continue improving their relationships with the community.  Everyone in the community is fully behind you and commends you both for learning the British Values of humility.  To our leaders and elders thank you for keeping a watchful eye on the ‘predators’ and handling the challenges in a professional and British way of drawing boundaries and limits.  To our Mothers and Youth thanks too for your hard work and hope that you will build on the successes to do even better in 2014.  To everyone else, including the predators, tourists and well-wishers, have a promising and prosperous New Year.  “Ngo ibyaye ikiboze irakirigata”, they are our own and we have a duty to teach, coach and if necessary cleanse them of their predatory epistemological perspectives, a product of our history.

 

God Bless Rwandese Community in UK and all Rwandans!!! .