Many of my colleagues have taken issue with the recent remarks I made on YouTube detailing my take on Rwanda’s political situation as it prepares to host the 26th CHOGM. Some have even taken issue with me personally.

I do not seek to discourage those who have set out to challenge Kagame’s RPF when I say that there is no credible opposition at home or in exile and I will continue to reinterate my position in the hope that this helps bring about a genuine political class if democracy is to be practiced in Rwanda one day.
General Kagame’s mafia-like system has no real opposition. What it has been contending with for years are disgruntled double dealing “pressure groups” masquerading as political ” opposition”.

The ” Pressure Groups “:

Initially, we have Habyarimana’s overthrown elite that has -for the last 28 years- been pitiably negotiating the conditions of it’s polititical and military defeat. This group is frozen in the bewilderment of having lost power to “gangs of marauders” as it bitterly continues to malign the armed force that defeated it’s dictatorship. It is despairing to see this fallen elite holding on to what it has lost forever after the horror that befell the human capital it drove into the DRC (then Zaire) as a last bargaining chip when it was forcibly reclaimed from it.

This group refuses to acknowledge it’s current predicament and the consequences thereof, choosing to bequeath its humiliation to its younger generations and encouraging whoever will listen to find meaning in the hope of a future mass revolt : one that it hopes will play in its favor, mirroring the events of 1959. This pressure group’s latest enterprise of condemning a generation to repeating the unacknowledged failures of its senior is morally reprehensible and cowardly.

The second group disguising as opposition is mostly comprised of deserters. Truth be told, that is what many of us have been forced to become by General Kagame’s autocracy. We fought to liberate our country from the oppression of “Hutu Power” politics but the greed and criminal nature of a number of elements in our ranks has robbed us of the right to retire honorably as veterans to our cause . Too many injustices were left unaddressed by the corruption and the impunity festering in General Kagame’s armed forces. As an example, some of these toxic elements who followed us in exile after falling out with the monster they have helped create, confident in the culture of impunity they have turned into a military code, sought to make us lieutenants to their disgrace.

The overzealous political involvement of some colleagues in this group is presumably their conceptualization of the quickest way to amnesty but in reality it has instead led many to their deaths, to their imprisonment and torture, to their abduction, disappearance and ruin…

In third place comes a recent emergence in this would be “opposition” in exile, a online pressure group baring the banner of yet another derailed school of thought that stands between Habyarimana’s defeated elite and RPA/ RDF former military. It is yet another class of nostalgic escapists and/or wishful thinkers who fantasise themselves occupying government positions they presume to be deserving based on their understanding (or musunderstanding) of Rwandan ethnic politics. These compatriots fail to distinguish between the Rwanda they want, the Rwanda we have, and the Rwanda we can realistically aspire to. They propose another unlikely alternative to the power structure in Kigali.


The current leadership of Rwanda : Kagame’s  establishment.

All antagonists considered, one regretfully concedes and acknowledges the necessity for an overbearing authority in post 1994 Rwanda.
Our society was a broken civilization that needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. It had been plagued with a crime that implied and warranted the complete annihilation of its own, there was no cure to the extent of hate it had been contaminated with. It had to be reconstructed with landmarks built in concrete, order and restraint were imperative. There was a need for an authority to base the undertaking of hard choices on.

It would have been naive to expect the change of attitudes befitting Rwanda ‘s post war and genocide “new normal” to happen smoothly and for what it is worth, Kagame deserves credit for marching what was left of the country forward; but he has fallen short and installed an oppressive regime known for it’s abuse of power, a regime that tyrannizes who it wills with impunity, a regime that practices money grubbing, that disappears, tortures and unlawfully imprisons with no questions asked.

Kagame has terrorized and silenced Rwanda’s thinkers to a very worrying degree.

This is why we must call for political cleavage in RPF’s think-tank. I believe it incumbs on whatever is left of it to cleave around the shortcomings of it’s 28 year rule, to vet and draw in dissent and give Rwanda the balance of left and right in difference of opinion it deserves for a healthy political environment.

I know and understand this cannot happen before General Kagame’s reign of terror comes to an end. A great number of our wise will not be ready until it does. So traumatizing was their humiliation, many will hold their tongues even long after he is gone, but I call on you all, Rwandans and comrades to start envisaging a future without Kagame’s predominance. I admonish you to start preparing for the difficult days ahead.

Our generation must be the first to prevent the pattern of violence that follows the departures of idolized statesmen.

A luta continua. Rwigema Oye.


Noble Marara