Ahead of vote on term limits, Rwandans worry about presidential power grab

KIGALI, Rwanda — In her days as an active member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Eloise Umutoni did her best to show support for Rwanda’s ruling party and its leader, Paul Kagame.

As a district-level party cadre, Umutoni was responsible for mobilizing youth in line with the RPF’s development agenda, widely considered to be one of the most ambitious on the African continent. By helping lead various government initiatives, from the monthly communal work program, umuganda, to a campaign to eradicate traditional thatched roof houses, she was the face of the RPF for the young people of her village, a cog in a party machinery that penetrates deep into rural Rwandan life. Come local or national elections, she would dress in the RPF’s red, white and baby blue, extolling the party’s role in Rwanda’s progress, and reminding voters what was expected of them.

“I’m the one who told people, ‘You know who to choose,’ ” she said on a recent afternoon. “The RPF is like a family. And everyone understands they’re not supposed to vote against it.”

Yet Umutoni — whose name has been changed to protect her identity — has never quite felt comfortable with her country’s evolution under Kagame, Rwanda’s steely-eyed, rebel leader turned president. On the one hand, under Kagame’s leadership, the country of 12 million has achieved remarkable progress. Since the RPF, originally a rebel movement formed in Uganda by Tutsi exiles, captured power at the end of the country’s 1994 genocide, Rwanda has transformed from a graveyard of a million souls into one of the most orderly and fast-developing nations on the continent. The longer Umutoni worked within the system, however, the more she was disturbed by the government’s methods. There was the constant stifling of opposition; the state’s alleged pursuit of dissidents in exile; the way in which people, knowing that even their neighbors could be spies, would only discuss politics in whispers.

In a national referendum on Friday, voters are likely to approve constitutional amendments that could allow Kagame to remain in office until 2034. In advance of the vote, voices of opposition have been predictably silent. The process of lifting the current term limits, after all, was supposedly initiated by the will of the people. During the first half of 2015, Rwanda’s Parliament says, it received petitions from more than 3.7 million Rwandans — 72 percent of registered voters — requesting a constitutional change that could enable their president to run again after his second term expires in 2017. In a document released before lawmakers approved the constitution’s changes last month, Parliament said it had identified only “about ten” Rwandans nationwide who objected to the amendment.

Interviews with Rwandans of various backgrounds in the capital and countryside suggest a far more divided electorate. Many, citing Rwanda’s stability and record of economic development, say they fear political change and believe the extension of Kagame’s mandate is the best bet for the country’s continued progress. Yet some who dare speak critically admit they’re tired of a system they say tramples individual rights and places too much power in the hands of one individual. Few people here envision that a re-election bid by Kagame could trigger an immediate uprising, as occurred in neighboring Burundi after President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision this summer to pursue a constitutionally dubious third term. But some worry that the drive to keep Kagame, 58, in office will increase the likelihood of future unrest by emboldening his growing list of enemies.

“Our government wants the world to believe that everyone supports this president,” Umutoni said. “But many people want change. Our country has developed, but Rwandans don’t have peace of mind.”

Kagame, who assumed the presidency in 2000 yet has effectively ruled Rwanda since the end of the genocide, has long been a controversial figure. To his admirers, both inside Rwanda and abroad, he is viewed as his country’s liberator and the architect of its unlikely revival. Today, Rwanda is one of Africa’s cleanest and safest countries. Its capital, Kigali, has transformed from a shattered city into an airy, modern metropolis with an ever-evolving skyline reflecting economic growth that’s averaged 8 percent per year during the last decade. Under Kagame’s watch, Rwanda has introduced free basic education, achieved near universal health insurance, and seen maternal and child mortality fall by more than 50 percent. Although internal whistleblowers have accused authorities of manipulating recent poverty statistics, prior figures suggest that poverty fell by 24 percent during the first decade of Kagame’s presidency. And while historically rooted tensions between the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority have not disappeared, many say that ethnic identity is beginning to lose importance as a generation of Rwandans born after the country’s great cataclysm comes of age.

None of these accomplishments have been the work of Kagame alone. Yet even critics credit his heavy-handed, military-inspired leadership with establishing a foundation of order and security that has underpinned the country’s development. Unlike in neighboring countries, where both major corruption scandals and petty police bribery are a part of daily life, Rwanda’s security forces and bureaucrats are tightly monitored. Each year, cabinet ministers and leaders of Rwanda’s 30 districts are required to sign ambitious performance contracts, known as imihigo, with the president. Those who fail to meet their targets in a range of development indicators can be sacked.

On a daily level, however, others cite difficulties caused by one of the RPF’s signature top-down policies: a move, undertaken in recent years, to change the country’s language of education and commerce to English from French. Many who were born and educated inside Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, say the change gives a distinct advantage to those — often from families associated with senior members of the RPF — who grew up in Anglophone Uganda.

“If you’re not from [Uganda], it’s very hard to find a good job,” said Umutoni, who survived the genocide as a child, completed her education in French and has struggled to master English while living in Kigali. “I’m a Tutsi, and this government is led by Tutsis, but I feel like I don’t belong.”

It is in rural Rwanda, home to 80 percent of the population, where the state’s influence is felt at the most intimate level. Here, Kagame’s government has subjected residents to what one researcher has described as an elite-driven social “re-engineering,” characterized by an abrupt shift of the agricultural sector away from traditional subsistence farming toward a market-based system intended to spur broader economic growth. At the heart of this is a state-led initiative known as the crop intensification program, launched in 2004, in which households that once grew crops for their own consumption are assigned to produce just one or two specified crops for sale on the market. As part of the program, the government provides farmers with seeds free of charge, gives them fertilizers on credit and helps link them to buyers. It’s all part of an effort, explains Louis Butare, director general of the Rwanda Agricultural Board, to lift the country’s rural inhabitants out of poverty and allow them to earn cash for things like health care, school fees and electrification.

The policy, however, has been contentious. Although Butare says that households are assigned crops through “village discussion,” farmers and independent researchers say the program entails a great deal of coercion. This is in part because local leaders, obliged by performance-based contracts to meet ambitious production targets, face a high degree of accountability upward, but little recourse if they agitate their populations. On paper, in the aggregate, the program’s numbers look impressive. According to World Bank calculations, Rwanda’s agricultural output nearly doubled between 2000 and 2012, with particularly strong gains in CIP priority crops such as maize, wheat and cassava. Nonetheless, as Chris Huggins, a postdoctoral fellow at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University, argues in a 2014 report, farmers’ dependency on one or two crops, and their growing reliance on cash to purchase food, makes them more vulnerable to hunger should their harvests fail or underperform. Several peasant families in Rwanda’s Northern and Eastern provinces — areas where authorities insist the program has been most successful — told Al Jazeera America that hunger had increased since the program’s start. Many admitted to growing rows of beans or other “prohibited” crops clandestinely, despite the risk of fines or jail time. One 40-year-old grandmother, who spoke while hoeing a field in the midday sun, said she usually turns a loss from maize, her assigned crop, but is unable to change course due to the demands of her local leaders.

“At least under the former government, we were free to grow what we wanted,” she said. “People now are hungry. And we feel lost.”

Should Kagame remain in power after 2017, as is widely expected, he will not be the first leader in the region to overstay his term in office. In 2005, an amendment to Uganda’s constitution abolished term limits. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda's president since 1986 and a mentor to Kagame, remains in power today. In Burundi, the decision of Nkurunziza to cling to power, some fear, has left the country inching closer to war. Moves to delay elections or extend presidential mandates have also caused unrest in the DRC and the Republic of Congo. In October, security forces in the Congolese capital Brazzaville shot and killed four protesters prior to a referendum that lifted term limits for President Denis Sassou Nguesso. In Rwanda’s case, the amended constitution would enable Kagame to serve one additional term of seven years and two subsequent terms of five, with future presidents eligible for two five-year terms only.

With Rwandan elections more than a year away and Friday’s referendum yet to validate the amended constitution, Kagame has not confirmed whether he will seek another term. In the past, he has publicly shunned the prospect, telling delegates at a 2013 RPF conference that his inability to groom a successor and create “capacity for a post-me Rwanda” would represent a “personal failure.” Sources close to the party, however, say that Kagame has long had his sights on a continued stay in power and that insiders who’ve voiced opposition to the prospect have been sacked or demoted. Most notable is the former minister of justice, Tharcisse Karugarama, who was abruptly removed from office in 2013 after the Guardian reported he believed it was “essential for Kagame to step down in 2017.” (When asked by Al Jazeera America about the circumstances of his dismissal, Karugarama refused to comment.)