Orville Taylor | Lessons from Rwanda

He came in last Wednesday, greeted by our prime minister and other top dignitaries, with the appropriate welcome. He is not quite a king, but Marcus Garvey would have been pleased because he did prophesy that a monarch would arrive from the east. Of course, he is not the first East African head of state to visit. Jah Jah Haile Selassie I set foot here in 1966, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania blessed us here in 1975, bringing his traditional rain with him. More recently, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya celebrated our 57th anniversary of independence in 2019.

There is something different about this visit because it is Easter, and there are hints of 30 pieces of silver, and it is doubtful that they were divided equally among the 15 full members of CARICOM. In fact, there are 12 other English-speaking countries in the group apart from Jamaica. Thus, the imagery regarding Judas Iscariot is not lost on me.

President Paul Kagame, head of government of The Republic of Rwanda, has just ended his three-day visit here. Unlike three weeks ago, to my chagrin, there was no lining of the streets, no crowds peering through the fences to touch him or even Rastafari holding a ‘groundation’ and beating of drums with him. Apart from the laying of the wreath at the shrine of Garvey, it seems to be all business, meeting with the Government and Opposition. I am unsure if there is simply fog or it is really smoke, but the coincidence of his visit with the impending Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting that he is hosting in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital in June, is too much to ignore.

At that meeting, one of two candidates, incumbent the Dominica-born British Baroness Patricia Scotland, and ‘surprise’ nominee our Kamina Johnson Smith will be confirmed. The latter’s nomination has caused a storm in a Pee cup, with Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne crying fowl. True, it is not the first time that he has done the Chicken Little, sky is falling shout-out, because just three years ago, he threw more shade than a guango tree. When logical questions were raised about the viability of a UWI campus in his country, he blurted, “… some politics that is taking root now with some of the campus countries – if I may call them that – expressing concerns. They have all kind of fears. They have all kind of innuendoes and subterfuge they now bring to the fore.” Of course, he never presented any evidence. But truth and expedience make strange bedfellows.

VOTES AS A BLOC

Traditionally, CARICOM votes as a bloc and if Johnson Smith was pushed forward by our government, where there was already in place an agreement to keep Scotland, then indeed Iscariot wears black, green, and gold. However, there is no evidence that Jamaica is being a maverick or a turncoat. For the record, it is unimaginable that a man like Kagame would make such a trip, knowing fully well that something was amiss with the contest.

Kagame led his country, a republic, into a voluntary membership in the Commonwealth of Nations in 2009. This former head of the African Union understands deeply the concept of Third World (black) solidarity. Like Mozambique earlier, his country is the second nation, with no colonial tie to Britain to enlist into the community. Personally, no disrespect to Scotland, but she is a Brit, and she like some of our CARICOM Afro-Saxons, cannot properly represent us with their conflicted colonial titles. Thus, assuming that we can get over the parochial divisiveness and reach a consensus, both CARICOM and the Commonwealth will be fine, and Kagame will help us to move ahead. We have a lot to learn from him.

Around 30 years ago, his nation and its neighbour and former co-country Burundi experienced two of the most horrendous cases of internal wars with people as similar in history and geography as the Russians and Ukrainians mercilessly slaughtered their kin. In Rwanda, as they hovered around a cease fire in 1993, the president was assassinated on April 6, 1994, and that precipitated an unmitigated slaughter of the minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates by the Hutu majority. Estimates are that between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsi were killed in the hostilities that lasted until July 15, 1994. Black lives mattered then, but no major nation intervened to prevent it.

Thought shocking, these numbers are not alien to the 800+plus who were killed in our own undeclared civil war of 1980 and the annual average of 1,300 since 2000. We have murdered almost 30,000 of our own since Kagame became president in 2003. Four years before Kagame’s ascendancy, Rwanda set up its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with a view to not just seeking justice, but important, to heal the wounds and build national unity.

For Jamaica, with a revenge-seeking set of death penalty advocates, it should be noted that Rwanda’s homicide rate is around three per 100,000, compared to ours at 40 plus. In 30 years, Rwanda has secured a corruption perception index of 53, which is 10 percentage points better than Jamaica. Importantly, it has put the clamp on the fly-by-night wannabe rich pastors. It has moved illiteracy from 58 to 76 per cent, gross domestic product per capita from around US$850 in 1994 to $2,100, and life expectancy from around 50 to closer to 70 years.

Doubtless, this is no complete victory, but doing so much in so little time with so little must be an exemplar for Jamaica to follow.

Happy Resurrection!

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.