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An Open Letter to All Rwandans
By: Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa
July 15, 2024
Rwanda is a nation very familiar with repetitive cycles of tragic dramas, often punctuated with unpleasant comedies. The latest three decades act has been dominated by no other than General Kagame, who once again has subjected Rwanda’s predominantly impoverished 13.5 million citizens to a costly sham election on July 15, 2024. Taking a short break from his usual extensive and expensive foreign tours, he has been seen dressed in the blue and white party colors, addressing large crowds of peasants forced to attend his rallies. He deceives them by saying he is the hero who liberated them, the invincible ruler who has made their lives more secure and prosperous. He promises more war to his domestic, regional, and international opponents. Traumatized by cycles of violence, civil war, and genocide, the crowds sing and clap.
He does not need their votes, for he rules Rwanda like an absolute monarch, the richest, cruelest, and ruthless in the nation’s centuries-old history. As in the previous three unfree and unfair elections, he decides beforehand what perfect score he wants. In 2017, he decided he was loved by 99% of the electorate. Predictably, in 2024, he has again awarded himself a perfect score. These unfair and unfree elections are in the catalog of countless crimes he commits daily against Rwandan citizens, like killings, exile, kidnappings, and imprisonment, which he publicly brags about as ‘flawless operations.’
Rwanda remains a nation haunted by its past, imperiled by intergenerational trauma, and threatened within by despotic rule that polarizes, impoverishes, imprisons, kills, disappears, exiles and marginalizes the citizens. General Kagame seeks to rule indefinitely while he continues to wage an unjust war of aggression to plunder the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Oblivious to the death toll among the young Rwandans who he sacrifices as cannon fodder in this war of self-enrichment, he pursues an endless war that has decimated and displaced many millions of Congolese people.
We are a nation and a people at a dangerous crossroads again. The promise and opportunity of a Hutu revolution of 1959, political independence from Belgian colonial rule in 1962, a Hutu military coup of 1973, and the RPF capture of state power in 1994 have successively been lost as each regime change left ever more increasing streams of tears, sorrow, lies, and blood on the nation’s desecrated hills.
We must rediscover our patriotic duty and obligation to choose an alternative pathway to the lies, deception, and evil deeds of General Kagame’s authoritarian rule. While we cannot stop him from staging this latest abuse as a comical election exercise, we must reflect and act on its implications for our shared future.
First, General Kagame is a brutal dictator in denial, unable and unwilling to read the writing on the wall. Having thrived on impunity for three decades, he is a captive within the bubble of wealth, power, fear, and violence he has built. Under pressure from within and without, the bubble will burst sooner than he thinks, with catastrophic consequences for Rwanda and the Great Lakes region.
Before that happens, the national crisis will widen and deepen, causing him to use more coercive, draconian, and violent methods of suppressing a desperate population in revolt.
Second, as the national crisis intensifies, the beleaguered general will double down on taking even riskier gambles in his war-making effort in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Rwanda’s human and material costs mount, with limited and ever-dwindling replenishment means, the Congolese people and their allies will gradually mobilize to stop and reverse his military adventures.
Third, as the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo intensifies, so will Rwanda’s self-proclaimed dictator become isolated regionally and internationally, making him more paranoid and erratic in his one-man-dominated micro-managed decision-making. The recent decision by the new UK Labor Government to ‘kill and bury’ the UK-Rwanda human trafficking project, the now more frequent questions from the USA and Europe about Rwanda’s war in DRC, and the increasing exposure of the regime’s global transnational crime syndicates are danger signal on Rwanda’s horizon. These pointers, albeit weak for now, will increase in tempo and scope, highlighting that the general’s benefactors may be developing second thoughts about their guy’s capacity to deliver.
Fourth, pressure will mount for Rwandan people to mobilize and organize themselves into a networked social movement whose agenda is a peaceful transformation of Rwanda from dictatorial rule to a full-fledged democracy under the rule of law. The rebirth of such a new political, economic, and social dispensation will require broad-based negotiations for a national social contract among all Rwanda stakeholders. Positive outcomes from such a social contract, entered by free Rwandan citizens, buffeted with full rights and obligations, and followed by a discourse with East African stakeholders, will ensure sustainable peace, security, justice, and prosperity for Rwanda and the region.
All Rwandans are wounded citizens. To heal and bind our wounds, we must first think and act as a wounded healer, inviting a neighbor to this pathway of personal, family, community, national and regional healing. We must dedicate ourselves to a life-long, intergenerational commitment to healing, with all citizens and leaders partaking in this process as wounded healers.
Rwandans must, therefore, reject General Kagame, the self-appointed Serial-Killer-in-Chief, and embark upon seeking and finding wounded healers among themselves to lead them.
Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa
Chairman, Rwanda Freedom Movement-ISHAKWE
Co-Founder, Rwanda Truth Commission
Washington, D.C.
USA
E-mail: ngombwa@gmail.com
Tel: 001-240-8407358
