The Rwandan Patriot

The international friends that engage with Rwanda and its leadership don’t do so out of charity, they do that because it is a constructive partnership. The list of friends hasn’t reduced, as RNC-propagandist Dr David Himbara would like us to believe, but rather keeps at growing. Himbara may not be aware that at COP28 in Dubai, Rwanda’s innovative green vision won accolades. Rwanda’s pavilion was the-go-to place for everyone looking for the big idea. Green City Kigali, a masterplan for the sustainable and inclusive expansion of urban Kigali also won the World Architecture Festival (WAF) Future Project Masterplan Award last week. The Rwandan delegation to COP28 led by President Paul Kagame will be coming back home with over $250m in partnership financing for different green projects. Himbara, this to us here in Rwanda and every right-thinking person, doesn’t look like a country in distress. I will volunteer others numbers that speak for themselves. Dr Himbara, you don’t have to trust ...

Paul Rusesabagina came to fame two decades ago as the hero in the movie  Hotel Rwanda . While reality was not as Hollywood depicted, fame sparked first ambition and then, failing to gain support in Rwanda, bitterness. He spoke about the necessity to overthrow the Rwandan government by any means necessary and then  acted on it , wiring money to a terrorist group. Under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of the State Department’s top goals in Africa was to convince Burundi, the continent’s poorest country, to  cease allowing  cross-border insurgents to use its territory. He succeeded. Rusesabagina fumed. In June 2020, Évariste Ndayishimiye became president of Burundi. Rusesabagina sought to convince him to cease stopping the terrorists Rusesabagina funded. After his capture, Rusesabagina’s story that he was taking a private jet to Burundi to talk to a church never made sense given Burundi’s poverty and the expense of international private charters. After the plane div...

Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza is being sanitized in a carefully choreographed campaign. She has published in Aljazeera, the Guardian, OpenDemocracy and different other media. Ingabire’s backers want to change her from the ethnic extremist she is, to an international female face of opposition in Rwanda. However, either knowingly or unknowingly, Ingabire’s financiers are letting her continue spreading an old divisionist ideology. Ingabire knows she is fooling non-Rwandan readers, while sending her coded messages to Kinyarwanda speakers both in Rwanda and outside. In a recent interview with British newspaper The Times, Ingabire depicts herself as concerned about unemployment in Rwanda. When Ingabire claims “we have so many young people without jobs”, in actual sense is saying “rubandanyamwinshi”, which is the RTLM hate radio narrative to refer to “Hutus”. For the article for OpenDemocracy, Ingabire writes about the policy to help women work from gazetted places. She alleges the wome...

  The falsehoods. The fabrications. The Rwandaphobia. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in a rapturous welcome to the Genocide denial lobby unwilling to let us mourn our dead in peace. The chorus we are seeing this week is expected. First, it was Human Rights Watch through the usual brands Lewis Mudge and his mentor Keneth Roth. Then came caste-traumatised Indian Anjan Sundaram via The New York Times. The latest, is the Patrick Karegeya pained concubine. She is definitely not the last. The perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, their offspring, and their white backers, are running a well-oiled campaign to maintain the alternative “truth”. The script is the same. Single out President Paul Kagame. Paint him as self serving dictator reigning over a powerless people, and solely responsible for the mess in Congo. However, those happily insulting Kagame, are quickest to petition Twitter or Facebook to ban people who come to his defense. The other bit of the script is ...

In the United Kingdom, anything you post on Twitter, Facebook or any other social media platform could bring the cops to your door. It can be anything, from grumbling about a bad service at the airport, or speaking about victims of a bombing in Afghanistan. According to accounts by two news platforms, The Verge and The Register , arrests and charging of those who fall fowl of the law concerns what is commonly known as “section 127”. Latest figures are not available . However, going back some years, the data is staggering. In 2012, over 3,000 were arrest for posting different things online. That year, to be exact, 1,423 people were found guilty and were jailed or fined up to £5,000 which is about Frw 6million. So how many have faced same wrath in Rwanda? Imagine if less than 10 are arrested in Rwanda.                          

Last year in September, The New York Times carried an extensive investigation into social media arrests in Germany. The Times found that there is no national database that keeps data on social media arrests. However, the paper found more than 8,500 cases tracked by different agencies. Overall, more than 1,000 people have been charged or punished since 2018, a figure many experts said is probably much higher. How many were arrested in Rwanda for what they post on social media? The jury is out there for you to decide.                    

Dr David Himbara never recovered from being refused entry into Village Urugwiro. Around the end of 2009, Himbara was replaced from his job in Office of the President. The following day, Himbara woke up very early as usual going to work. At the entrance, the presidential security couldn’t let him in. It’s obvious, because security protocols require that any guests are recorded beforehand. He had no invitation. Arrogant as he had always been, Himbara probably imagined that he would walk into the presidential office whenever he pleases. I highly doubt anyone else, including the President’s family, apart from the First Lady perhaps, have that right of unfettered access. The Presidency and the holder, is an institution of a country, whose security becomes of paramount importance. However, Himbara had convinced himself, from years of having access there, that he could walk in at anytime he wished. In his usual English language bravado, Himbara shouted at the guards at the entrance, a...

  Playing the usual suspect, Dr David Himbara rants about a new innovative financing program by the IMF, from which Rwanda has acquired $319m. For his blog readers, Himbara paints the financing as adding to Rwanda’s debt portfolio. The IMF, World Bank and other international bodies have assessed Rwanda’s borrowing as manageable, reason being that for every cent taken in, there is a clear plan as to what it will do and how it will be repaid. Historically, nations have relied on taking risk to be able to get significant resources for development. Countries need big money, which very often isn’t available locally. The uniqueness of the IMF program is such that only three nations, including Rwanda globally have been able to tap from the Fund. The IMF’s experts are better placed to determine Rwanda’s ability to do good with the money. Himbara’s twisted propaganda against the IMF funding is the usual blackmail, with the hope that the Rwandan government comes out on the defensiv...

Last week, the government of DR Congo assumed it had the upper hand, claiming that M23 rebels, and by extension Rwandan troops massacred 120 civilians in Kishishe. The numbers have since changed. I won’t speak of the outlandish fabrication that Rwandan troops are on Congolese soil. It needs to be treated with the contempt it deserves. The mere suggestion that Rwandan troops have killed civilians, should make it to the Guinness Book of World Records, as one of the most deranged claims of the century. The people of countries where Rwandan troops have actually operated or still do, must be laughing so loud. I won’t have to say much, instead recommend you ask the Mozambicans in Cabo Delgado region, Haitians, South Sudanese, Central African Republic (CAR),   Malians, and Darfurians, to mention but a few. In Congo itself, Rwandan troops brought home hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees, saving them from disease, hunger and all the bad that war creates. Arising from the Rwa...

In latest RNC propaganda, it’s spokesperson Dr David Himbara goes after Dr Anaclet Niyibizi and   L.E.A.F. Pharmaceuticals. Himbara bases the attack on Dr Niyibizi from a news report by Bloomberg in which the government of Rwanda is suing L.E.A.F. The latter is accused of falling short and not making good on moneys invested by the government. Himbara expects you the reader to believe the government did a bad thing to invest in an international company. Completely worthless propaganda. Serious governments all over the world make investments of taxpayers money, banking on the hope that it will bring returns for the saver. What is the use of billions of money sitting idle in a bank account when it can be grown further! In June, the Japanese government settled on a plan to put some of its $1.5trillion pension fund into startups. The fund has invested in different other sectors. There is worry in some quarters that the fragility of the world economy could cause Japan to lose i...

  Israel has a new government. Benjamin Netanyahu to return as prime minister of Israel following the election held this week. As with previous polls, the opportunistic international order is again flashing Netanyahu with the extremist tag. The reason being advanced is that he has coalesced with political parties that can no longer be ignored. The unpopular political direction that Israel chooses in every election, to a significant extent, has parallels with the path to which President Paul Kagame has opted for Rwanda. The political parties that Netanyahu sought, are fundamentally no different from their colleagues in other formations. All parties have one interest, which is to safeguard Israel. The people of that country know their lives cannot be determined by political correctness. Israelis know Israel’s survival cannot be designed by overzealous political analysts from outside their borders. It is Israelis. They are prepared to swallow the bitter pill to forego immedi...

  By his own narrations, Dr David Himbara called it quits in January 2010, left Rwanda. Himbara’s entitlement and ego couldn’t allow him to accept that President Kagame didn’t depend on his sole counsel. As a head of state, Kagame takes decisions based on advice from a wide variety of sources. It is the reason he has the security and civilian apparatus at his disposal. All well-meaning heads of state do. Himbara’s writings say it all about him. He couldn’t work in a system and chose to quit. Himbara’s latest about a government scheme bringing Zimbabwean education professionals to Rwanda is a continued manifestation of that arrogance. Let’s look at the record. If Kagame had sought Himbara’s advice, if he had to anyway, we wouldn’t be having Carnegie Mellon University Africa, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), University of Global Health Equity (UGHE), several others, and soon to be Coventry University. The US set up Green Card purposely to attract th...

  British interior minister or home secretary Suella Braverman is quietly attempting to hand herself new powers to clamp down on the government’s political opponents, civil right advocates have warned. This in a country which brands itself as a democracy and first world.  The home secretary has tabled a last-minute amendment to a widely criticised anti-protest bill that would allow her to apply for injunctions against anyone she deems ‘likely’ to carry out protests that could cause ‘serious disruption’ to ‘key national infrastructure’, prevent access to ‘essential’ goods or services, or have a ‘serious adverse effect on public safety’. The proposal would also give police the power to arrest anyone they suspect to be breaching such an injunction. Leading human rights groups say that the Public Order Bill, which is set to reach its final stages in the Commons today, would align the UK’s anti-protest laws with those in Russia and Belarus. The bill includes new powers, such as pro...

  One man’s speech delivered to a crowd in rural Rwanda 30 years ago became the bible verse for marauding militias in 1994. The hunted for Tutsis, killed them and dumped their bodies in rivers so that they “went back to their place of origin” – referring to Ethiopia. Dr Leon Mugesera, currently serving a genocide conviction, was the man behind the microphone. The speech he delivered on that day in November 1992, when read in English, doesn’t strike the shock it does when read and listened to in the original Kinyarwanda language. Mugesera is a single individual, who used his oratory skills and association to the powers of the time, to reinforce a genocidal agenda. He is not alone. As I will demonstrate here, many such individuals are numerous. DRC President Felix Tshisekedi gave a speech to the UN General Assembly last week in which he told the world that Rwandan FDLR militia is a “pretext” used by Rwanda to destabilize his country. He said the FDLR had been defeated compl...

This text was first published in November 2013 by the Qatar Chronicles, written by Dr Igban K. Adetunji From 1441 to 1888, a period 450 years, more than 29 million black Africans were terrorized and kidnapped from their virgin homelands and transported across the different oceans as slaves in a carefully planned operation. It was meticulous, discreet and handled by players who knew what would exactly follow. Though the exact number of victims will never be known, the degree of savage cruelty endured, and the consequences the barbaric trade left for Africa will never go away. Unfortunately today Africans themselves have forgotten the human plunder and mass atrocities against black Africans. As seen from this photo, these are child slaves. These teenagers are barely 18 years indicative of the child genocide The owners of transatlantic ships made a fortune. Slavery created and then relied on a large support network of shipping services, ports, and finance and insurance companies. New indu...