Kenya: Tale of Two Sister Nations Going in Opposite Directions

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The Nation (Nairobi)

20 July 2008
Posted to the web 21 July 2008

Josh Kron Nation
Nairobi

On the slick beach-street bars of Burundi's capital Bujumbura, on Lake Tanganyika, 10 Rwandans pass time drinking gin and slapping the sides of their girlfriends.

They are a mix of former students of the University of Rwanda in Butare, near the Burundi border, and the children of those who fled across the border in 1959.

They are mostly Tutsi, a powerful but minority group in both Burundi and Rwanda. They and are not necessarily proud of it, but they are vocal.

There are also Burundians at the bar, and Hutu, the vast majority of the population in the country. They eat, drink and laugh together, while simultaneously referring to one another by ethnicity.

Ethnic conflict

Strange for a country immortalised in African history as a land of ethnic conflict that has killed generations of Burundians.

Claude, a Burundian-born businessman whose family fled to the country from Rwanda in 1959, takes my hand and goes around the table.

"Standing here are three Hutus; can you guess them?"

He pushes forward a little, laughing. "Don't worry, guess them."

A half-century of ethno-political conflict has left Burundi one of the world's poorest, and unlike Rwanda - similarly placed - it looks poor.

The major roads in the centre of the capital look as though mines have exploded on them, and the country's major industries include soap and blankets.

Government buildings are still dilapidated, hollow constructions in industrial areas alongside the national brewery and empty green space used as a waste dump.

National revenues for 2006 were $239.9 million, just less than American online gaming-site World of Warcraft.

On the other hand, Rwanda has not only velocity, but also direction - a focus that President Paul Kagame says makes his country the first "purpose-driven nation" in the world.

It is in no small part due to the administration's intent on staying formally neutral on ethnic issues banishing identity through the ethnic group.

This "mind-change" - as the government calls it- in which everyone is "Rwandan and nothing else", has fuelled renewed nationalism that lays emphasis on information technology, entrepreneurship and science-focused higher education.

It has an economy that is as energetic and consistent as any other on earth, and is referred to as a place where development communities dream to work.

"Rwanda is the only country on the planet," an aid director recently told the Los Angeles Times, "that has a chance of going from absolute poverty to middle income in the space of a generation."

The country has attracted foreign investment, exclusive tourism and political prestige on the regional and continental level.

National colours

And at the heart of it are the pop-chic Rwanda flag T-shirts, stationery with national colours and the proud saying, "We are all Rwandan."

Yet the administration has in the past come under criticism from foreign governments and international Western civil-society organisations for repressing freedom of speech and this supplanting of a new social order.

But President Kagame has received accolades for the same concept, and for his steering of a "new Rwanda."

If the system seems to be working so well for now in Rwanda, the question for Burundi is how it could follow its northern neighbour's lead, and why it wouldn't.

Rebel group

The overall atmosphere in Burundi, however little peace there actually is on the ground, is one of relative moderation. There are abductions, grenadings of UN vehicles, and a radical rebel group is still armed in the upcountry hills near the Rwandan border.

Yet the kidnappings have largely subsided, and the grenade attacks have been explained as isolated incidents of "employee frustration".

And the rebel group, though a major obstacle to lasting peace, is a vague background character, not overly important to Bujumbura's inhabitants. It is not expected to play a major role in the government in the future, which will hopefully keep it from ethnicising politics further.

In 1993, the country's first democratically elected president, Hutu engineer Melchior Ndadaye was kidnapped and assassinated by the Tutsi-led army, sparking a civil war that has lasted for 15 years.

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