Sometimes Rwanda can never win

Damned if you do and damned if you don’t

There is a saying in public relations “there is no such thing a bad publicity.” Indeed, any negative story can be used to elicit good publicity or at least publicity. The opposite is true as well, in the world of national publicity, any good story can be used to generate negative publicity. A recent example is the study by transparency international that claimed Rwanda had the lowest corruption rate in East Africa, while Uganda, Kenya and Burundi rated at over 30% prevalence we had only 3-6% prevalence. It claimed the rate was negligible, good story I thought, but think again.


The BBC claimed that this was a sign of political oppression in Rwanda, if prosecuting corrupt officials is political oppression then I am all for it. It is like Africans have to conform to certain negative stereotypes and any attempt to depart from this is painful for some foreign journalists. How can Africans move past this stereotyping? We need to stop conforming to what is expected from us. A border guard is expected to solicit bribes, a tax inspector is also expected to take kickbacks, so how can you change that?


It requires both the carrot and a very big stick, government servants in East Africa apart from Rwanda are rarely paid on time, their salaries barely rise in line with inflation and few can blame them for being resourceful in how they are paid. Another aspect is developing a target oriented culture, few civil servants know what targets they are working towards so they work towards their own goals of self-enrichment. The final is the most important, to use the big stick – the threat of prosecution must always be there. Even though Rwanda has a limited skills base, it is not afraid to prosecute government officials without fear or favour.


The fight against corruption is a constant ongoing war, like how you have to take a bath every day. The scourge of corruption is constantly there and will never go away, we need to always review the processes, checks and balances to stop the evolution of corruption. Officials are always devising ever more clever ways to steal public funds, such as interfering with the tendering systems or even withholding large sums of money to skim the interest. The more complex the checks and balances, the cleverer the corruption scam.


The fragmented nature of tribal politics facilitates corruption, in some countries the pie has to be divided according to tribal quota. Burundi is now the most corrupt country in Africa, let alone East Africa. The pie has to be divided to a strict quota, 84% for Hutu, 15% for Tutsi and 1% for Twa. If you fail to fulfil that quota then you are in danger of being corrupt, so you have the curious situation where a corrupt Hutu is looking for a Tutsi to share 15% of their ill-gotten gain. This is the Africa that the BBC knows and loves, because if a correspondent cannot bribe an official then it means the world is turned on its head.