In August, political parties in Rwanda got busy travelling up
and down the country, canvassing for votes for the parliamentary
elections that took place at the beginning of this month.
As has been the case with previous electoral cycles, this one left me with many takeaways.
To
capture the importance of these takeaways and why they give pause for
thought, it is important to outline some things that have been said or
written about governance in Rwanda over the past 24 years. One is the
claim that there is “no political competition” in the country.
This
links smoothly to another claim: Political space in Rwanda is closed.
This particular claim allowed would-be exporters of democracy to Rwanda
to demand that the “political space” be “opened up” to allow for wider
participation.
In response to the pressure to open up,
the authorities insist that theirs is a political system whose workings
reflect the country’s uniquely difficult history and a collective
determination by those upon whom primary responsibility for ensuring
political stability in the long run has fallen in the past two decades.
Their
primary aim is to ensure that past mistakes that made instability
inevitable are not repeated. A key mistake, the argument often goes, was
unrestrained competition amid systematic use of sectarianism by those
in pursuit of power to further their ambitions.
It is
easy for those given to applying standard templates to every situation
to dismiss these arguments as excuses, and to refuse to judge Rwanda’s
political reality on its merits.
The best way to
examine the question of political space and the degree to which in
Rwanda it is open or closed is to look at the number of political
parties in the country, changes in the number over time, how political
campaigns are conducted and managed, and the organisation of elections.
Contrary
to the all-too-common claim that Rwanda is a one-party state, there are
actually 11 political parties in the country. Here, more than elsewhere
in East Africa, election campaigns are a matter of constantly shifting
alliances. Presidential elections can see several parties sponsoring
individual candidates as happened in 2003 and 2010.
Then
comes another presidential election and the same parties forgo the
opportunity to sponsor their own candidates and instead choose to rally
behind a single candidate as happened when President Paul Kagame
contested and was re-elected for a third term in 2017.
Come
parliamentary elections, some parties will go it alone while others
seek alliances to bolster their chances of securing a seat or two.
Rwandan
political parties may not be so fractious, but they are not immune to
bitter splits. One such split saw some members of the Social Democratic
Party, the second largest behind the RPF, walk away to form another
party, which was nearly stillborn because of infighting that ended with
its first leader spending a few years in prison.
Interestingly,
a lot of what happens inside Rwanda in terms of political competition
and alignments and re-alignments is largely unknown outside the
country’s borders.
One reason is that inter-party
political contests are largely sedate affairs entailing neither violence
nor verbal fights of the kind that feed media headlines.
Nor
are political campaigns in Rwanda occasions for politicians and
political parties to spend fortunes on buying political support or
paying hooligans to disrupt each other’s rallies, another aspect of
politics elsewhere that sells newspapers and keeps people glued to their
radios and television screens.
Another reason is that
there has been no occasion when the army or the police have had to
intervene in inter-party political contests and thereby ignite the kind
of controversies that reverberate around the globe.
Arguably
the most striking aspect of participation in politics by Rwandans, is
the opportunity afforded to every eligible voter, wherever they live in
the world, to have their say in electoral contests. It is probably not
that significant that Rwandans in the diaspora can and do vote in
presidential elections.
What is significant is that
voters in any location in the world can organise themselves to vote,
including supervising the elections and tallying the votes, and then
relay the results back to the national electoral commission in Kigali.
Even
Africa’s much-vaunted democracies, the likes of Ghana and others from
which the rest of us are supposed to learn, do not go this far in
enfranchising their citizens.
Even more significant,
these recent legislative elections have demonstrated that even polls
that observers may not consider insufficiently important to merit all
the resources required to enable the diaspora to vote are taken
seriously in Rwanda.
Which is why on September 2, a day
before Rwandans inside the country went out to vote, their compatriots
in the diaspora trooped to dozens of polling stations outside the
country.
Even Rwandans who ordinarily live in the
country but happen to be travelling on that day voted from wherever they
were. So much for the country’s “closed” political space.
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