Introducing Ship&Anchor Pub Calgary

Pubtalk: A bizarre soccer week mares Commonwealth debut spirit

GEORGE KAGAME

There’s a story, true or false withstanding, about one of several Taifa Stars coaches in the 1990s. It is about a dramatic incident in which the coach tantalized Tanzania's press with carefully chosen English terms, a language he knew would attract few questions during the press conference. Therefore downplaying the controversy raised by the issue of dismal results after a series of friendly matches played by the team on a special and rare visit to Brazil.

Witnesses to the press briefing, which was dubbed as 'the exclusive English interview' organized to coincide with his team's arrival at Dar International Airport was even rarer in the comedy that is Tanzania's football.

The friendlies themselves had been organized as a step forward in the country's timeless-and ongoing unsuccessful attempts to- develop the standards of the game in East Africa's largest and most populous country.

AT the time the trip to Brazil, (the equivalent in Soccer as Mecca is to Islam,) was organized following another in the series that is the disastrous performance of Taifa Stars-going by the extremely high expectations of the average Tanzanians which have now stabilized at mocking the team and laughing it off as a comedy series.

In this era, the tour gave the Stars an opportunity to participate in, and loose in all friendly matches between them and their Brazilian hosts. In the circumstances, the Taifa Stars lost in huge margins that upon their arrival at Dar International airport, an explanation was demanded of the coach in a press briefing. The national coach was asked why his team had lost in all the matches and whether the team had learnt anything at all in their training camp.

Asked in Swahili about the dismal performance of the team and knowing fully well that just a handful of journalists present at the press conference would ask many other questions in English, he excited the crowd when he decided to address the journalists in English. The event is also said to be his first interview exclusively in English, an uncommon language in football circles at the time.

It is further said that at the end of the interview journalists present were left in wonder and amazement. Apparently, the team had more than undertaken soccer training, they had also learnt language skills. Shooting two birds with one stone!!

You may ask where the resident of the Hammock is going with this mambo jumbo about soccer, especially Tanzanian soccer, when the newspaper has enough pages and columnists dedicated to sport/soccer.  Well, there’s the issue of the ‘hand of God 2009’ Version featuring Thiery Henry that made it hard during the week to think of anything else of national importance to discuss at the local pub. Note. In this pub, known as the Ship and Anchor, soccer has provided some hilarious moments for its patrons over the times. And as such the game is a very serious affair to which women of wisdom-no women of any calibre-are invited in equal numbers as men.

There was one such moment last year when French national football coach Raymond Domenech was asked  a simple question in a live interview about his team and the nature of tactics it had used to fail so embarrassingly at Euro 2008.

Domenech responded to the question by proposing to his girlfriend (a journalist herself) in a press conference broadcast on all major news networks and media houses. Now put this into persecutive, a press conference involving France’s national soccer team is an important national issue. Sometimes even the president of the country is watching the thing.

In the spirit of celebrating Rwanda's entry in the Commonwealth as well as announcement by all the five presidents to launch the full EAC Customs Union on 1 July 2010, (just days before the World Cup final in South Africa in 2010.)

I’ll save you the details about statistics and all, that was way after the pub closed.

"We are in the Commonwealth today, from now, we are going to adopt English as the language of drinking in this pub."

One patron announced after his third beer and staring at the barman as only a man that has drunk three Mutzig bottles plus eating two zingaro brochete can stare.

This pub is a serious one, it is important to be discussing national matters. 

In fact so important and heated was the discussion on Friday that it was agreed unanimously on many issues surrounding Rwanda's commonwealth debut. The members again agreed that in order to further the country's English competence, "We are also signing up seriously with the East African Community. We shall get rid of the Franc one day and if change does not come, we will will seriouly consider taking on Swahili as the first business language. And as if that is not enough, we will abolish the Rwandan passport and adopt an East African one. Yes, with a little foresight, Felicien Kabuga can officially and legally operate his business on Kenya.

We intend one day to become like the EU, in fact we shall have our own serious version of the UEFA Champions’ league. Have you not heard of our preparations for this year's CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup?"

Continue to the next page!

Africa needs to enter the highway of history or risked being blurred

BY GEORGE KAGAME

In a week during which memorial ceremonies commemorating the defeat of Hitler's axis and the end of the second World War were held I watched two movies of peculiar interest but with a slightly similar violent story. One, an oscar award winning performance by Kate Winslet chronicles the legacy of the gas chambers in which millions of Jews were burnt by Hitler during the Holocaust, the other is about the conflict in Sierra Leone which ended in the early 2000s after claiming more than 50,000 and was fueled by one of Africa's curses; the diamond.

The first, The Reader is about the story of an illiterate female prison officer that falls in love with a young supposedly Jewish law student that later participates in the trial of the gas chamber guard. The story shows the blind hand of fate and the innocent clash of two other-words irreconcilable worlds. The other movie, The Blood Diamonds tells Africa's miserly in dealing in its natural resources and its failure simply to connect source to market without a war. The story is told in the simplest of terms that only Hollywood knows and wants to understand about Africa and our confilcts.

As is expected, there's wielding of sharp machetes here, grosteque images of Africans butchering each other there and the occasional whiteman baffled by the exercise. The whiteman is on the beaches holidaying, holding a photo camera, sometimes writing the next big humanitarian story from Africa for a major media house in the US or Europe and other times it shows the businessman unconcerned with a 'dark' people who cannot coexist peacefully while he is doing business.

From my simple write up you can tell one thing, the way that I grasped the stark contrasts in the two movies. The complicated nature of the legacy of Nazi German and the simple 'good bad' guy in the African story.
The European story is told in such a way that tells of sophistication, it is a civilized encounter among human beings that are innocent. On other hand, the African story is told in such way that its actors are simple blood thirsty vampires bent on eliminating each other by virtue of greed for resources whose value they cannot grasp as the diamonds are shown to be traded far away in Europe.

And thats the story of Africa. Since most people out of AFrica never read about the continent in books or in newspapers, they know most things about the continent from movies, and some times (honourably) wildlife features about the animals on the continent. (It is my opinion that Europeans and North Americans know more about the animals in Africa than the people living in the continent.)
So since movies tell their stories in terms of good and bad guys, most people outside Africa know of the continent in terms of good and bad guys too-recently, an acquaintance introduced me to his North American girlfriend, "he is among the good guys", and I was baffled by what he meant.

If one comes from Rwanda and travels to another part of Africa or the world, they will once in a while be asked a question or two after the proverbial; 'Where do you come from?" Having established that one is from Rwanda the next question or conversation will be probing to establish whether one is Tutsi or Hutu, in order to place you among the good or bad guys of Africa. And people in developed countries know about conversations and getting information when they want to. They thrive on information afterall.

To many, this probing is humiliating, some foolish people are quick to point out that they are Tutsi as this is likely to win any sympathy votes, (In a related idea and also as part of this paradox, every Rwandan that goes outside Africa automatically gets the Tutsi tag and plucks it on a pedestal.) There are categories of bad and good in other parts of the world as there was during the holocaust but their differences were not recorded on obvious structures as ours.

In the same way, if you were asked to describe the bad guys of the European genocides, (they have had a couple there, have they not?) This description will pit one particular idea against another. No particular specifics, these are civilizations after all. It is not really popular how the Jews were identified for extermination by the Nazi for example, but there's a wide collection of variables that the Hutu used to butcher the Tutsi in Rwanda. If the identity card never gave one a particular designation of tribe, you could look at the neck, the mouth, demeanor, the hair, complexion and particularly the nose.

The good bad guy analogy is a simple one in the Rwandan context, this is because of the fact that as as you answer innocent queries about your Hutuness or Tutsiness ( such that one can approve whether what they watched is true) They have a set of givens and trademarks as established by anthropologists. It is an attempt to show the blur on the African story.
Closer to home, the story of Rwanda's genocide-in its most famous script as told by Paul Rusesabagina and his book; "An Ordinary man" way after he left Rwanda, and more eloquently in Hotel Rwanda is the moral of this rambling.

When a local story is told in the eyes of a foreign audience and acted out for that audience the people affected by actual events of the story become figures, graphs and theories. And in this way Africa misses out in the real story of the world, our story is told only when a powerful entertainer visits and we take advantage of the photo ops or a charity organization makes a video asking for sponsors of this or that cause. (Hotel Rwanda is off a book written by a Hutu man, and acted by an American and a Nigerian plus a couple of Ugandans.)

The people that are living the events are reduced to appear as extras. It is with this hindsight that French president Nicholas Sarkozy remarked in 2007 at a Senegalese University ‘Africa has never entered history.’ Africa needs to find a way to help real African story tellers to get into mainstream media outlets. Or even easier to develop our own media where we will not be fed on other people's impressions of us.
donuwagiwabo@gmail.com

Awareness lacking as full customs union and common market begin in 2010

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I am going to step into the muddy waters that is the relationship between Tanzania and Kenya as well as between Tanzania and the five members of the East African Community.
But before I do that I suggest that you find/if you have not yet/ read a book titled; “The Shackled Continent.”

The Economist Reporter Robert Guest like so many before him writes about the mess that has been Africa since the end of colonialism, he attempts as much as only a journalist can to ask; “Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades. Why?”
The book is not likely to show you much more that you have not read elsewhere, nevertheless, it is rich with dozes of information that can come in handy while you have a pub/living room/class/garden or roadside chat under a tree shade about Africa.

First, to tell you briefly about the book. The general idea that Guest discusses is that Africans lack property rights or any awareness about it, have not experienced economic integration in small part due to our tribal tendencies and its evils, and have an obsession with land that borders on religion.

Yet we just get pleasure in the perceived respect of owning land not necessarily using it to access any meaningful financial services that can create capital and spur investments for development. The same belief that my forefathers had in owning many heads of cattle but continued to live in shackled grass thatched houses and died of malaria.
 

I was thinking of this book recently when I received an email from a Tanzanian friend. The message was a long opinion about his concerns in regard to the the East African Community.
To take you to the message I received from my Tanzanian colleague, he was reacting to a Kenyan media story concerning Tanzania’s reluctance in fast tracking the East African Community and all its frameworks. Like all the five members in the group using a similar passport, a single customs union, single currency and all the prerequisites for economic integrations.

The Kenyan story, allegedly had alluded to Tanzania being a ‘poor dirty’ country, and that Kenyans spoke ‘better broken English’ than the Tanzanians and would therefore be better prospects for business. The Tanzanian was so bitter in his reply that with pure African emotion wrote; “ If defending our great country means the death of the federation, so be it!” He went on to add that Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda are only motivated by the desire to grab Tanzanian land rather than trade, be mutually benefiting neighbours or even share their own resources with Tanzania.

According to him, Tanzania’s land will be fleeced by the other members of the EAC, the other countries have acute land shortage and Tanzania is the answer as it is the biggest country among the five and has a relatively small population.
The relationship between Tanzania and Kenya is a complicated affair, it is especially complicated if you are a Rwandan writing about it. Seeing as it is that Rwanda has been the most vocal and active member of the EAC, we were invited to the EAC late and we were given a set of conditions to fulfill and reforms to undertake so as to access full membership to the block.

As a result, the government introduced massive reforms to be able to join not only the EAC, but do well in The World Bank Business reforms and put in place the prerequisites of joining The Commonwealth family as well. Because of this, Rwanda’s overzealous ambition for reforms was seen as despair by many in the block.

And considering that only 15 years ago there was a Genocide in Rwanda which claimed over a million people, it was/is simply and conveniently argued that we are too many to fit in the country and therefore we are joining these blocks to reduce population pressure. Therefore for a Rwandan to attempt to tell a Tanzanian to relax that we are not after your land is a tough call.

But in the larger scheme of things, Tanzania and Kenya have a very complicated relationship. In my limited experience visiting and working in these countries this relationship is basically made intriguing because of the crucial tourism industry. In this regard, Tanzania has some of the world’s best and largest collection of natural tourist attractions in terms of game parks, lakes, and history as well as having their capital on the ocean.

On the other hand, Kenya with less natural tourist attractions has expert management that markets their tourism in the country a pillar of the economy. Yet the kenyan tourism industry to a large degree benefits from being closer to Tanzania’s wealth of natural God made beauty like Kilimanjaro, exploiting the Serengeti as well as the elegant and prized Ngorongoro crater to attract high end tourists.

This nature of business has continued for a very long while where Kenya uses Tanzania’s natural blessings to attract tourists and the tourists spending all their money in Kenya rather than Tanzania.

Tanzanian politicians on the other hand saw this as an opportunity, they developed the mining industry at the expense of other sectors of the economy and turned national anger towards Kenya. The mining industry is first of all an expensive one as it is capital intensive, it employs a small fraction of locals and is further riddled with corruption bugs everywhere.
The rhetoric was first, they earn millions of dollars in tourism which would be coming to Tanzania and now have ganged up with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi marketing the EAC? They only want your land. So the anger of Tanzanians against the EAC idea while misplaced is justified.

Even the land that is politicized is a misrepresentation of the reality, a large part of Tanzania’s land covering huge expanses in the west of the country is not ideal for any agriculture, it is lacking in water and is invested with herds of mosquitoes.

The view that other members of the EAC are short of land for their people is a popular one in Tanzania, many in this country believe that the EAC is a project aimed at hoodwinking Tanzanians into loosing their land.
It believed in many EAC circles that this idea has frustrated negotiations in the progress of the EAC unfortunately, and at some point Tanzania, in an apparent show of protest joined the South African Development Cooperation to target investments from the wealthy South Africa, booming Botswana and emerging Malawi. Even if this did not stop Kenya being the biggest investor in Tanzania after Britain.

According to highly credible regional business publication The Ratio magazine, “Kenya remains one of Tanzania’s largest investors – in fact, the country has more investments in Tanzania than South Africa, according to the 2007 investment records from the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC). Britain had 595 projects worth USD1,115m, with at least 232,030 jobs. In the same year, Kenya had 249 projects valued at USD958.21m, employing 37,511 people.”

The British investments are in the mining sector which mainly benefits politicians and technocrats who are not really Tanzanians and most earnings from this sector is repatriated while the Kenyans invest in consumer services like banks, hotels and shopping malls that benefit regular Tanzanian folks.
Tanzania is itself benefitting from the EAC already, Ugandans have opened their schools for students from Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi to access this quality services, while Rwanda-which is in dire need of expert labour has opened her doors to expatriate Tanzanians to work there in technical capacities.

Regional EAC trade has been increasing since the customs union was launched in 2005, and should continue to rise as internal tariffs come down to 0% in January at the onset of a fully fledged Customs Union, also many companies have moved into Tanzania to take advantage of its port access and borders with growing markets such as Malawi and Zambia .

As the customs union becomes a reality next year, the EAC secretariat needs to get out of hotel rooms and the politics of travel allowances to the field. There’s urgent need to sensitize East Africans what the mutual benefits of the union is about and go beyond the politics of blind and sentimental nationalism.

And talking about land, Tanzania is now in negotiations to sell 1,000 square kilometers (386 sq miles) to South Koreans and leasing 500,000 hectares of farmland in Tanzania to Saudis to grow rice and wheat, which means the country has already decided to deal land, therefore the system there needs to depoliticize EAC and land.

Africans and our lovely climate/weather

WHEN IT RAINS AFRICA CRIES, WHEN IT SHINES AFRICA CRIES (Except in Malawi)

Yesterday at 23:44

A few months ago, every day there was a "mercy train" or "mercy convoy" leaving Nairobi carrying food and other relief to some of the nearly 10m Kenyans threatened with starvation -- because it hadn't rained. The dams ran dry and, as happens in most of Africa, electricity outages followed. Now the rains are back. And it is misery again; floods, broken bridges, and although the dams are full, the storms are dropping huge trees on power lines and we continue to endure darkness. Last night, most of Kenya was without power for several hours.
This failure to harness nature is frustrating.

In the early 90s, most of Africa suffered severe food shortages. I remember then listening to a BBC broadcast, in which a ranking UN official was saying the worst was over, and food production in most of Africa will increase toward the end of the year. I thought he was going to announce the discovery of some new crop variety or irrigation method, or miracle fertiliser. No, he said they had been looking at the skies, and the signs were that is was going to rain soon!

Our difficulties with using science to take control of our lives, ends up in situations where we have unbearable dust in sunny seasons. Then when it rains, we are paralysed. You can't wait for a bus or taxi without getting soaked, because most stands are not covered. In fact, taxi stop points are arbitrary. Even if you have a car, it is useless. Traffic snarls become six hours long. And if your car can't swim through the floods, you are going nowhere. My office assistant called me at 7.45am to say she was stuck in traffic. It is two hours later, and the poor woman has not yet made it to office.

And, yes, because of the heavy rains, we can expect that there will be food shortages. So is it all hopeless? No. Take a country like Malawi. It has one of the smallest economies in Africa, and was once among its poorest nations. But in less than 10 years, it has moved from a food deficit case to a food surplus status and one of the leading African food exporters. This year Kenya, the country with the most mechanised agriculture in East Africa, is importing maize from Malawi.

Two tales for two great African cities; attempts at validating corruption

Sun at 15:48 | Edit note | Delete


BY GEORGE KAGAME

".........good for workshops not investments."

Two colleagues of mine would choke if you spoke about your optimism about Kigali's ways of doing things. To introduce you to the controversy, Kigali is reputed for its tidiness and high nich for order and tranquility that borders on sleepy.

The two colleagues, one from Uganda the other from South Africa are the face of cynicism when it comes to observing Rwanda's current political economy and the fanfare it raises in many low key bars and discussions. If Andrew Mwenda listened to the arguments of these two men, he would slap himself in the face. Yet unlike Mwenda, these two African 'pundits' earn their bread and live their lives in Kigali.

Pundit one comes from Johannesburg, as such he will jump to any opportunity to defend his home city whenever the words crime, violence and car jacks is mentioned. (Even if this great city will host the world cup the afore mentioned words are normally used used while describing it.)
Johannesburg is Africa's biggest city, it has more investments than any other centre on the continent and where this development was unfair and unequal in its distribution, it has become inevitable that some felt cheated and resorted to getting what they otherwise deserved. The South African is quick to point out that there are very little investments in our city so as first to attract many people in the 'ville' and two there is very little to rob. (As if robbing is now a virtue.) So it is easy to keep boarding school type order.

But he is not done, he says that his country having taken care of apartheid in the 90s, the early 2000s presented a major challenge to most urban centres as the 'beautiful' and wealthy in the country moved to places yonder. Some entered deeper into Botswana others drifting further to New Zealand, this ensured apartheid fighters never found any resources in Johannesburg to redistribute amongst themselves. Many continued in their violent ways. And todate they are still moving around unabated.

Yet the new economic empowerment programs did very little to address these unequal relationships and so violence presented the only chance at a car, a fridge, a radio and later a mobile phone. Since apartheid had categorically and systematically limited blacks from accessing career opportunities, many of them became very good at the arts, they became musicians, movie creators, painters and writers.

Pundit says Black South Africans are among the most ingenious people you will meet and even if many have not attended formal educational institutions, they are very good story tellers and fashion designers and despite Johannesburg and Cape Town being risky places to visit, the blacks there are some of the funniest and genial people to hang out with.

As you can tell, the man is not exactly answering queries why his hometown remains with a reputation of crime and muggings, but he raises one subtle concept. In a city where there's an active population, participating or propagating a busy social life, it is inevitable that some undesirable people who may rightly or wrongly feel cheated will create havoc at one point sooner or later. He gives Nairobi our good old neighbours to the east as the perfect example. Although East Africa's party city remains by far Kampala in Uganda, Nairobi is the real economic hub of the region. All the 'good' things might be happening in Kampala but all the serious businesses and organizations are in Nairobi.

And there's also a very elaborate artisan and showbiz industry there too, this city also has some of the highest crime incidences along with higher corruption tendencies among law enforcement agencies in the region. To drive his point home he states that Nairobi hosts some of the world's biggest slums and when you walk in its streets you are scared of a cop as much as a street thug. Little wonder therefore that they now have a new term-PEV.

Pundit number two is maddened by the brightness of Kigali especially if the comparison is to his hometown Kampala (which has a somewhat bad reputation of piling huge amounts of smelly garbage in exclusive residential areas as well as commercial hubs,) says the cleanliness of Kigali is down to the fact that most businesses in the city are owned by one entity or interest. He states also that a city which has no busy commercial hub is very easy to clean. "If all you clean are NGO offices and residential lanes", you can as well keep the city clean all year long," he adds with murkiness; "Kigali is a clean city for workshops not investments."

With businesses increasing in downtown Kigali, it is prudent to learn from the two gentlemen above about the direction that our great city is likely to take. Whether Kigali's peacefulness and tidiness is due to the fact that there are few private businesses Or due to the fact that there's really no active active social, is stuff for sociologists.
The moral of this story -if you have been patient enough to read upto here- is to start the debate in Kigali. With the increase in arrests of public officials involved in corruption, and most recently the Rwandan police being named (By the Ombudsman) as being among the most corrupt institutions in the country, are we headed to being the new SA or Kenya? Shall Rwanda also become corrupt and lose its new found position among many as a darling of good governance? A sort of new girl on the block cliche?
Updated on Sunday ·

Comment · Like

Gregory Mabele;
Look on the bright side - at least you're arresting corrupt public officials, very much unlike in Nairobi. This gives a good façade to investors who will soon start flocking once their confidence levels become optimum.
Mon at 01:09 · Delete

George Kagame;
Yo Greg,
They have indeed started flocking to Kigali. Problem is that the public officials being caught are fleecing gov't money which is actually donor funds-and thats deadly because our 'good' old donors will go away/they will discourage investors in their backyards.
Lucky you, you have the Indians and akina Lord Cholemondely-his name is so hard to spell-who will never go away.......before they chase you all from their ranches...

Honour and pride minus humility; the paradox of Rwanda

BY GEORGE KAGAME


In 2007 the World Bank, in its annual Doing Business Index placed Rwanda 158 among 175 countries worldwide in attracting entrepreneurs. Rwanda was upset, how can it be? Conferences were called, workshops and retreats were held. Something had to be done to improve this bad position. How can we be close to the last? The last in these times being the likes of Zimbabwe, Somalia, Iraq etc.

How can we perform so well in the tourism festival in Berlin and fail in our backyard in encouraging entrepreneurs to start and develop businesses? At that time the government called anyone with some business knowledge to policy round tables. Whoever thought there was no democracy in the country at the time would have noted these brain storming sessions. The Strategy and Policy office in the Presidency took on a major role and even if he worked behind curtains, David Himbara increasingly became a major figure in the country at the time.

The Rwanda Investment and Export Promotions with Francis Gatare also took centre stage. Note that the Private Sector Federation re-branded but remained largely a desktop lobby organization. The other two offices embarked on a vigorous PR campaign targeting the local media and later regional media house. Crucially Tony Blair-he needs no introduction- was on board too.

The following year Rwanda was ranked 139, I remember about the same-time covering an event at Hotel Umubano where a certain Nkurunziza who was heading one of the business improving agencies in the country said some unflattering things and soon loosing his job in the reshuffles that followed that meeting.

About the same-time, the RPSF-Rwanda Private Sector Federation- also took note of the winds of change and came on board. The first activity was meet President Paul Kagame and address with him the issues deterring investments in the country. Its head Robert Bayigamba said the high cost of transporting goods and services to the Rwandan market along with the absence of an effective tax rate were some of the issues that had to be dealt with effectively if Rwanda were attract more investments. (Although soon afterwards, at a conference called by the RRA some of the leading accountants in the revenue agency said they did not understand that tax system in the country.) But perhaps due to this meeting Kenyans firms started arriving in Kigali as did Nigerian Banks.

The government then opened a training institute in Butare where RRA tax collectors could be trained on basic tax systems in Rwanda, how to collect the taxes and more importantly how make these collections useful in the development of the country. The tax collectors after learning from the institute came back to Kigali and utilized their lessons very well and tax collection in the country increased considerably to Frw 566.2 billion. T he only hitch being that some of the tax collectors having collected this sum were jealous to hand it all to government and so they diverted some of it to building villas in Nyarutarama and Kibagabaga. Ever alert, the spies caught with some and they were sent to the 'commune.'

Characteristically cautious, Kagame formed a special unit in his office to advise him on how to attract investments to the country. The Doing Business in Rwanda task force began its work in December 2007 and, within nine months had identified and successfully implemented 15 investment climate improvements, most of which were captured in the 2008 survey causing Rwanda to move several notches up from 158 to 139. These included; reduced cost of port and terminal handling by liberalizing the warehouse services sector, and new customs declaration points which helped to accelerate trade. Furthermore, decentralization sped the issuance of building permits.

The task force came into force at about the same time that the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development along with the Rwandan country office of the World Bank hired The Policy Practice, a savvy consultancy firm from the US to advise economic policy makers on business reforms to improve local private investments.

These reforms included starting a professional framework for employees and employers in the formal sector like regulating or establishing working hours, (although this was kept only on paper) and advising the government to lobby for increased working hours at all boarder points in Kenya, Uganda and the sea port of Mombassa. AS a result all terminal points started 24 hour shifts. Exports and imports increased and reforms in the land and agriculture sector were also undertaken.

The multi frontal strategy to improve business in the country especially targeted improving the lagging service sector in the country and as a result performance contracts were established for local government authorities and enforced albeit in dramatical form.
They were to be calculated in percentages. The ICT philosophy also became ingrained in the now famous Vision venti venti ideology. Not to be outdone the RPSF hired a South African research organization to advise it on how to be more efficient in service delivery to Rwandan investors, and also how to draft reports to their appointing authority.

In the process the amount of money spent on consultancy in the country totaled to Frw 80 Billion and a large percentage of that going to foreignors!
Recently as the Immigration officials lined up at the airport to receive Anaclet Kalibata, carrying the latest award in good institutional management thanks to the good service of the commission he heads, there was a major feeling of satisfaction and pride. It was the same case with President Kagame's return from the Former US President Bill Clinton's Global Initiative about the same-time as he was awarded for his commitment to good leadership.


But when the Mo Ibrahim released their analysis of service in the country it was not favourable because Rwanda was placed nearest to the bottom rung. Transparency International also had their take on our fight against corruption and they were not sugar coating. Institutional bosses were defense immediately up in arms defending themselves without giving any credence to the two organizations.

And this rises the question, if we are happy and enjoy being honoured and praised for good works by foreignors, why are we not humble enough to accept criticism. Denying the voice of critics and then partially implementing their recommendations is a sign of double standards and we don't want that on our resume.

Ends
donuwagiwabo@gmail.com