Why Kagame Propagandists Are Not Very Bright – They Make Easily Disproved Lies

Kagame Propagandists keep recycling the bogus story that I fled Rwanda because I organized to be paid large sums of money by an international organization, and got caught.

Manasseh Nshuti was the first to write this trash in the Kagame mouthpiece, the New Times. Nshuti claimed that I “engineered a consultancy contract from an international organization in Rwanda” that was to pay me US$15,000 per month.

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/section/article/2014-10-24/182278/

These propagandists fail to realize that we live in the world of Internet in which public records are instantly accessible.

Why would I need to engineer something that was official and transparent? The entire capacity building project I was running in Rwanda was financed by several international organizations, including the World Bank, and the African Development Bank.

In the case of the African Development Bank, the details of the funding for the capacity building work I was leading are found here in this January 2009 document on “Support for Policy and Strategy Development.”

http://www.afdb.org/…/Rwanda_-_Support_for_Policy_and_Strat…

As indicated in the African Development Bank document attached here, my position in Strategy and Policy Unit and other responsibilities were funded and described as follows:

“This component entails support for the position of Strategic Adviser to SPU (terms of reference and profile attached in Annex 1). It will also fund short-term consultants to provide policy advisory services and mentor SPU professional staff. The consultants will work with SPU staff to prepare policy briefs/papers and analytic products for the National Leadership Retreat organised annually under the auspices of the Presidency; as well as special studies/investigations to follow-up ideas and recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Council. Some equipment support will also be provided to SPU. Key outputs include trained SPU staff, policy briefs and special studies prepared.”

So why did the Strategy and Policy work require external financing as opposed to relying on Rwanda government budget?

The challenge we faced was enormous while there was hardly any expertise in Rwanda to perform the work. We had to hire teams from outside the country, while training Rwandans. A three-person expertise was acquired from Kenya, while the Tony Blair provided us with a twelve-person team. The Kenyan team was funded by resources from the World Bank, while the Tony Blair was financed by the Sainsbury family charity, the Gatsby foundation in U.K. Separately, the private sector development arm of the World Bank, IFC, supported our work via another team to assist with Doing Business Reforms.

Before we embarked on these reforms Rwanda was a mess. This is how the World Bank described the failed capacity building in Rwanda at the time:

“Numerous capacity building initiatives have failed to make a lasting impact because of insufficient coordination within ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs), between MDAs, and between the GoR and donors. Moreover, capacity building projects have been designed and implemented in isolation and without a guiding national strategy, and linkages and complementarities between various capacity building projects are rarely considered. In addition, past capacity building activities were often fragmented and donor-driven with little Rwandan ownership. There i s no institutional framework for managing GoR-donor relationships in capacity building and ensuring a sufficient flow of information on needs assessments, capacity gaps, ongoing activities, technical assistance and outcomes of training programs.”

http://documents.worldbank.org/…/373441468777…/pdf/27857.pdf

So what did we accomplish from 2006 to 2009? Our reforms led to the establishment of the following:

1) Strategy and Policy Unit (SPU) to lead the reform process;

2) Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR) to provide independent analysis outside government structures;

3) Ministry of Cabinet Affairs to streamline leadership decision-making processes;

4) Rwanda Development Board (RDB) to bring investment and export promotion under one roof;

5) Doing Business reforms saw Rwanda improve spectacularly.

Kagame propagandists are not very bright. They think they can lie their way around – repeatedly abusing people’s intelligence. But the records are here for all to see. We say shame on them for pedalling half-baked lies.

David Himbara