During the military war games held in December 2018, Rwanda’s strongman General Paul Kagame sounded like a leader of a superpower and head of a banana republic at the same time.
On the one hand, Kagame bombastically announced his military superiority which would crush any state or group that dared to cross his red line.
But on the other hand, Kagame declared Rwanda to be too poor to afford bullets and too impoverished to lift its soldiers out of poverty.
A Rwandan soldier earns RWF33,000 in salary and RWF15,000 in food rations — totaling to RWF48,000 a month. That is equivalent to US$54 per month or US$1.80 a day.
In other words, Rwandan soldiers earn less than US$1.90 which is the international definition of extreme poverty. Ironically, Kagame arrived at the war games in eastern Rwanda in one of his four armored Range Rover Sentinels costing US$543,000 each.
Meanwhile, awaiting for Kagame at the airport for his shockingly frequent travels abroad was his US$65 million Gulfstream luxury jet.
It appears that Kagame lives a lifestyle of a superpower leader who rules a banana republic in which almost all his compatriots are dirt poor — not least the soldiers.
