Paul Kagame: Africa’s knight in shining armour

On Thursday Africa celebrated Africa Day, the 60th anniversary of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and its successor the African Union (AU), amid a myriad of difficulties besetting the continent. 

On May 25 1963, African leaders met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with leaders from African liberation movements, culminating in the formation of the OAU, whose mainstream mandate was to champion a Pan-African vision for an Africa that was united, free and in control of its own destiny. 

Sixty years on, Africa might have successfully overcome colonialism and gained full sovereignty but the reality is the continent is blighted by bloody armed conflicts, deepening poverty, disease, ever entrenching despotic rule and corruption. Adding salt to wounds, the continent is most affected by the effects of climate change. 

To overcome the challenges, Africa is worryingly heavily dependent on the benevolence of its former colonial powers to either provide financial resources or human capital to extricate it from this abyss. 

But every dark cloud has a silver lining. 

The knight in shining armour is none other than Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.

Kagame is widely revered not only in Rwanda but across the continent as a problem solver and solution finder to many of the problems besetting Africa. 

Apart from lifting Rwanda from being a shattered backwater failed state to a model country, touted as the Singapore of Africa, Kagame’s magic wand is visible in helping transform the continent and restore African pride and dignity. 

The Rwandan president is widely extolled as the continent’s standard bearer for good governance and socio-economic progress. 

Many Africans across the continent envy Rwandans for having such a visionary and dedicated leader. Some wish he could be seconded to their own countries to fast track socio-economic advancement. 

When he left the rotating chair of the AU in 2018, he had initiated reforms that have reorganised the organisation into a more coherent and robust social political bloc. 

He championed a proposal to levy a 0.2% tax on each country’s imports to finance the AU, which would provide the organisation with funds to wean it off from its donor dependence.

Kagame launched the African Union Peace Fund aimed at developing a mechanism of self-financing of the continent’s peace and security activities. 

Despite being endowed with massive natural resources the continent has no means to fund its peacekeeping operations. It relies on the benevolence of the West to support its peace and security operations. 

Kagame sought to address this challenge. 

“Promoting peace and security is one of the core functions of our union,” he said at the launch of the peace fund.

“However, up to this point, we have lacked a credible mechanism to fund our priority operations in this domain. We depended too extensively on external resources.” 

To strengthen and bolster economies of countries in the continent, Kagame initiated the game changing African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), which was unveiled in Kigali in March 2018. 

 Africa has become the world’s largest free trade area with an integrated, continent-wide free trade zone encompassing 54 countries and 1.3-billion people, and a GDP exceeding $3.4-trillion (R67-trillion). 

The World Bank estimates it will boost regional income by 9% or $450bn (R8.9-trillion) and lift 50-million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. 

To accelerate the implementation of the AfCTA, Kagame initiated the introduction of the AU passport to enable free movement of people, goods and services across the continent. 

So effective was his reign at the AU that the head of Africa advocacy at the International Crisis Group, Elissa Jobson, said Kagame demonstrated that the AU chair – for a long time considered to be merely a figurehead – can be used to promote national interests and boost a leader’s international profile. 

Kagame was named as the African of the Year at the All Africa Business Leaders Awards and appeared on the cover of Forbes Africa.  

To effectively accelerate regional trade in the new digital era, Kagame initiated Transform Africa to develop concrete steps that can move the continent into the 21st century of information communication technology development (ICT). 

In October 2013 he hosted a summit to operationalise Transform Africa. The summit was  attended by more than 1200 delegates, including leaders from Burkina Faso, Gabon, Kenya, Mali, South Sudan, and Uganda, senior representatives of more than 100 countries, top executives of major global brands such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, HP, Samsung, SAP, and Korea Telecom, policy makers, academics and civil society representatives. 

At the summit in Kigali, the African leaders committed to put ICT at the centre of their national socio-economic development agendas, given that the continent was undergoing an unprecedented upsurge in mobile penetration and broadband connectivity. 

At the recent Smart Africa Summit held in Zimbabwe the African Development and Smart Africa Alliance launched a project to enhance digital trade and e-commerce ecosystems across the continent. 

Cross border e-payments through the Digital Payments and e-Commerce Policies for Cross-Border Trade Project will be facilitated for governments, the private sector and small and medium-sized enterprises. 

Kagame and four other African leaders were in attendance in Victoria Falls. 

So successful is the Smart Africa concept that it prompted  Stuart Brotman, a Howard distinguished endowed professor of media management and law and Beaman professor of communication at the  University of Tennessee, Knoxville to comment: “The developed world should look more closely to the developing world for models where doing well by doing good is more fully congruent by design. The Smart Africa initiative is blossoming with each passing month. Our nation would benefit greatly by studying how its large-scale private-public sector partnerships can be beneficial for all who are engaged, and for the public at large.” 

On security and peace, Kagame has helped bring stability to Mozambique, which was struggling to deal with a Jihadist insurgency in the northern province of Cabo Delgado which had overwhelmed government soldiers and spread to other provinces. 

Following pleas by the Mozambican government, Rwanda deployed a crack intervention force that has neutralied the insurgency and resulted in the rapid reestablishment of government control in Cabo Delgado.  More than 3,000 people had been killed, some through beheading, and more than 800,000 people had been internally displaced. 

The swift intervention in Mozambique was a result of a bilateral agreement. 

Rwanda also intervened to repel rebels on the verge of storming the capital of the Central African Republic at the end of 2020 and start of 2021. Rwanda has helped restore peace and calm in the country. 

In addition to these effective interventions, Rwanda is the fifth-largest contributor to UN missions globally and the second-largest continental contributor.   

Rwanda’s role and performance in the] missions have earned it a reputation for having a highly disciplined and effective military and police force. 

To help improve health care in Africa, Kagame championed the production of Covid-19 vaccines in Africa and make the continent less reliant on imported vaccines. 

This was at the height of disclosures that rich countries were hoarding doses of Covid vaccines, putting people living in poor countries, especially in Africa, at risk.  

At the time many advanced economies had achieved vaccination levels of above 80%. In some instances it was established rich countries had bought enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations three times over.   

Meanwhile, Africa only had about 8% of their populations inoculated against the virus. In Ethiopia and Nigeria only 1.4% and 2.3% respectively were vaccinated. 

Kagame protested, slamming the vaccine inequality while calling on rich countries to do more to expedite the distribution of inoculations in Africa.  

As a result, Covid vaccine production plants are being set up in Rwanda and Senegal as part of a plan to boost regional healthcare. 

Kagame is playing a key role in restoring the dignity of African migrants trapped in strife-torn Libya after failing to illegally travel to Europe through the north African country. 

The migrants are subjected to sub-standard treatment in squalid detention camps.   

Kagame moved in and offered sanctuary to the distressed migrants. More than 1,600 have moved to Rwanda with options to apply to settle in countries they wish to go to, stay in Rwanda or go back to their countries of origin in a dignified manner. 

As part of a skills exchange among Africans which Kagame is actively promoting, up to 158 educational personnel from Zimbabwe comprising teachers and lecturers were last November deployed in Rwanda. More are expected to be transferred to Rwanda. 

In a game-changing development in Africa’s sporting landscape, the globally famed National Basketball Association (NBA) and International Basketball Federation set up Africa’s top tier basketball league, the Basketball Africa League (BAL). Teams are drawn from many African countries and games are spread across the continent in the spirit of promoting talented African basketball players. 

The 2023 BAL finals will be played at the world-class 10,000 seater BK Arena in Kigali. 

The playoffs featured leading teams drawn from countries such as Senegal, Egypt, South Africa, Mozambique, South Sudan and Mali. 

The BAL materialised as result of Kagame’s engagement with celebrity basketball players from the NBA with African backgrounds. 

Kagame also continuously engages Fifa with the aim of promoting talented Africans through football academies. 

At the 73rd Fifa Congress in Kigali the 2026 edition of the World Cup, which will be co-hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, was expanded from 32 to 48 teams, with Africa emerging as the biggest beneficiary. 

 The continent will have nine slots at the expanded 48-team tournament. Africa was represented by five teams at the last World Cup tournament in Qatar. 

Kagame hailed the new format, saying he was positive about the increased engagement and visibility for African teams at future World Cup tournaments. 

"I welcome the expansion of the number of teams participating in the next World Cup. Under this format, the slots available for African teams will almost double, creating even more engagement and visibility on our continent."

Kelvin Jakachira is international editor for AB Communications, a multi media group in Zimbabwe.