Paul Kagame seeks to extend his three decades in power in Rwanda elections

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame left little room for improvement in Monday’s election after taking nearly 99% of the vote in the previous round.

The scale of his victory in 2017, along with his 95% victory margin in 2003 and 93% in 2010, raises some questions about how democratic the election truly was.

The former refugee and rebel leader confidently dismissed the criticism.

“Some people think it is 100 percent not a democracy,” Mr Kagame told thousands of cheering supporters at a campaign rally in western Rwanda last month.

Referring to elections elsewhere, he added: “There are a lot of people getting elected with 15 per cent… Is that democracy?” How?

The president insists that what happens in Rwanda is Rwanda’s business.

His supporters agreed, shouting “They should come and learn” while waving the red, white and sky-blue flags of the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) party.

The 66-year-old father of four is over 6 feet (1.83m) tall and has a burly build. He looks serious and commanding in the crowd. He can smile and tell a joke or two, but the bespectacled leader often wears the look of a disappointed elder.

His soft, thoughtful delivery forces listeners to pay attention, and when he speaks, he is usually very direct and rarely beats around the bush.

Even in situations where he used more private or diplomatic language, he used hints to let people know what he was talking about.

Mr. Kagame’s life has been affected by the conflict between Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.

To overcome this problem, his government now insists that people are Rwandans rather than a specific ethnic group.

Mr Kagame has been president since 2000 and is currently running for a fourth term, but has been the East African country’s true leader since July 1994. The Hutu extremist government that orchestrated the genocide.

He initially served as Vice President and Secretary of Defense.

Many of his supporters, including some leading Western politicians, praise him for bringing stability and reconstruction to Rwanda after a mass genocide that saw 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed.

Some have accused his then-rebels of carrying out revenge killings at the time, but his government has always said the incidents were isolated and that the perpetrators were punished.

The president is not behind in criticizing the West, but he has sometimes exploited guilt over his failure to prevent genocide to gain Western support.

Rwanda was also a partner and financial beneficiary of a now-abandoned British program to send asylum seekers to the country.

“Of course I will vote for PK,” said university student Marie Jeanne, referring to Mr Kagame’s initials.

“You see how well I study. If he were not the president, I might not be able to study well because of my insecurity.

To her, the answer was obvious who she would vote for, but there were two other names on the ballot for the nine million registered voters to consider.

The Democratic Green Party’s Frank Habineza and the Independent’s Philippe Mpaimana will both run again in a repeat of the presidential election seven years ago.

However, in the last round they received just over 1% of the vote.

Other political parties are also backing Mr Kagame’s bid for president.

Opposition politician Diane Rwigara, an outspoken critic of Mr Kagame, was banned from running on the grounds that she did not submit the correct paperwork, which she saw as an excuse to halt the campaign.

Mr Kagame has also been accused of silencing other potential opponents through imprisonment and intimidation. He once told Al Jazeera news channel that he was not to blame for the weak opposition.

His powerful spy network is said to have carried out a series of cross-border assassinations and kidnappings.

They are even said to be targeting their former boss, former intelligence chief Colonel Patrick Kareggia, who fled Rwanda after a falling out with Mr Kagame.

He was murdered in 2014 in a suite at an upscale hotel in South Africa’s main city of Johannesburg.

“They literally hung him up tight with ropes,” said David Batenga, Colonel Kareggia’s nephew.

Mr Kagame has done little to distance himself from the killing, while officials have denied any involvement.

“You cannot betray Rwanda with impunity,” he said at a prayer meeting shortly afterwards. “Anyone, even those who are still alive, will suffer the consequences. Everybody. It’s just a matter of time.”

The president’s pursuit of domestic security has led him to send troops into neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and say they are hunting Hutu rebel groups. Rwanda has also been accused of supporting the M23 rebel group there – something it denies despite overwhelming evidence, including a recent report.

“to be honest, [the election] This is a farce,” said Filip Reyntjens, reflecting on the poll. The Belgian political scientist is an expert on the Great Lakes region.

“Of course I don’t know what will happen this time, but previous elections have been…a circus.

“What I mean is that the National Electoral Commission is responsible for the votes and not for counting them,” he claimed, citing the latest report of the European Union (EU) Observer Mission in 2003 and the 2010 Commonwealth Observer Mission report.

Rwanda’s Electoral Commission said on its website that it conducts “free, fair and transparent elections to promote democracy and good governance in Rwanda”.

“For me, Rwanda’s upcoming presidential elections are no big deal,” said Dr. Joseph Sebarenzi, Rwanda’s former speaker of parliament, who lost his parents and many family members during the genocide and now lives in exile in the United States.

“An election is like a football match where the organizers are also participants, choosing other contestants, ordering people to participate in the game, and everyone knows the predetermined winner but must act as if the game is real.”

Mr Kagame, an avid football fan who closely follows Premier League club Arsenal, rejects that characterization.

He was born into a wealthy family in central Rwanda in 1957, the youngest of five children.

However, when he was only two years old, he fled persecution and massacre in the late 1950s with his family and thousands of members of the Tutsi minority, and became a refugee in neighboring Uganda.

Although he was just a baby at the time, Mr Kagame said he still “remembers looking out to the next mountain. We could see people burning down the houses there.

“They were killing people. My mother was desperate. She didn’t want to leave this place,” the president told US journalist and unofficial biographer Stephen Kinzer.

These killings came after Belgian colonists changed the ethnic groups they supported in favor of an emerging ruling elite from the majority Hutu group, some of whom suffered abuse under the Tutsi monarchy.

Rwanda gained independence in 1962.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Kagame made a series of secret visits back home.

While in the capital Kigali, he frequented a particular hotel in Kyovu, one of the city’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. Its bars are popular with politicians, security officials and civil servants who chat over beers after get off work.

Kanazawa writes that future leaders would listen to their conversations while drinking orange sodas and sitting alone at tables, avoiding attention.

These visits to his homeland heightened his interest in the art of espionage.

He received military intelligence training in Uganda and participated in that country’s successful rebellion led by Yoweri Museveni, who came to power in 1986. received further training.

He then led a mainly Tutsi rebel army into Rwanda in 1990.

“[The training] Very useful. Cuba was quite advanced in intelligence during its war with the United States and its contacts with Russia. And political education: What is the struggle for? How do you maintain it? he told Mr. Kanazawa.

He has tried to sustain the struggle by targeting economic development – Mr Kagame suggested Rwanda could emulate Singapore or South Korea and develop within a generation.

Although Rwanda failed to achieve its goal of becoming a middle-income country by 2020, Professor Reyntjens said “it is a well-governed country”.

“The problem in Rwanda is political governance, there is no level playing field, no space for opposition, no freedom of speech, [which] The achievements of good technocratic governance can be undone.

But Mr Kagame insists the large number of supporters who have gathered at his rallies is just one example of the trust and love Rwandans have for him and their desire for him to remain as leader, even though he has said he will cultivate Create a successor.

Thanks to constitutional changes, he could theoretically remain in power until 2034.

Addressing the issue of his time in power in a live interview with state broadcaster last month, Mr Kagame said “the context of each country” was important.

“[The West says]: “Oh, you stayed there too long.” But that’s none of your business. This is the business of these people here.

Thousands of miles away in the United States, Dr. Sebalenzi said he did not know what the future held for his homeland, affectionately known as the Land of a Thousand Hills, but added: “History shows that the head of state is more powerful. In countries with limited access to state institutions, changes in power can become violent, leading to post-regime chaos.