It Is Political Tomfoolery For Paul Kagame To Accept Being A Life President
Rwanda is now concluding a referendum process through which the current president Paul Kagame is expected to get constitional mandate to reign for life as a president of Rwanda. The reasons for this political flap are not technically palpable. However, an analytical out-look, will obviously show that it is nothing else other than the cult of personal megalomania and political falstaffity among African presidents that is making Paul Kagame to accept changing the law in his favour so that he rules Rwanda forever down to his shrouded cadaver. Socially, this is an apex of political tomfoolery, as the concept of being a president for more than two terms is not justifiable any in the cosmopolitics of 21st century.
Why the people of Rwanda are voting to make Kagame the life president is because of state intimidation but not out of voluntary expression of free-will and democratic right. Since he became the president of Rwanda through violent means, Paul Kagame has worked so hard to destroy democratic space in Rwanda.
He has totally killed freedom of the media, destroyed right to privacy, marred freedom to express the self, decimated freedom of tribal identity, destroyed right to bury a kin in the family land, he shrank the socialization space, he increased and infiltrated among the people of Rwanda fear through state intimidation and police brutality as well as prison brutality, he destroyed democratic space, he perpetrates extra-judicial killings, he destroyed space for political dialogue, he destroyed freedom to overt consciousness, culled freedom and right to leisure, he also destroyed intellectual freedom; freedom of critical art and creativity he diminished.
He only does this use the over-policed state machinery in the name of fighting corruption and tribalism. In fact the people of Rwanda exist like the frightened characters in George Orwell’s 1984, under the snippering and owlish watch of the big brother.
The people of Rwanda are being tyrannized into voting Kagame a life president, because if any one of them tries to oppose or have a different idea, he will be arrested and given a long sentence in prison. Beyond all the rudiments, Paul Kagame needs to and must decline from this idea of being a life president, let him retire from politics the way Jakaya Kikwete and Jonathan Goodluck have done.
He should not monkey-wrench the actual democratic feelings of the people of Rwanda by imposing on them his warped conscience. Additionally he must stop converting Burundian refugees into guerrillas to fight against Nkurunziza in the future. Let him only give them the asylum, as we wait for the African Union and the UN to get a good solution. Or otherwise, I will agree with the words of a Political scientist at Moi University, Mr. Wenani Kilong that Rwanda and Burundi will make the black sheep of the east African community.
Alexander Khamala Opicho,
Lodwar , Kenya