Africa News blog

Women lead from the front in Rwanda’s parliament

After next year’s election in Rwanda, women hope they will take around two thirds of the seats in parliament.

It would be an ambitious dream for equality campaigners in many countries, but after the 1994 genocide, women made up 70 percent of Rwanda’s population.   Rwanda became the first country in the world with a female majority in parliament after last year’s election.   Solange Tuyisenge has a rural constituency and has been a legislator for about four years. She says even more can be done to give women even more political clout.

“We cannot say that we have empowered all women; we still have a long way to go,” she told Reuters Africa Journal.   “We still have girls and women who need representation, to be spoken for.”   She says she believes changing the mindsets of Rwandans is the key, so they “understand that the woman of the 40s is not the same as the current woman, a woman is not only to bear children or stay in the kitchen, there is development”.

Rwanda brought in constitutional reforms to boost the number of female parliamentarians, as well as supporting other projects to develop opportunities for women – such as encouraging them to take up farming.   “Well, personally, the initiative to empower women in Rwanda has really made it possible for me to develop,” Alphonsine Umwubahimana, whose husband was killed was killed in 1994, told Africa Journal.   She signed up for a farming programme, which gave her three dairy cows. She now has 15 and employs seven male labourers.

An estimated 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda by militiamen and soldiers during just 100-days in 1994.

Activists from Burundi, where two decades of civil war killed 300,000 people before it ended in 2006, have been to Rwanda to try to learn from its experience.   After changing the constitution in 2005, the proportion of women in Burundi’s government rose from zero to 30 percent.   “Right now we are preparing ourselves for the next election in 2010, so that they can work some more on the constitution and increase the percentage of women from 30 percent to 50 percent in all sectors,” Burundian delegate Manairakiza Godelive said.   Male delegate Nayishake Eugene said: “We have seen the truth … even if we have not yet started the hard part, we now know that it is possible.”

Who gains from Kigali’s building boom?

Economic growth is fuelling a building boom in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, and the city is likely to be unrecognizable within a decade.

A government initiative called ‘Vision 2020′ is intended to transform Rwanda into a middle income country, with a healthy annual growth rate of seven percent.

Rwanda is one of Africa’s most densely populated countries and Kigali needs to deal with a rapidly growing population that already numbers 1 million.

The Vision 2020 construction boom is creating employment opportunities in a country where many have no jobs. At the same time foreign investors are also flocking to Kigali.

But there’s a negative side to the boom. Structures that don’t meet building standards are being demolished.

Absalom Mvuyekure is a landlord whose one-bedroomed house and two other houses that he owns will be demolished. Though the government has compensated him, he is unhappy.

“For this house of mine the government gave me $9,000 while if you look at the current market value I should have been given about $18,000 dollars. So definitely I am not pleased with this,” he told Reuters Africa Journal.

Congo: Step forward or back to the past?

Rwanda sent hundreds of its soldiers into eastern Congo on Tuesday in what the neighbours have described as a joint operation against Hutu rebels who have been at the heart of 15 years of conflict. Details are still somewhat sketchy, with Rwanda saying its soldiers are under Congolese command but Kinshasa saying Kigali’s men have come as observers.

Evidence on the ground suggests something more serious. United Nations peacekeepers and diplomats have said up to 2,000 Rwandan soldiers crossed into Congo. A Reuters reporter saw hundreds of heavily armed troops wearing Rwandan flag patches moving into Congo north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. The world’s largest U.N. peacekeeping mission is, for now, being kept out of the loop.

Foreign soldiers in Congo are nothing new. Rwanda first invaded in 1996. A 1998-2003 war in Congo sucked in six neighbouring armies. But after years of diplomacy and billions of dollars spent on peacekeeping and Congo’s 2006 elections, analysts are frantically trying to work out what is going on.

The current joint operation stems from an agreement signed in December between Rwanda and Congo to cooperate more closely after weeks of heavy fighting in North Kivu province. Although the fighting was officially between Congolese government forces and Tutsi rebels, most analysts saw it as an escalation of a proxy war between Rwanda and Congo that has continued despite 2003 peace deals.

U.N. experts have accused Rwanda of supporting the Tutsi CNDP rebels, formed in 2004 out of previous Rwandan-backed movements that fought against the government in Kinshasa. As on many occasions in the past, Congo was, in turn, accused of arming and using Rwandan Hutu FDLR rebels to boost the effectiveness of its fragile and chaotic army.

The fighting underlined the weakness of President Joseph Kabila’s army, which looted and raped civilians as they fled the CNDP. But it also refocused attention on the Hutu rebels, many of whom crossed into Congo when they were routed after taking part in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and have long since been used by both Rwandan and Congolese Tutsi forces as justification for military operations in the mineral-rich east.

Rwanda and Congo have frequently agreed to resolve the FDLR problem. With talk of normalising relations, does Tuesday’s intervention by the Rwandan army mark the first concrete step in new a new relationship between the two countries?