There was much excitement in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in the week leading up to the convening of the World Economic Forum for Africa recently.
As with past meetings of this magnitude, the government of Rwanda left nothing to chance. Its remarkable mobilisation capacity was deployed to get everyone with a role to play during the preparations to do their bit and do it well.
Under normal circumstances officials and public servants here work like there is no tomorrow. It gets worse when big events that require special attention are in the offing.
Contacts I was running after for bits of information about this and that and who from one to the next pleaded inability to see me, summed up what was going on. The most common response to appointment requests were, “I really can’t do anything this week.”
A friend working for a major government agency wasn’t exaggerating when he said it was no use trying to set up a coffee appointment before the WEF was over, “because I am not able to think about anything else right now”.
It mattered not whether I was talking to a public servant, a politician, or a member of the local business community. They were all “busy with WEF.” What on earth were they doing, I wondered.
In public, there was not much activity in evidence. And there were no reports in the media about this or that critically important aspect of the preparations lagging hopelessly behind schedule. Everything seemed to be in place.
Not here the last-minute procurement deals leading to accusations of corruption against those charged with ensuring that everything goes well. Not here the last-minute general cleaning up and beautification of the city entailing mass garbage removal and the planting of grass and flowers on the eve of a long-awaited event.
Not here the unseemly battling over contracts to supply these or those goods or this or that service by local and foreign businesses fronted by well-connected fixers and their allies in high places.
Not here the last-minute purchase of limousines to ferry visitors back and forth. Still, everyone was busy preparing for the event.
And then the WEF came. And then very quickly it went. As was evident in reports trickling out of the several plenaries and side meetings, many weighty matters had been examined, debates held, and deals sealed.
The hosts were showered with much deserved praise for pulling it all off without a hitch. I paid mostly perfunctory attention to the deal-making and the big declarations regarding what Africa ought to do to avoid being left behind by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Every big meeting comes up with its big ideas. What is really interesting is what happens after all the vows and pledges have been made. The fact of the matter is that follow-up and implementation are two challenges to which our governments fail to measure up, much of the time miserably so.
Even governments with the best of intentions and driven by the strongest of incentives, struggle with these things. With all its famed capacity for getting things done, Rwanda’s government has had its nightmare experiences too.
Which makes it even the more interesting to watch out for which government will have fulfilled which commitments by the time the next WEF for Africa rolls around.
For me, the more immediately interesting aspect of the gathering was fairly mundane, considering what was happening at the level of ideas. In addition to the money they generate for the local economy and the prospects they open up for growing Rwanda’s tourism sector, meetings of this sort have an arguably intangible but hardly unimportant outcome.
First, they bring the world to Rwanda. In so doing they enable visitors, among them the world’s key decision makers, some of them in position to influence make-or-break decisions on Rwanda back in their own countries, to come and see for themselves what is going on.
As with other African countries, what the world gets to know about Rwanda and therefore what shapes popular opinion and sometimes policy about it depends on what international media and all types of activists and advocacy groups consider to be important, and what they therefore communicate.
There are many things they consider to be important, which are indeed important. Some of them have been key to building Rwanda’s reputation for having one of Africa’s most effective governments and as a site of innovations and solutions to what elsewhere are intractable problems, not least in the service delivery domain.
Others, however, have been instrumental in building up the country’s other image as, for example, one where there is little progress beyond the capital Kigali, no debate takes place, no dissent whatsoever is tolerated, and where even the most elementary of freedoms are suppressed, leading its citizens to live in “constant fear.”
Coming to Rwanda and experiencing the place first-hand does not necessarily settle the questions these claims raise. What it does, however, is to allow one to absorb the full scale of the country’s recent transformation and appreciate the broader context in all its complexity, as indeed many delegates at WEF pointed out in media interviews.
For Rwanda, perspective-changing experiences of this kind are real value for money.
