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Rwanda is one of the few nations in the developing world spending more on education than on the military. Kagame re-wrote the constitution such that his party cannot have more than 50 percent of the seats in parliament. Though Kagame is from one ethnic group, his Prime Minister and 70 percent of his cabinet are from the other. Thirty percent of elected officials at the level of municipality, parliament, and cabinet are required to be women; and a world-leading 56 percent of parliament is now women. The country is secure and the World Bank's Doing Business report recognized Rwanda as the greatest reforming nation in the world last year.

Shyaka Kanuma at the East African reports on an interview with Paul Kagame,regarding Trading Blocs he asserts:

...If we have big regional blocs, then you will have a situation where more businesses from rich countries come looking for opportunities — and more direct investment means less reason to go looking for foreign aid.

“These rich countries still exercise control over us; all these human rights and media rights organisations and so on, their sole objective is to impose Western ideals and values on everyone; anyone who refuses to go along is blacklisted.
“If you reject even some of their suggestions or recommendations, you pay for it. It doesn’t matter either whether the suggestions aren’t practical for us or don’t fit our situation...[continue reading]

Image by skasuga via FlickrBenin Mwangi at African Path reports:

Paul Kagame has cut a striking image throughout the world as a leader who has been willing to go against the grain on so many levels to bring about real and lasting change in Rwanda.
Whether we are looking at the ICT industry, the tea and coffee industry, education, women's rights, or reconciliation he seems to always be at the forefront of his class-that class being the class of current African presidents and political leaders. And his leadership has not gone unnoticed in the since that since he came to leadership Rwanda has made a slow but very steady march towards stability and prosperity...[continue reading]

Chris Blattman writes:
Checks and balances in democratic systems are sources of stability. No one man or woman can rule the state as a fiefdom, and no succession battle can so destroy a nation country.
Africa's strong man syndrome has, some argue, been the key to whatever meager development it has achieved. Witness Yoweri Museveni's Uganda, Paul Kagame's Rwanda, or Ellen Sirleaf's Liberia--both men (and the one woman) pulled their countries back from the brink and on the path to health and wealth.Yet today's Kagame or Sirleaf may be tomorrow's Kibaki or Mugabe--entrenched leaders who refuse to go when their time comes, destroying all they have wrought in the process...[continue reading]

Paul Kagame in the FT:

We appreciate support from the outside, but it should be support for what we intend to achieve ourselves. No one should pretend that they care about our nations more than we do; or assume that they know what is good for us better than we do ourselves. They should, in fact, respect us for wanting to decide our own fate...[continue reading]

Paul Kagame states:

“Without a knowledge base, Africa’s imperative for agricultural and industrial development to create wealth will remain unrealized. Nor will we be able to develop and manage water, energy, resources, health, climate change and biodiversity, to name a few fundamentals.”

Jean-Louis Warnholz at Bottom Billion:

Africa, all too often, is seen as a place do to charity, not business. Returns may be high, but there is a degree of discomfort to take profits out of the country amidst widespread poverty. Jeff Chu, Senior Editor at Fast Company Magazine traveled to Rwanda and sheds light on President Kagame’s investment strategy and the quest to change the country’s reputation. Rwanda’s development vision requires substantial foreign investment to create jobs and raise standards of living. This strategy rests on entrepreneurs taking the country seriously as an investment proposition...[continue reading]

Chris Blattman highlights a report which stated that:

Without much notice,agriculture recently ceased to be the largest sector in the economy for the first time in Ethiopia’s history. This heralds a major structural transformation of the economy and we forecast that the services sector—which covers real estate, hotels, transportation, communication, banking, health and education—will make up more than half of Ethiopia’s GDP in just two years time, a development with many implications and opportunities for Ethiopian business.

...the big risk, for me, is succession. The Prime Minister claims he’s going to step down in five years, but we’ve heard that from him before. Like Kagame and Museveni, I doubt he is leaving anytime soon. While the drug trade worries me most in West Africa, in East Africa I worry about the leaders with endless terms and no plan for succession...To hang onto power, the leader must undermine institutions, even his own party, and personalize power. His fear that he is the only man to run the country becomes self-fulfilling, for the cabal and not the greater institution is what holds the state together.

Susie Linfield writing in Guernica:

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached.