Kagame made the remarks as he addressed 80 members of Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), a global network of business leaders with more than 26,000 members in more than130 countries.
President Paul Kagame, who is the Chairman of the African Union (AU) and who in 2016 was mandated by his fellow African Heads of States to watch over the African Union institutional reforms, expressed his pleasure in the role Rwandans have played in the AU reforms and said a lot more can be achieved by the Continent and through partnerships.
“It is a great pleasure for us as Rwandans to be part of it [AU reforms] and play our role, however little, trying to achieve results for everyone’s benefits. There is so much we can do as a continent and there is, even more, we can do with partnerships,” he said.
On Rwanda’s progress, Kagame said: “We are convinced that we have had in our past is not what we deserve, what we deserve is in our future. We all go together and we don’t want to leave anyone behind, that is more or less like a religion for us.”
To get the future the country deserves, Kagame urged the YPO members to ‘act ahead of the actual time you are in.’
Kagame said: “I am no longer worried about the past or the future, the sustainability of what we are building is what I spend my days and nights on. We have to keep thinking ahead, and sometimes acting ahead of the actual time you are in.”
“We need to sustain the kind of politics, activities that ensure Rwandans value one another so we don’t go back to the history where one looks at a neighbor, a workmate as an enemy. There is no basis for that,” he added.
The Chairman of the African Union highlighted the mental problem as the biggest challenge that delays Africa’s transformation stressing some cases where Africans beg from others what they already have.
“In Africa, we tend to lower our standards. In some cases, Africans even beg to be given what they have. Some ask for others to spend on them when they have the resources to spend on themselves. It is a mentality problem,” Kagame said adding that, “What is lacking is being able to say, we have all the means & the intellectual ability to think. There is no continent with more resources than ours. The question is what is missing to produce what we need, to take ourselves to the level where we need to be.”
On the AU Peace Fund that was launched during the AU Extraordinary Summit last weekend in Addis, Ethiopia, Kagame said: “The idea was to create a fund and grow it so that we can prevent conflicts on our continent without having to beg NGOs or others to do it for us.”
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