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  • Rwanda moves BNR governor in reshuffle

    President Paul Kagame appointed the central bank governor as minister for trade and industry in his first reshuffle since being re-elected with 93 percent of the vote last year.

    Francois Kanimba, a former World Bank senior economist who had been governor of the National Bank of Rwanda since 2002, was replaced by his deputy Claver Gatete.

    Kagame, who has a firm grip on power in the central African country, gave no reason for the reshuffle announced late on Friday. It had been expected, however, because two ministerial posts recently became vacant.

    Kagame last rejigged his cabinet in December 2009. 

  • Rwanda soldiers kick out poverty

    The fresh dark green cassava leaves sway from one direction to the other as small insects scuttle around, doing quick errands combing the soil for food. 

    “All this cassava you see here, was planted by the Rwanda Defence Forces,” says Lt John Sebakara as he points at the huge plantations stretching towards the horizon in Rwanda’s eastern province.

    Ordinarily, Lt Sebakara and other soldiers would be in the jungles with guns training how to defend and assault their enemies. But taken up by the pressing food insecurity, the RDF, like any other army associated with guns, decided to take up hoes to till the land for agriculture. 

    “Our mission is not only to cultivate, but to involve farmers. We train them and tell them to go and implement what they have learnt,” adds Lt Sebakara as he kicks some small mounds of loose soil, which give way to a battalion of wheezing black ants. Huge chunks of idle government land formerly used as military training grounds for churning out gun wielding soldiers, have been transformed into agricultural farmland with a view to support national poverty reduction strategies.

    Armed with forked hoes and cutlasses, the dedicated soldiers donning full army uniforms and gumboots, descended on the virgin land clearing bushes for cassava plantations.

    The RDF through its Agro Processing Industries Ltd (API) has cultivated 1,300 hectares of cassava expected to be harvested in the last quarter of 2011.

    PI’s Director Finance and Planning, Lt John Sebakara, says API has four strategic business units. They are coffee and silk industries, Gako crop and horticultural production, Gabiro crop and horticultural production and dairy industry.

    With nine coffee washing stations and one mini station, API exports 207.3 tonnes of green fully washed Arabica coffee. At US$ 3.9 per kg, it brings 469,097,179.2 FRW US$19457.

    Rwanda has identified an Indian investor who will set up a processing plant. The factory will process the cassava into flour, starch and ethanol for exports to neighbouring countries.

    The cassava has already created employment for the locals. The workers, which comprise widows and widowers employed to work in the gardens get a salary of RF 45,000 (about US$76) per month.

    “This work is helping us a lot. We now have a group like a SACCO where we pool our money and give out to members in a rotational manner,” says Collette Mukarubayiza, a 51-year-old widow.

    While there are no actual figures, Rwanda is said to have cut down its defence budget, shifting the funds to agriculture.
    Sector performance reports show that in the 2010/2011 Financial Year, the Government of Rwanda spending on agriculture stood at 10.2%, slightly above the Maputo Declaration of 10%.
     In 2009/2010, Rwanda’s annual average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth for agriculture was 7.4%.  

    In 2003, African Union issued a directive dubbed “The Maputo Declaration” for African leaders to increase their investment in agriculture to 10% of their national budgets. 

    “The failure of many African countries to increase their spending towards agriculture has been seen as a serious impediment to the continent’s mission to boost economic growth,” says Dr Cris Muyunda, the Alliance for Commodity Trade in Eastern and Southern Africa (ACTESA) Chief Executive Officer (CEO). 

     ACTESA , an alliance of institutions, is the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) specialised agency.

    COMESA through its specialised agency, embarked on a programme to ensure smooth flow of seeds from surplus to deficit areas by harmonising standards and removing trade barriers that hinder free-flow of seeds among member states.

    Rwanda is one of the countries that have successfully implemented COMESA/ACTESA programmes. Through the distribution of better seeds and training on better farming techniques the country has seen the production of its principle crops – maize, cassava, beans and bananas soar.
    The Rwanda Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Dr Agnes Kalibata, contends that linking smallholder farmers to markets is key to achieving food security in Africa.

    The RDF is a typical example of an efficient army that has gone out of war battles internally and in neighbouring countries and turned to hoes.
    With the post-genocide government committed to rapid economic recovery, prudent fiscal and monetary policies, liberalisation of the economy, and institutional capacity building, the economy has rapidly rebounded.

  • Rwanda to boost budget as growth slows in 2011

    Rwanda plans to increase its budget for the fiscal year starting in July by 16.7 percent to help accelerate growth and reduce poverty, the Ministry of Finance said on Friday.

    It said in a statement that growth would slow to 7 percent this year due to the adverse impact of higher food and fuel prices, which would also push the inflation rate to 7.5 percent by the end of 2011.

    Fuel prices in the country have increased twice this year. The cost of premium petrol and diesel rose from 887 francs to 1,015 francs per litre in January and then to 1,060 francs per litre in April.

    The government attributed the increases to political instability in oil producing nations of the Middle East.

    “In 2011, output growth is projected at about 7 percent, showing a slight slow-down from 2010 due to the expected adverse impact of rising food and fuel prices,” the ministry said.

    “These are expected to push domestic prices and inflation is now projected to reach 7.5 percent at end of 2011.”

    The economy expanded by 7.5 percent in 2010, according to the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda.

    Rwanda’s inflation rate in urban centres rose to 4.11 percent in March from 2.56 percent in February and the central bank expects it to hit 6 percent by the end of June.

    The ministry said the country’s 2011/12 budget would rise to 1.116 trillion francs from 984 billion in 2010/11. The budget will be unveiled in mid June.

    “Fiscal policy in the period 2011/12 to 2013/14 will seek to balance the competing objectives of further accelerating growth to make a dent on poverty reduction whilst preserving the medium-term fiscal and external sustainability,” it said.

    “The medium term budget policy is to increase expenditures for investment projects that generate more impact on growth, while limiting recurrent costs,” the ministry said.

  • Rwandan refugee to Berlin electro diva

    My hour with Barbara Panther is coming to an end and I ask her, prompted by some of the lyrics on her excellent eponymous debut album, whether she’s religious. What follows is a seven-minute monologue that centres around a trip to Rome in 2000, during which Panther took a dip in the sea only to have a panic attack prompted by the feeling that the sun was actually a giant lamp pointed at her in order to make her grow in a certain way. Later that evening she was bitten by a mosquito in her hotel room, an everyday occurrence during a hot summer that left her in such a state of paranoia that she bought a Bible and a copy of Dracula the next day and saw parallels between the two so vividly that she renounced religion. The “flower with thorns”, as she saw it, that had grown inside of her was gone and she was free of its “parasite”.

    My face must be a picture of blank astonishment by the story’s end because Panther lets out a giggle and exclaims, “What an answer !” In a conversation that’s touched on harrowing tales from a country ravaged by genocide (Panther was born in [Rwanda|Rwanda->http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/rwanda] and her family fled to Belgium when she was three years old), as well as temporarily mutating into an episode of professor [Brian Cox|Brian Cox->http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/24/brian-cox-wonders-of-the-universe]’s Wonders Of The Universe (“In our bones we have neutrons and protons and matter that comes from the stars that fell on the moon”), it’s still brilliantly baffling. In fact, it sums up Barbara Panther to perfection. On paper her answers can look needlessly flowery or awkwardly spiritual, but there’s a humour lurking behind the intensity that makes you not only agree with everything she says but come away feeling energised. That we leave the interview singing the lyrics to Wham Rap ! at each other seems completely obvious.

    When Barbara Panther arrived in Brussels at the age of three she did so with the rest of her family. For reasons she won’t elaborate on other than to say that her parents “had other plans”, she and her siblings were adopted into separate Belgian families. “As a kid when you are forced into a situation where you need to adapt, I think you act your way out of it and you accept your way out of it through understanding,” she says. “It was not a natural situation for me, you know, all of a sudden I’m [in Belgium], there is another language, there are other children that are not my blood, and all of a sudden you need to adapt to a situation that is unnatural to a child.” Her early childhood was spent being expelled from schools, with a last-ditch attempt by her adoptive parents leading to her enrolling at a Catholic school run by nuns. This too was short lived : “The nuns thought I was autistic. I had a lot of energy and I wouldn’t accept the things they were telling me, I kept thinking, ’There must be more.’“

    In her early teens she left home and enrolled at a performing arts school. She thrived, but left after two years. Later, this same restlessness saw her up and leave Belgium for Berlin after hearing German electronic music for the first time on the radio. “I’m a nomad, it’s in my blood,” she says. “Nietzsche said it once, and Einstein too, that when you stop growing in a certain place you have to move on if you believe that you can grow more.” When the Guardian asks whether, before settling on singing, she ever tried anything else, Panther is quick to correct us : “I never ’tried’ anything, I always ’did’. Never trying.”

    At some point post-performing arts school and before a year spent at a dance academy in Venice, Panther joined a group of Belgian journalists and researchers on a trip back to Rwanda. “I wanted to meet myself and see my roots again. I was in this crisis of like, ’I want to see who I am’ ; find my roots, basically.” The trip saw her come face-to-face with the scars left by years of war and genocide. While her reason for going was to learn, the reality was that it left her empty and unable to create. “I could only write stuff down, but it was very ugly,” she says. “It was kind of like an innocent child that could only describe what it saw, like bones and death. I couldn’t speak, I was in a state of shock.”

    The year she spent in Venice with choreographer Carolyn Carlson acted as a kind of therapy. “It was more than dancing. She explained to me the ways of the universe and how to overcome the heaviness of life, or the trauma which is life, and to be an energy like all the other energies,” she explains. “Through that I learned not to have this emotional stone in my stomach, to kind of go through it and go over it.”

    Once in Berlin (where she’s lived for five years), Panther started to hand out demos of her songs in clubs and eventually started collaborating with various producers and DJs. From there she signed to City Slang and suggested to them she’d like electronic music innovator [Matthew Herbert|Matthew Herbert->http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/matthew-herbert] to help finish the songs. Initially, Herbert – whose solo work has included [turning an edition of the Guardian into music|turning an edition of the Guardian into music->http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/18/matthew-herbert-guardian-music] – was asked to mix the album, but once in the studio the two decided to collaborate fully.

    “The songs were already written, that’s very important. Write this down : ’My songs were all written !’” Panther growls playfully. “My beats would be all over the place because I would have this very innocent, childish idea of you have a verse, you have a beat but then it goes faster in the chorus. He [Herbert] gave them a root. I had a lot of ornaments and I think he grounded my songs.”

    The finished album is a ridiculous mix of musical ideas (Panther calls it “modern electronic baroque music”), bound together by the sheer force of her personality. There’s a mechanical aggression to it which pins you back in your seat, while the lyrics are either spat out in anger or cooed luxuriantly over an intoxicating mix of crunchy beats and found sounds (the beat in Rise Up is punctuated by the prang of chains being thrown at a radiator). It’s an intoxicating blend of experimentation and melody. As with [Björk|Bjrk->http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/bjork], who Panther is being compared to, the words are sung in a way that seems to disregard the normal rules of syntax and all that boring stuff. “English isn’t my first language so I am free to choose,” she explains. “I don’t have this systematic thing of ’this belongs here and this is the way you speak’. Also, I believe that I have the freedom to find my own words. If for me it makes sense and it sounds good to my soul, that is the way it’s going to be.”

    Lyrically, Panther betrays the anger she still feels not only about Rwanda but about the ongoing conflicts worldwide. On the tribal-pop cacophony of Voodoo she opens with the arresting : “Every night I pray like a bitch/ That one day the poor will eat the rich/ And I don’t care if that makes me a wa-wa-wa-wa-witch“. The words are almost rapped over what sounds like a thousand drummers learning to play a 90s drum’n’bass anthem on some saucepans. Panther laughs when I read the lyrics back to her. She’s aware of their naivety, but that doesn’t mean they’re not grounded in her reality.

    “When I visited Rwanda I saw a lot of skeletons and bones, and for me they were eaten by cannibals,” she says. “I believe now that the rich are eating the poor, not literally, but I hope that one day when the poor wake up and rise up, they turn it around.”

  • Rwanda to import lions, rhinos to Akagera park

    Rwanda will import animals including lions and rhinos and invite five-star hotel developers to upgrade Akagera National Park in a project funded by investors including the head of Wal-Mart.

    The $12.3 million project is being managed by Akagera Management Co., a unit of African Parks, the South Africa-based non-profit development company. Wal-Mart Chairman Samuel Robson Walton pledged $2.5 million to the project, Bryan Havemann, project manager for Akagera, said in an interview.

    This year, the industry may generate $216 million, the government said in March. In 2008, 17,000 people visited Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park to see the country’s mountain gorillas, according to the World Bank.

    “We can keep people who come for the gorillas in the country,” Havemann said in a phone interview yesterday from Kigali, the capital. “The economic effect is going to be huge.”

    The Rwandan government last month said it would spend $2.3 million helping build an electric fence as long as 75 miles (120 kilometers) around parts of the 386 square-mile reserve. The barrier will curb poaching and quell some of the human-animal conflict that has plagued the park in recent years, Havemann said.

    “One of our biggest problems is that people set snares by the hundreds,” he said. Another issue is keeping the animals in the reserve. Last month, 55 elephants — about half the total population — wandered onto nearby farmland before being driven back by park authorities, Havemann said.

    The Athens Group, a U.S. luxury-hotel developer, expressed interest in two of the three hotel concessions available at Akagera, Havemann said. The group may build resorts that rent rooms for $1,500 to $2,000 per night, he said. The company declined to comment when contacted by e-mail.

    The electric fence is expected to be completed in about a year, after which developers plan to re-introduce black rhinos and lions into the park. The animals were exterminated by poachers and cattle farmers who overran the park in the early 1990s amid conflict and lawlessness. They will join elephants, buffalo and leopards, making the park home to the “big five” animals, a draw for international tourists, Havemann said.

    The Walton FamilyFoundation didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

     

  • Witness identifies Kobayaga as taking part in genocide attack

    A
    woman whose husband and three young children were slaughtered during the 1994
    Rwandan genocide cried Thursday as she identified from the witness stand the
    Kansas man she contends led a mob attack up a mountain where she and many
    others had sought refuge from the ethnic carnage that was sweeping Rwanda.

    Her
    account was the most emotional yet as the trial of Lazare Kobagaya entered its
    fifth day of testimony in a federal courtroom in Wichita in the U.S. The government is
    seeking to revoke his U.S. citizenship for allegedly lying to immigration
    authorities about his involvement in the genocide.

    The
    84-year-old Topeka man is charged with unlawfully obtaining U.S. citizenship in
    2006 with fraud and misuse of an alien registration card in a case prosecutors
    have said is the first in the United States requiring proof of genocide.
    Kobagaya contends he is innocent.

    Valerie
    Niyitegeka, a Tutsi woman whose family farmed near Kobagaya’s village,
    recounted for jurors the events of April 15, 1994, when she, her husband,
    Appolloni, and their six children fled as mobs of Hutu men burned Tutsi houses.

    “I
    was OK for my house to be burned — as long as I am not dead,” she
    testified through a translator.

    Niyitegeka
    detailed how she climbed — and at times crawled — up the steep, rocky mountainside
    of Mount Nyakizu with her youngest son strapped to her back. She described how
    the women and children gathered piles of stones for their men to throw as mobs
    of Hutus attacked.

    She
    told jurors she was able to identify the elderly Kobagaya as the leader of the
    attacking mob because she recognized the way he walked and the cane he carried
    that day. She pointed at him in the courtroom : “He is there. He is the
    one.”

    The
    defense tried to cast doubt on that identification by noting trees and other
    obstructions on the mountain that day.

    During
    the melee as the family fled the mountain in the ensuing days, Niyitegeka was
    separated from her husband and three of her children. She testified she would
    never see them alive again. Their slain children’s ages were 12, 10 and 8.

    Joseph
    Yandagiye, a 76-year-old Hutu farmer, testified about what happened to the
    children and their father, who sought refuge at Yandagiye’s house. After taking
    them in, Yandagiye went to run some errands. When he returned, he said he found
    a crowd of Hutus had already surrounded his house.

    Yandagiye
    testified that when the crowd threatened him in an attempt to get into the
    house, Appolloni came out and told the mob : “Take me instead.”

    Yandagiye
    also told jurors he initially followed the mob that had taken Appolloni and his
    children, but turned back after they told him they would make him kill them
    himself if he continued to follow.

    Later
    that day, a group of Hutu men came to get him too, Yandagiye testified. It was
    then that he learned that Appolloni and his children had been killed.

    Yandagiye
    testified that Kobagaya told the mob that they should kill him too because he
    had sheltered Tutsis in his house during a 1959 conflict. Yandagiye said
    another community leader, Francois Bazaramba, urged the crowd not to kill him
    but to punish Yandagiye by making him buy beer, which he did.

    Bazaramba
    is a former Rwandan pastor who was sentenced last year to life imprisonment by
    a Finnish court for committing genocide.

  • Private healthcare firms meet in Kigali

    Private regional healthcare providers will meet with policy makers in Kigali during the third edition of the East Africa healthcare conference next month.

    Spokesman Kizito Mokua said delegates will discuss private health matters including access to capital, regulatory frameworks and tax incentives. “Healthcare leadership and professionals will use this conference to engage with experts and create regional private sector driven partnerships that are expected to translate to high quality affordable healthcare for East Africa,” he said.

    Medics are also expected to discuss how they can acquire expensive medical devices jointly, which continues to be a major headache for healthcare providers.

    Mokua said private sector players will engage with experts and develop a regional strategy to overcome challenges affecting the growth of private healthcare in Africa.

    This is the third round of the conferences after the first two successfully took place in Uganda and Tanzania last year. Mokua revealed that investors from the US and Europe will use the session to identify private health opportunities in East Africa. “’We have delegations from America and Europe who will use the conference as a source of market intelligence” he said .

    The conference, slated for June 11, will also serve as a basis for the private sector in the five member states to establish mutually beneficial business relationships anchored on patients’ interest. “Delegates have expressed interest in developing efficient referral systems which can be used to exploit competencies and skills available in the region instead of having to travel outside the region for medical attention,” said Mokua. This is the third round of the conference delegates are drawn from from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.

  • Number of AIDS patients on ARV treatment rises

    Additional 4,187 AIDs patients in Rwanda have registered for Anti-Retroviral treatment since 2009.

     This has increased the number of patients on ARVs by 5.8% to 76,726, this year, from 72,539 in 2009, according a recent report released by the National AIDS Commission (CNLS).

     CNLS officials attribute the increase to the nationwide sensitisation programs aimed at creating more awareness on HIV/AIDS.

    Rwandans living with HIV are estimated at 3 percent or 300,000 in a population of 10 million plus, the report says.

     Currently, the number of sites that offer ARVs is estimated at 517 countrywide.

     The report further shows that out of 1,393,081 people who took HIV test, 34,239 were positive.

     The report says that women aged between 30-44 years are increasingly taking the lead in accessing treatment.

     The report says that the ABC strategy, which means Abstinence, Faithfulness and Condom, is bearing fruits in educating Rwandans about the HIV spread.

  • No need for mistrust in legalising marijuana for medical purposes

    June last year laid the groundwork for The drafting of a law seeking to establish the rules and regulations in the use of narcotics in our healthcare system. This provoked a lot of controversy due to the implications behind using marijuana for medical purposes, a substance that is illegal in many countries around the world.

    The use of the drug in the medical sense proposed the possibility of it having inadvertent consequences in its regulation and control, perhaps promoting the use of recreational marijuana.

    This move undoubtedly raised a couple of eyebrows with claims of Rwanda being the only nation in Africa to do so. However, the draft law is nothing out of the ordinary. This would be because of the very well known and widespread use of narcotics in the medical world. Morphin and Opium, which are both illegal substances are drugs whose properties are used occasionally to relieve pain or anesthetise.

    Such drugs have resultantly made a substantial contribution to the pharmaceutical industry. Despite its negative reputation, marijuana has been proven to have medical properties that are used in the treatment of many diseases and conditions such as cancer or AIDS.

    “Marijuana is classified as a psyhoctropic drug and the healthcare system in Rwanda, which is under the convention with the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) in Vienna, simply drafted a law in the parliament that would help in the regulation and control in the use of this drug,” says Alex Ruzindana, the officer in charge of Pharmaceutical Information Pharmacy Task Force within the Ministry of Health.

    “It has completely nothing to do with the legalisation of marijuana. It is strictly for medicinal and research purposes. In fact, it is not even administered as a herbal drug , but rather its components are used and integrated into other substances making its administration come in other forms. ”

    According to Ruzindana, the law is in concord with the INCB, and its infringement would therefore go beyond the realm of the medicine thus leaving the issue to be dealt with by the authorities. He adds that medical Marijuana would only be prescribed by a specialised physician and its use would be significantly limited.

    “Other countries across the world have taken a further step by establishing pharmacies that specialise only in the sale of medical marijuana that come in various forms. But we have not implemented that at all. The use of this drug is only exclusive to the prescription given out by the doctor according to the patients needs,” says Ruzindana.

     He advises that due to the strictness in the prescription of the medicine, misconceptions should not arise when it comes to the consummation of this drug. Marijuana remains highly illegal outside the medical world and its distribution in limited dosages will continue to remain exclusive to the medical domain.

  • Rwanda seeks second credit rating- Rwangombwa

    Rwanda will seek a second credit rating this year as it prepares to sell its first global bond, Finance Minister John Rwangombwa said.

    The government is in talks with Standard & Poors on a sovereign rating expected in 2011 and “we expect to be really ready for the market in the next two to three years,” Rwangombwa said in an interview in Cape Town yesterday.

    “We have investment banks that are willing to go to the market right now,” Rwangombwa said in the interview, conducted while he was attending the World Economic Forum on Africa. “But we are putting our house in order to ensure that we are getting the right cost of our financing. There is appetite outside there.”

    Rwanda joins African countries such as Nigeria and Zambia that are turning to global capital markets to fund infrastructure projects. Rwanda has a sovereign credit rating of B by Fitch Ratings, lower than Zambia’s B+ and in the same category as Uganda, Mozambique and Seychelles.

    The World Bank has praised economic progress in Rwanda, where it takes just three days to register a company, compared with an average of 45 days in sub-Saharan Africa and 13.8 days in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, according to the lender.

    Renaissance Capital said in a report on April 12 that Rwanda is succeeding in reaching its goal of becoming a “Singapore of Africa” due to political stability, low corruption and a shift to a service economy.

    Investor demand in the recent sale of the state’s 25 percent stake in beverages manufacturer Bralirwa, a unit of Heineken NV, indicates appetite for Rwandan assets, Rwangombwa said. The government plans to hold an initial public offering for Bank of Kigali this year and “already the indications are that appetite is very high in the market,” he said.

    Rwangombwa has lowered his target for economic growth this year to 7 percent from 8 percent as rising food and energy costs push up inflation and boost import costs. The government may consider lowering fuel taxes to ease costs if its outlook for inflation worsens, he said. Inflation reached 4.1 percent in March from 2.3 percent in the previous month, the statistics office said on April 15.

    The finance minister presented a budget of Rwf 1.12 trillion francs ($1.86 billion) to parliament on May 2 for the fiscal year ending June 2012, with revenue expected to jump 14 percent to Rwf 538 million francs. The budget deficit is forecast to narrow to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product next year from 4.1 percent in the year through June. International donors fund about 41 percent of state spending, Rwangombwa said.

    Stronger tax revenue is mainly due to increased spending as the economy expands, the minister said.

    “People have more money and there’ll be more revenues,” Rwangombwa said. “Also there’s an increase in the efficiency of revenue collection.”