{A battery of journalists huddled in a room at Bujumbura’s State House awaiting a meeting between President Pierre Nkurunziza and former President Benjamin Mkapa had a surprising visitor into the room.}
He entered, waved and apparently happy to be with the members of the Fourth Estate.
The local journalists were equally gratified to see their fellow scribe alive and kicking although he had a PoP wrapped around his right arm.
This was none other than Mr Willy Nyamitwe, the presidential advisor on media, who had just survived an assassination attempt a fortnight earlier.
One of his body guards died in a hail of bullets sprayed on his vehicle on his way home one evening while another bodyguard was critically injured.
Without the armed body guards, he would certainly not have survived the attack.
Although Mr Nyamitwe exuded confidence and appeared to go about his duties in a normal way, his physical state was a reminder, among many people in Burundi including his fellow journalists, of the severity of the Burundi crisis.
Killings have become too common in Bujumbura, although the city looks peaceful with the market places and shopping centres filled with people from all walks of life.
This was not the case for much of 2015 and early part of last year when the city was the scene of pitched battles between security forces and protesters who opposed President Nkurunziza’s third tenure in power.
Several senior government officials have been assassinated and the government has blamed armed groups opposed to the government.
Initially, senior military officials were targeted. But later officials close to the presidency such as Mr Nyamitwe have been attacked. Lately, however, senior politicians also appear to be also in danger. It began with the slaying of the country’s member of the East African Legislative Assembly (Eala) and former minister, Hafsa Mossi, in July last year.
Latest incident occurred last Sunday when the minister for Water, Environment and Planning Emmanuel Niyonkuru, 54, was shot dead while on his way home in Bujumbura after a New Year party. He is the most senior official to be killed during the political crisis.
That took place after a seemingly lull after violence rocked Bujumbura. But it also happened less than a month following the Burundi Dialogue session which, for the first time, took place in Bujumbura which, as observers had expected, showed how Burundians remained sharply divided over the mediation efforts by its East African peers.
The opposition – both internally and externally based – is largely against to the position taken by the government on the dialogue.
While the government has rejected the inclusion of the opposition politicians in exile on grounds that many of them had been indicted in last year’s coup attempt and alleged to be masterminds of the deadly clashes in the streets of the capital city, a former president says solution to the crisis lies with the implementation of the Arusha Peace Accord.
Leave a Reply