President Paul Kagame has bristled at suggestions that democracy is not flourishing in his country, and said that the 93 percent of the vote he won last year was not enough.
Kagame further added that Rwanda enjoys a multi-party political system and that he supports, “a right that allows anybody, everybody to express themselves.”
He said the will of the people was expressed during last year’s presidential election. “So, 93 percent — I wonder why it wasn’t higher than that,” Kagame told the Council on Foreign Relations, a prominent New York-based think tank.
When a senior Human Rights Watch director in the audience challenged Kagame, the president said he did not want to hear “lectures.”
Responding to Peggy Hicks a Human Rights Watch director on mere claims that there were no strong opposition in the elections and that some journalists were silenced.
Kagame denied this, insisting that there were four presidential candidates from four different parties, although his three nominal opponents in fact had ties to his Rwandan Patriotic Front party.
The president said anyone can participate in Rwandan politics as long as they do not advocate a return to the genocide that tore the country apart in 1994.
“There are things that are unacceptable here or in Rwanda, or anywhere else if they work to the detriment of society,” Kagame remarked.
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