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Rwanda’s partnership with Arsenal is already a win

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Rwanda’s attractions are varied and exciting. With the launch of the Congo-Nile Trail, sports and mountain biking enthusiasts from all over the world are flocking to Rwanda, and we are also home to East Africa’s only canopy walk.

The marketing deal between Rwanda and Arsenal has generated a lot of attention since it was announced last month, most of it positive.

Some observers, however, have been unable to overcome their incredulity that a small African country like ours is putting real money behind the idea that we have something unique to offer. But why is it normal for Alberta and Bermuda to market themselves, but not for a place like Rwanda?

The op-ed recently published in these pages by Professor Lisa Delpy Neirotti is typical of this prejudice. A recognised expert in sports marketing, she is perfectly entitled to her own opinions. But not to her own facts, and her mistakes are numerous.

First, memorial sites of the Genocide against the Tutsi are not tourist attractions. They have never been marketed as such, and never will be. These are sacred places of burial and remembrance for Rwandans.

Visitors to our country who wish to better understand our history are of course most welcome to visit the memorials. But to claim, as Professor Neirotti does, that Rwanda’s only two attractions are gorillas and death, betrays profound contempt.

Second, interest in visiting Rwanda is rising, not falling, as she asserts. Rwanda’s three main national parks – Akagera, Nyungwe, and Volcanoes — saw a six per cent increase in visitor numbers in 2017. It is easy to see why.

Rwanda is one of the safest and most hospitable countries on the planet. It is also the only place where tourists can see the Big Five (lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards, and buffalo), as well as the critically endangered mountain gorilla and several bird species endemic to the high-altitude rainforest in Nyungwe National Park.

Rwanda’s attractions are varied and exciting. With the launch of the Congo-Nile Trail, sports and mountain biking enthusiasts from all over the world are flocking to Rwanda, and we are also home to East Africa’s only canopy walk.

Third, Rwanda’s tourism strategy is not based solely on wildlife. Conference and meetings tourism is growing fast, driven by strategic investments in RwandAir, world-class hotels, and the iconic Kigali Convention Centre, one of Africa’s largest and most modern. Citizens of any country in the world can get a visa on arrival in Rwanda.
In 2017, Rwanda earned $42 million from this segment; this year’s earnings are projected to be $74 million. We have hosted the World Economic Forum, and two African Union Summits. Nearly 30,000 international delegates are descending on Kigali this year to participate in more than 90 confirmed international meetings.

Last month, the International Congress and Convention Association ranked Rwanda the third most popular destination in Africa for hosting international events.

Rwanda’s visitors have varied accommodation options, ranging from major international hotel chains such as Radisson Blu, Marriott, and Serena, as well as the award-winning boutique eco-lodge, Bisate Lodge, where Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi stayed on their visit last month.

Our country has come a long way. Today, Rwanda has over 10,000 hotel rooms, up from just 600 in 2001. Professor Neirotti claims there are no flights from Rwanda to the UK, but in fact RwandAir has been flying to London-Gatwick since May 2017, alongside more than two dozen other destinations, including Brussels, Dubai, Mumbai, and most major cities in East and West Africa. New routes to the United States and China are set to launch in 2019.

Arsenal is one of the most popular teams, in the most-watched league of the world’s most popular sport. The Arsenal jersey is seen 35 million times a day. The Visit Rwanda deal has created enormous global interest, which is exactly what we wanted.
Whatever opinions they have about the deal, people are talking like never before about Rwanda as a tourism destination.

Ultimately, in Rwanda, we are going to pursue our goals the way we think best, just as every other country should. For us it is already a win.

Commentator: Clare Akamanzi, chief executive officer of the Rwanda Development Board.

Strictly Personal

Off we go again with public shows, humbug and clowning, By Jenerali Uliwengu

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The potential contestants in the approaching elections are already sizing themselves up and assessing their chances of fooling their people enough for them to believe that they are truly going to “bring development” to them.

 

I mean, you have to be a true believer to believe that someone who says they have come to offer their services to you as your representative in the local council or in the national parliament and they tell you that they are going to build your roads to European standards, and your schools are going to be little Eatons; your hospitals are going to be better and more lavishly equipped than the Indian hospitals, where many of our high-placed people go for treatment, and your water supply will be so regular that you have to worry only about drowning!

 

I mean no exaggeration here, for the last time we had the occasion to listen to such clowns — five years ago — we heard one joker promise he would take all his voters to the United States for a visit.

 

He was actually voted to parliament, or at least the cabal acting as the electoral commission says he was. He has never revisited that promise as far as I can remember, but that must surely be because he is still negotiating with the American embassy for a few million visas for his voters!

 

Yes, really, these are always interesting times, when normally sober people turn out to be raving mad and university dons become illiterate.

 

Otherwise tell me how this can happen: Some smart young man or woman shows up in your neighbourhood and puts up posters and erects stands and platforms for the campaign and goes around the constituency declaring his or her ardent desire to “develop” your area by bringing in clean and safe water, excellent schools, competent teachers, the best agricultural experts as extension officers, etc, etc.

These goodies

At the time this clown is promising all these goodies, you realise he has been distributing money and items such as tee-shirts, kitenge prints, khangas, caps as well as organising feeding programmes, where everyone who cares can feed to satiation and drink whatever they want with practically no limitation.

Seriously, I have been asking myself this question: Would you employ a young man who shows up at your front porch and tells you he is seeking a job to develop your garden and tells you that, while you are thinking whether to employ him, “Here is money for you and your family to eat and drink for now!”

Now, if we think such a man should be reported to the police or taken to a mental institution, why are we behaving in exactly the same way?

Many a time we witness arguments among countrymen trying to solve the conundrum of our continued failure to move forward economically, despite our abundant resources, and it seems like we haven’t got a clue.

But is this not one of the cues, if not probably the most important clue, that we have not found a way to designate our leaders?

It ought to be clear to any person above childhood that this type of electoral system and practice can never deliver anything akin to development or progress.

Now, consider that we have being doing this same thing over and over — in many of our countries elections follow a certain periodicity like clockwork — but we have not discovered the truth.

Put simply, our politics is badly rigged against our people, and elections have become just devices to validate the political hooliganism of the various cabals running our countries like so many Mafia families.

Knee-jerk supporters

We have so demeaned our people, whom we have turned into knee-jerk supporters of whoever gives them food and drink around election time, that now they say that at least at election time it is their turn to eat, which means, naturally, that at all other times it is the turn of the ones who “bring development” to the people.

Clearly, this is not working, and it is no wonder that dissatisfaction and frustration are rife, as our people cannot put a finger to the thing that holds them back.

Apart from these sham elections, from time to time, the rulers organise shows designed to make the people believe that somebody is concerned about their problems.

We have one such masquerade happening in Tanzania right now, where public meetings are organised so people can vent their frustration. But these will never solve any problems; they are just shows.

If the elections we have been holding had any substance, there would not be any need for such public shows, except those organised by those people we elected.

Where are they? What is the use of spending so much money and other resources to erect and maintain a political system that has to be propped by public shows, where people come to vent their grievances over the hopelessness of the system in place?

I am just asking.

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Strictly Personal

Road deaths are symbolic of our national failure, By Tee Ngugi

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“Killer roads claim 25 lives,” screamed the headline of the Daily Nation on March 18. Among this number were 11 Kenyatta University students, who died in a grisly road accident on the Nairobi- Mombasa highway.

The report gave chilling statistics on the ever-worsening road carnage. The 25 died in a span of three days. Between January and February 20, a staggering 649 people lost their lives on our roads.

What these statistics show is that we are well on our way to breaking the annual record of deaths on our roads.

Roads are deadlier

In a column in 2022, Kenyan roads are deadlier than some of the battlefields, I gave some comparative statistics to illustrate just how deadly our roads are.

I stated: “In 2021, more than 4,000 people lost their lives (in Kenya). By contrast, the UK, with a population of 65 million people and 32 million cars, recorded 1,400 deaths on the roads in 2021.

“In Germany, within a comparable period, about 2,500 people died on the roads in a population of 85 million people and 48 million cars.
“Thus, Kenya, with a population of 50 million people and only two million cars, registered more deaths on the roads.”

I went on to show that the deaths on our roads in 2021 were twice the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a 20-year period.

If these statistics are not enough to wake up our somnolent officials, then nothing ever will.

Not the avoidable deaths during droughts. Not the deaths caused by collapsing buildings. Not the sky-high cases of femicide.

Not the cry of millions who sleep hungry every day as officials fly around in helicopters. Not the alarming numbers of street families.
Not the despair of millions of unemployed youth. Not the squalor in our unplanned towns and cities.

Nothing will wake these officials. In any case, as the Daily Nation of March 19 on globe-trotting officials showed, when awake, our officials are travelling to the next European destination or, as the countless cases of theft being reported almost daily in all media show, they are busy lining their already saturated pockets.

Now, Kenya wants to send its police to Haiti to rein in marauding gangs that control most of the capital. Do our officials, or citizens, ever ask themselves how Haiti became what it is?

Cursed by God

Haiti is not cursed by God. It got that way because of systematic plunder by officials over the years.

It became what it is because of officials not performing their duties to required standards, and not being sanctioned for it.

It became that way because its officials love nothing more than to cavort in Paris or Miami, rather than think about how to transform the lives of their people.

Every day in our papers, we read about the conduct of our officials that mirrors the behaviour that led to Haiti becoming the broken country it is today.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator

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