Quote:
Originally Posted by Okayyou
Cool to see Kigali here, didn't you post some other shots of the city a while back? I was there in March of 2010. I found the city to be more developed and orderly than other East African metros. Also very clean. If I recall the city residents have to pick up trash once a week or something like that. Thanks for sharing.
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Yeah I have two other Kigali threads,
here and
here.
I've been in Kigali for nearly two years now. It's incredible just how much the city is growing and modernizing. Kigali's population is just over one million but it's seeing a huge influx of people from the rural areas (Rwanda's total population is about 11 million). Rwanda is still receiving mountains of aid money and support from NGOs and international governments and much of that money is going towards the capital. They just finished laying fiber optic cable across the entire country a few months ago and now we're just waiting for the cable to be run across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean for it to be switched on. So for now we still have to live with really poor Internet speed. The Rwandan government's aim is to make itself the IT and banking hub of East Africa, but to be honest it's going to have a hard time overcoming cities like Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala in those markets, and the level of post secondary education here is still quite low.
As far as language, President Kagame made English the country's official second language a few years ago. He claims the sole reason for the change was to make Rwanda more competitive in commerce and education (the other countries that make up East African Community, aside from Burundi, have been using English since colonization), but many feel he also changed it to thumb their noses at France, who many still feel contributed to the 1994 Genocide. The transition from the Francophone to Anglophone system has been slow, and for people like me who deal in education, very painful.
Today Rwanda is really a police state with Kagame's RPF having a very firm grip on power. Kagame himself seems to be a very progressive leader who really cares about Rwanda's progress but he also seems to be very paranoid about losing his grip. He just won reelection last year, taking something like 93% of the vote (after essentially banning any opposition parties), but the real test will be in 2017 when his legally defined final term in office comes to an end. Will he step down honorably like a Mandela or will he just rewrite the constitution every term and stay in power for 25 years like Uganda's Museveni and countless other African leaders? Time will tell.
As far as the society's progress since 1994, well that's a darker topic to discuss.
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