No ‘winner takes all’ in Rwanda politics – Parliamentarian

What is your mission in Nigeria?I am a member of parliament in Rwanda and also a member of Pan African parliament. I am in Nigeria to attend the first Africa legislative summit which is being organised by the National Assembly in Nigeria with representation from Africa to deliberate on promoting democracy and role of the […]

What is your mission in Nigeria?
I am a member of parliament in Rwanda and also a member of Pan African parliament. I am in Nigeria to attend the first Africa legislative summit which is being organised by the National Assembly in Nigeria with representation from Africa to deliberate on promoting democracy and role of the legislators.
What has been your contribution to the summit as representative of the Rwandan parliament?
I don’t have a specific role in the programme, since it is the first summit of its kind. But it has been rather a wonderful experience and we have quite high calibre of resource persons that have been leading the discussions.
How would you describe the programme and experience so far?
It is a very useful programme because it gave us an opportunity as legislators to re-examine our role on how we are performing vis-à-vis our constituency and relationship with the executive. It placed the legislature on the spot on the role it should play as the representative of the people.
What difference would the summit bring into your work as a parliamentarian when you go back to your country?
The discussions we had focused mainly on internal democracy, role of legislature in relation to party position and constituency demands. It helped us much as we are using the Nigerian experience; you reflect and compare with your own country and personal experience and you see where you need to put in more effort and what needs to be changed. So it is more of what is happening within our midst, and draw lessons from what is working best.
What has been happening in Rwanda in the past few years in terms of governance, development and growth?
We have had a history that is comparable to other countries in Africa of pre-colonial and colonial days, independence, post-independence and up till 1994 we had a military regime. Towards 1994 we had what other countries didn’t go through in Africa; we had the first genocide in Africa where we lost more than one million people which led to a lot of destruction, distraction of both socio and physical infrastructure. Now we have started counting Rwandan post 1994 when we started a stabilisation programme where we had a national unity government with all the political forces been in the national government.
So from 1994 to 2003 we had a transitional arrangement and in 2003 we elaborated our national constitution through a referendum and after that we started working towards democracy. Right now we are in the third round of our parliament.
Fortunately for me I have been part of that transition and I have been running and winning elective positions in my parliament since 2003 till date. Throughout that time, if I see what Rwanda has been going through, when we started we had about nine political parties with some of them not participating in the parliamentary.
We have the senate and national assembly. The national assembly has 18 members and 26 senate members. All the national assembly members come through universal adult suffrage and there are some nominated members of the senate while others are elected depending on the provision of our constitution. Right now Rwandan parliament is a unique one because it is the only parliament in the world where the majority in the national assembly are women. We have 64 percent women. Our speaker and parliament clerk are women.
 Recently Rwanda requested for assistance from Nigeria to get more doctors. Is it part of efforts to further strengthen the Rwandan health sector?
On our own we do not have enough qualified doctors, beside that our medical facilities have improved both in quality and quantity. That means we need more specialists in different fields and in terms of country coverage we have more health centres which require more personnel. Nigeria happens to be a friendly country and one of those that always responds to our appeal of more medical personnel.                           
What is the relationship between the ruling party and the opposition in our country?
In Rwanda we are a fairly stable country in spite of our past and because of the deliberate will of the citizens to get away from our dark past. We have made our constitution in such a way that it is very inclusive. So we are practicing inclusive politics. Much as we have McPherson system of constitution, we don’t have the culture of winner takes it all, our constitution specifically stipulates that the president who won an election should not take more than 50 percent to its cabinet. So he gets from the other parties as well and they became participating parties and then we have a forum of political parties, which is a consultative forum, they meet and deliberate on critical issues of the country so that any controversy is discussed.
What do you think would be the outcome of the Pan-Africa parliament summit?
Like I said earlier, this is the first time we will be meeting as different legislatures in Africa. We are not harmonised, so this is a good forum for us to be able to come and talk to each other and compare experiences. I hope it becomes an annual event and moves towards having a single African parliament.