The drivers of cleanliness, order, and the brand of dignity
Rwandans are building
In mid-May we were in Kigali, Rwanda, attending the World
Economic Forum meetings. Across most of Kigali, there was something that has become
a signature of everything in this country – order. The streets were clean to a
fault, the city lawns were properly mowed, the flowers neatly pruned and the
gardens around them carefully designed and tended to, the public garbage cans
look better than anything I have seen in Paris or London, the traffic lights
count time by the second and at night the street lights turn night into day.
Everywhere people were walking – no dust or mud or open manholes that litter
cities in many poor countries. Kigali has public parks that rival anything you
have seen in Paris and the drainage system works.
But it is not these physical attributes that make Kigali
exciting. It is the people. My best impression were the police officers from
the country’s Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU), spotting neatly pressed black
uniforms and shinning black boots. The way they conducted themselves,
walking with a pride and elegance, ear pieces for security communication in the
ears, pistols holstered on their hips and a few with semi automatic guns thrust
across their chests. I hate to make this comparison (because of the
neo-colonial ring) but they looked like American marines or some elite force
from a developed country, not a police force of a poor country.
I spent a significant share of my time as a tourist guide,
missing some events at the forum in order to take visitors around the city to
see what this country looks like. We would drive from one end to another of
Kigali with every road lined with palm trees, a pedestrian sidewalk; every shop
builds a dust-proof pavement up to the sidewalk. The visitors would ask me what
drives this passion for cleanliness and order. I would tell them that Rwandans
have a word for this brand they are building. It is called agaciro – in
English, dignity.
The cleanliness in Kigali is shaped by one crucial thing that makes Rwanda stand out generally- the dignity espoused by Rwandans in a post-genocide era.
The idea that Rwandans should live in dignity is something
deeply rooted in the politics of post-genocide Rwanda. But for the nation to be
dignified, individual citizens should have dignity. To have this dignity, they
must have and do things that make a person dignified. So the post genocide
state and government has actively sought to encourage Rwandans to live in a
clean and neat physical environment but also to be clean and neat themselves as
individuals.
The best and most effective form of leadership is leadership
by example. So the government of Rwanda ensures that its public servants, the
face of the state, must look neat and clean before ordinary citizens who must
embrace this new Rwanda. To inculcate this spirit in the people, every
last Saturday of every month everyone in Rwanda from the president downwards
turns out for community work to ensure a clean neighborhood. On my Facebook
page I have videos of President Paul Kagame, his wife Jeannette and their
daughter Ange with folded sleeves cleaning a street or building some public
infrastructure.
Why does the state in Rwanda with less popular demands upon it
feel compelled to do all this? Why does it perform better at delivering public
goods and services than nations with more developed democratic infrastructure
like Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana and Senegal? Because on most conventional
benchmarks of measuring a democratic polity, these countries beat Rwanda hands
down. But why do the leaders of Rwanda with less democratic pressure on them
feel more obliged to serve than govern? I will revisit this question
another day to argue that all too often, we focus too much on the rituals of
democracy even when these rituals serve little or no democratic function. May
be Africa needs a conversation on the substance of democracy?
Secondly, Rwanda demonstrates the major weakness of using
GDP per capita to understand the wellbeing of the citizens of a country. Assume
someone earns $10,000 per month in Kampala and another earns $7,000 per month
in Rwanda. Whose wellbeing would be better? The guy in Kampala has to incur
extra expenses to compensate for poor pubic goods. For example, he has to
construct the road to his house or drive through mud and potholes. He has to
buy an SUV and spend more money on it regularly replacing shock absorbers
because of potholes. He has to wash the car twice a day because of the mud and
dust.
On many occasions, the Kampala resident has to drive
(burning fuel and breaking his car in potholes), to go jog, run, or walk in a
gym because there are no pedestrian sidewalks. He has to knock boda bodas
because at night there are no streetlights. He has to worry about accidents
(and suffer anxiety) because traffic lights don’t work. He has to pay medical
bills for his relatives and housekeepers because of lack of a national medical
insurance system. All these are costs on wellbeing. How do we price the
benefits of a good and clean environment that add to one’s wellbeing?
When I was young and intelligent, I used to think that it is
possible to replicate the Rwandan experience everywhere. Now that I have grown
old and thoughtful, I think if it were easy to replicate, many poor nations
would have done it. It is not true that all leaders of poor countries are
selfish and greedy thugs out to line their own pockets. All too often, the way
politics is organised in poor (and even rich countries) makes it very difficult
to mount successful reform of the status quo. This is because entrenched
interests that must be accommodated for the system to work benefit from many of
the dysfunctions we see. Any attempt at reform finds resistance from such
powerful interests. The experience of Jennifer Musisi in Kampala and the
subsequent obliteration of NRM in the last elections has driven this point
home.
That is why most successful reform tends to happen during
war or after devastation brought by war. May be Rwanda works in large part
because the genocide destroyed old centers of power, thereby making it possible
to pursue comprehensive reform without significant resistance from entrenched
interests. This sounds callous but nations like Germany and Japan that were
almost obliterated by World War Two enjoyed the fastest growth thereafter,
becoming second and third largest economies in the world than nations like
France and UK that had not suffered massive destruction. This has also been the
experience of East Asia’s success stories – South Korea and Taiwan.
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