Rwanda’s Rigged Election

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Malawi’s vice president is killed in plane crash, Somalia gets a two-year U.N. Security Council seat, and Egypt faces a natural gas shortage.

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Rwanda will hold presidential elections on July 15, when incumbent President Paul Kagame is almost certain to be reelected for a fourth term. Kagame has been in power for nearly 25 years, and so far, only two people have been cleared to run against him, according to a provisional list of candidates released Thursday by the electoral commission.

Several opposition figures have been barred from running, including Victoire Ingabire—who wrote an article arguing for her inclusion in Foreign Policy last month—and Diane Rwigara, a fierce critic of Kagame.

“After all the time, work and effort I put in, I am very disappointed to hear that I am not on the list of presidential candidates,” Rwigara posted Friday on social media. “Paul Kagame, why won’t you let me run?”

The electoral commission said Rwigara had failed to provide the correct documentation to prove that she had no criminal record, and that she had not met the threshold of 600 supporting signatures.

Rwigara leads the People Salvation Movement and was also disqualified from the last presidential poll, which was held in 2017. She was then jailed for more than a year on charges of forging supporters’ signatures on her application and inciting insurrection; she was acquitted in December 2018.

Rwigara is the daughter of Assinapol Rwigara, a wealthy businessman who had financed Kagame’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party before falling out with its leaders. In 2015, the elder Rwigara died in a car crash, which family members allege was a political assassination.

Ingabire lost an appeal in March to lift a ban on her candidacy in the presidential election. She spent eight years in prison for threatening state security and “minimizing” the 1994 genocide. She was freed in 2018 and banned from competing for office because individuals who have been jailed for more than six months cannot run in Rwandan elections.

Rights groups and opponents of Kagame say the country’s political repression has long been ignored by global powers in favor of stability. Rwanda is one of the largest contributors to peacekeeping in Africa, having sent troops to operations in the Central African Republic and Mozambique. “Rwanda’s contributions to multilateral operations, under the aegis of the AU and the UN, have also been used to stave off criticism of its human rights record, both domestically and abroad,” said a Human Rights Watch report published last year.

“The government’s commitment to deploying Rwandan soldiers in multinational peacekeeping missions has not only strengthened the country’s foreign relations but also projected the narrative of Rwanda as a developmental success. This carefully crafted public image is not reflective of reality,” Ingabire wrote in Foreign Policy.

Rwanda’s economy had a GDP that was growing at around 10 percent annually before the COVID-19 pandemic and at more than 7 percent today. Behind the numbers, the growth is sustained by high donor aid, which still accounts for 40 percent of the country’s budget. A  Financial Times investigation published in 2019 suggested that the Rwandan government had misrepresented some of its data on poverty reduction.

The two approved candidates—Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party and independent Philippe Mpayimana—were also the only candidates permitted to run in the 2017 election, and they do not pose a threat to Kagame’s bid. Habineza and Mpayimana each secured less than 1 percent of the vote in the last election.

In 1994, Kagame led the armed wing of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ended a genocide in which some 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists in just 100 days. Kagame took office shortly after the 1994 genocide as vice-president, and since 2000 has won the three subsequent presidential elections with at least 93 percent of the votes, which critics deem implausible. He gained 99 percent of the votes in the 2017 elections.

Kagame’s supporters argue that Rwanda is a well-run nation with stable electricity, accessible public services, and the largest share of women in parliament globally. But “the memory of genocide has become a political tool for the Kagame regime to enrich itself and cling to power indefinitely,” wrote Rwandan affairs analyst Norman Ishimwe Sinamenye in Foreign Policy.

The Rwandan Constitution was amended in 2015, scrapping the original two-term limit and allowing two more terms of five years each, enabling Kagame to run for a controversial third term—and another after it. He could potentially stay in power until 2034.

Kigali’s extensive state surveillance and poor human rights records have largely been overlooked by the foreign powers that bankroll the Rwandan government. Critics accuse Kagame of ordering political assassinations and forced disappearances of rivals. Neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, U.S. officials, and United Nations experts have accused Rwanda of sponsoring the M23 rebel group operating in eastern Congo. The U.S. State Department claimed that the Rwandan army and M23 were responsible for bombing a refugee camp in Goma, Congo, last month.

The final list of candidates is expected to be announced on June 14, leaving excluded candidates little time to appeal the electoral body’s decision. Yet, Kagame’s victory in July is assured—and his government is unlikely to face much blowback about its democratic shortcomings.

 Thursday, June 13: Tanzanian Finance Minister Mwigulu Nchemba and Ugandan Finance Minister Matia Kasaija are set to present their 2024-25 budgets.

Thursday, June 13, to Saturday, June 15: Leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Kenya to attend the G-7 summit held in Italy.

Saturday, June 15, to Sunday, June 16: Kenyan President William Ruto set to address the Russian-Ukraine peace summit held in Switzerland.

Sunday, June 16: South Africa’s deadline for the formation of a governing coalition

Saturday, June 29: Mauritania holds a presidential election.

Malawi plane crash. Malawi’s vice president, Saulos Chilima, and nine others were killed in a plane crash, the country’s president announced on Tuesday in a televised address. President Lazarus Chakwera said rescuers found the wreckage of the military aircraft in a mountainous area in the north of the country, and there were no survivors. In 2022, Chilima was arrested on corruption charges, and the president announced that Chilima would no longer be delegated official duties while the trial was ongoing—but the case was abandoned last month.

Russia’s Lavrov visits Chad. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week became the first high-level foreign official to visit Chad since President Mahamat Idriss Déby turned his military leadership into an ostensibly elected government last month. “I can guarantee you that our friendship with Chad will not affect our relations with France in any way. France has other approaches, it proceeds from the fact that either you are with us or you are against us,” Lavrov said in N’Djamena. Lavrov’s tour of Central and West Africa included stops in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and Guinea. Déby is one of the region’s last remaining allies of the United States and France, despite facing a deadly attempted revolt against him.

Somalia’s seat at U.N. For the first time in decades, Somalia has a nonpermanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, which it will hold for a two-year term starting in 2025. Somalia won one of the 10 rotating seats on the council with 179 out of 193 votes in favor. The East African nation had last served on the council in 1971 and 1972 under military leader Mohamed Siad Barre, whose ousting in 1991 led to state collapse and a decadeslong civil war between rival clans.

Sudan’s rising death toll. About 40 people were shot and killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman on Thursday, according to reports by Sudanese pro-democracy groups. The attack came a day after the RSF was accused of killing at least 150 people, including 35 children, in the village of Wad al-Noura, south of Khartoum, after residents reportedly tried to defend the area against the armed group. And a report released by Human Rights Watch last week accused the RSF of committing genocide against Masalit civilians in Darfur amid a siege on the North Darfur capital El Fasher.

The conflict between the RSF and the Sudanese army, which began last April, has so far killed around 15,000 people and displaced more than 9 million. Few aid trucks have reached civilians as the war has progressed, and around 5 million people are at risk of famine. The African Union released a statement on Friday condemning the attack on Wad al-Noura. In February, the regional bloc appointed a three-member high level panel dedicated to resolving the crisis in Sudan, but the bloc has been criticized for its lack of action. Major powers have failed to be decisive on Sudan, instead parroting “empty platitudes for all parties to cease hostilities without even directly naming the genocidaires and their sponsors,” wrote Mutasim Ali and Yonah Diamond in Foreign Policy.

Egypt-Israel gas. Egypt remains reliant on Israeli gas imports for domestic use and reexport, despite increased animosity between the two nations over the war in Gaza. The temporary closure of Israel’s offshore Tamar gas field for maintenance last week led to extended power cuts in Egypt, reported local outlet Mada Masr. The Egyptian economy depended on revenue earned from reexporting surplus Israeli gas to Europe. But now, plans to issue a tender seeking 15 to 20 cargoes—about 1 million to 1.5 million metric tons—of natural gas to fill its own domestic shortfall.

Limited access to affordable development finance has increased Africa’s debt burden and money borrowed from expensive private banks and bondholders, a new report from the United Nation’s trade and development arm shows. African nations pay more in debt interest than other countries on essential services, such as education and health.

A pro-West South Africa? A national unity government formed with an anti-Russia and pro-Israel Democratic Alliance is not likely to alter South Africa’s nonaligned stance in global politics, argues Nontobeko Hlela in Foreign Policy. “The ANC [African National Congress], buoyed by its recent successes at the ICJ [International Court of Justice], is likely to feel an increased sense of confidence on the international stage, even as its power fades at home.”

Niger’s EU migration route. The scrapping of an European Union anti-migration deal by Niger’s military government has not led to a surge in migrants entering Europe via Niger, Issifou Djibo, Alessandra Prentice, and David Lewis report in Reuters. There was, however, an increase in migrants from Niger to Libya seeking work rather than onward travel. “This is a humanitarian emergency. It’s not an emergency in terms of numbers” of immigrants, a U.N. expert told Reuters.

Africa’s cinematic potential. In Africa Is a Country, Tsogo Kupa reviews the recently concluded New York African Film Festival. Young African filmmakers are looking for ways “to widen imposed and self-inflicted limitations on African imagination,” Kupa writes. The South African film Time Spent with Cats Is Never Wasted “feels like it shouldn’t exist,” Kupa writes. “The South African film industry has struggled to form an identity independent from Hollywood impersonations and low-risk enterprises.” The film—set in a small ghost town in South Africa’s Northern Cape region—explores some of the country’s key issues, including mob justice.