Rwanda is often celebrated as one of Africa’s most striking development success stories. But how durable is that success, and who has benefited from it? Dan Banik speaks with Pritish Behuria about Rwanda’s services-led growth model, powerful national brand, and the unresolved challenges of jobs, inequality, foreign dependence, and structural transformation.
Rwanda is often described as one of Africa’s most remarkable development success stories: a country that rebuilt itself after the 1994 genocide, delivered impressive improvements in health and education, reduced its dependence on coffee, attracted global attention, and turned Kigali into a symbol of order, ambition, and state effectiveness.
But is Rwanda’s rise as durable as it appears?
Dan Banik speaks with Pritish Behuria (Associate Professor in Politics, Governance and Development at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute) about his new book The Political Economy of Rwanda’s Rise. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Behuria offers a nuanced account of Rwanda’s services-led development model — from tourism, finance, conferences, and nation branding to agriculture, mining, foreign investment, and the politics of structural transformation.
The conversation explores why Rwanda has become such a powerful reference point for policymakers across Africa, but also why its model raises difficult questions about underemployment, inequality, domestic firms, foreign dependence, political control, and the limits of branding as a development strategy.
Rather than treating Rwanda as either a miracle or a mirage, this episode asks what the country’s experience reveals about the future of development in Africa. And whether a small, landlocked country can build lasting prosperity through a services-first path in an increasingly competitive global economy.
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[Dan Banik]
Pritish, wonderful to see you.
Welcome to the show.
I've been wanting to do an episode on Rwanda for a long time, and then I got to see that you've written this wonderful book that's soon coming out.
So congrats and welcome.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Well, thank you so much, Dan.
That's really wonderful to say.
And I've been listening to your podcast as well for a long time, and I've been following your work as well.
So it's really great and an honor to be part of the podcast as well.
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[Dan Banik]
Well, so let's cut to the chase.
Is Rwanda a development success?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, it's a tricky question, so I won't give you a yes or no there.
I mean, in many ways, it is a success.
Rwanda has had rapid growth since the 1994 genocide.
It has diversified its exports, which is significant.
Actually, even pre-1994, Rwanda experienced quite high growth in the 1970s.
But there was no export diversification.
So there is export diversification, which has given them more policy space in a way.
It's services growth.
If you go to Kigali, the transformation is evident.
But there are some things that are clearly not happening.
And one is there's significant underemployment, more than 60%, according to Rwandan government statistics, right?
This is not uncommon across many low-income countries.
But it is characteristic of this services-based strategy.
And another key issue is they have not achieved structural transformation.
And by structural transformation, I mean the transformation of an economy from one that is employing low-skilled labor and relying on primary products to one that is employing knowledge-based assets, employing high-skilled labor.
And crucially, it doesn't have domestic firms that are internationally competitive, which is what sets apart East Asian developmental states and most other global South countries.
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[Dan Banik]
The reason I wanted to focus and at least start with the positives is, Pritish, whenever I'm on the African continent, Ethiopia, I've just returned from Ethiopia where I've set up a Centre for Sustainable Development, lots of PhD students, postdocs working on it, or Malawi or Kenya.
The one common theme when we talk about development is that most people I interact with, they look up to Rwanda.
So it's not just the developmental indicators, but it's also leadership.
There is, I suppose, some doubt about the statistics and the credibility of some of the data coming out.
But by and large, people agree, you know, 7% growth rate over several years, fantastic success in terms of maternal mortality, infant mortality rates.
My friend Paul Farmer, you know, was building hospitals.
Kigali is the cleanest city.
I think it's even cleaner than Singapore that I've ever visited.
There are people on motorcycles wearing helmets.
I've never seen that anywhere else on the continent.
You write about in your work, there's reduced fertility rates.
There's a focus on environmental issues, hygiene, but also the focus on gender, getting women into powerful positions.
So all of this is happening
And for many decades, Rwanda was the poster child of this developmental state idea, together with Ethiopia in a certain period of time.
So help me understand, help my listeners understand how is Rwanda or why is Rwanda seen to be the success industry?
even though I understand that the picture is nuanced.
If we just focus on some of the indicators I mentioned, it does appear to be an island of excellence.
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[Pritish Behuria]
You're right.
And I don't want to downplay the success.
What's happened is remarkable in many ways.
After the 1990s, the civil war and the genocide, the way the Rwandan Patriotic Front has transformed the country, most of its critics would agree that there is incredible transformation in Rwanda.
It's done really well on selected things that the donor community really were pushing at that time, whether that's the MDGs more generally, but usually, broadly speaking, on health outcomes, which were funded by Pharma, Gates, and many other, Clinton Health Access Initiative.
And in other aspects, gender as well, especially women in parliament and generally the focus on women, which is true to Rwanda and Uganda as part of their liberation effort, really.
And you come away from Rwanda as a first time visitor.
We actually even send our master's students here in GDI to Rwanda and they just returned.
So you marvel at the effectiveness of the state.
that they focus on something and they get there.
And there's this kind of national commitment, which is evident when you visit there with the Omaganda, the Saturday, every Saturday when they clean up the streets.
And it's really evident that there's a national pride.
And a lot has been achieved.
But what you kind of see is also both in terms of how stretched they have been in trying to fulfill what the donors wanted, presenting a sheen of development,
and also at the same time actually investing in strategic sectors which donors were not prioritizing, which they had to hide away in the kind of hidden developmental state that existed.
And the Rwandan government, though very committed to economic development, also for its own political survival, you can see how stretched it was.
And as a result, what we don't see is the high levels of inequality in the country.
And this real struggle that many countries face, and Rwanda is not alone on this, in terms of creating employment for the population, a very young population, where there will also be a youth bulge.
Now, most African countries, though there's a lot of rhetoric around this,
actually are not experiencing a youth bulge because there's no drop in fertility.
Rwanda has had the drop in fertility, and that youth bulge, when it comes with jobs, has been associated from demographic transition theory, at least, to be associated with a number of other positives, if there are jobs and if there is industrialization, which Rwanda has none of, really.
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[Dan Banik]
Yeah.
And I think, you know, what your work points to and what I really like about it is to nuance the picture because it's either portrayed as a huge success or is criticized because of its lack of democratic credentials or the fact that Paul Kagame is still in power.
And the worry is, you know, what happens when he leaves?
Is there a successor?
So I think there are things in between.
It's not, you know, black and white.
Perhaps it's a lot of gray areas.
But if you think about the starting point, I mean, often a lot of people start with 1994, right?
That's the genocide.
And people often marvel, I think that is the word, at what this country that is facing all of these challenges, the typical poverty traps are.
that Paul Collier talks about.
And by the way, Paul was on my show a few years ago, and he was really praising the Rwandan model.
And we'll get back to some of the strategies that the Kagame regime pursued.
But the fact that it is landlocked, you know, maybe surrounded by some hostile neighbors, has had huge challenges.
And then, of course, the genocide.
Given that starting point, what Rwanda has been able to do is very impressive compared to, say, a country that I've been studying, Malawi.
which is also small, landlocked, has been democratic since 94, but has not experienced that kind of, you know, development.
So the one thing that I wanted to ask you at this point of time is, and that's something that I noticed when I was there last, is that I got the impression that development is sort of directed by the state, right?
It is not necessarily directed by donors.
Is that a correct assessment that there's a vision, there's a cunning plan to make sure that each donor or each sector, you maximize the benefits as much as possible?
Is that the case or is that a romanticized ideal?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.
Now, maybe I can point you to a kind of story that I, when I first got to Rwanda in 2011, doing my PhD fieldwork, you know, I was taught in the developmental state mode of, you know, unless you industrialize, you're not going to develop really or catch up.
And of course, there was this idea that Rwanda was a donor darling.
That was clear.
Like, you know, you do well in health, education, growth.
There was like the Rwanda Development Board had a specific department focused on doing business indicators to rise up.
And now, you know, the doing business indicators.
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[Dan Banik]
You mean promoting the Rwandan brand, right?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, doing well on as many indexes as you could in relation to governance.
So presenting that sheen that, okay, we're doing what donors want, but also kind of, you know, the state was evident.
And repeatedly, like a lot of senior Rwandan government officials would tell me, you know, we are a landlocked country.
We can't industrialize.
We are not competitive with transport costs.
We have to build up the services sector.
And of course, as a critique, what we see now in terms of underemployment, low wage, precarious labor, this is predictable with all services economies.
On the other side, what we saw was Ethiopia focusing on industrialization, not meeting the employment needs either.
And the bet was from a developmental state point of view that Ethiopia would succeed or at least remain stable and not Rwanda in that way.
Many people doubt Rwanda about...
you know, since the genocide.
But they've sustained it in some way, not without its negatives.
And a lot of our, none of our literature has told us that this kind of country can succeed.
So they've defied a lot of things.
And they've done it their own way with donor influence.
Now, my argument remains that I'm skeptical of the services-led model because no one has done it before.
And it doesn't seem to create the right levels of employment.
But the Rwandan government is determined that it will do so.
So I would leave the question open in a way that it is obviously state-driven.
In a way, the models that are being emulated here
the model that they see how Singapore developed.
In my view, a misunderstood way of how Singapore developed.
It didn't purely develop to services.
Singapore had manufacturing, but Rwanda has perhaps missed that part of the story.
So they've misunderstood the model because donors themselves have told a different story of how different models existed.
And that is the dangerous thing also in a way of how Rwanda's story will be told if we don't understand the characteristics of the model.
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[Dan Banik]
Maybe I'm also guilty of being a bit brainwashed with this wonderful brand or branding of the country.
If I were to support the Rwandan leadership and the strategies, I would say that, well, the starting point is so difficult.
Landlocked, even though they insist, I see in your work, landlinked, that's the positive spin to it.
But given the disadvantages one faces and this brutal genocide,
You know, what can we do?
Okay, let's look at our comparative advantage.
Guerrilla safaris, tourism, Air Rwanda, sponsoring Arsenal.
Oh, Rwanda's been accused of sports washing.
Create a hub, conference centers.
When I was there like five, six years ago, it was all about, you know, the Marriott Hotel, shiny malls and conference centers and cleanliness, the picture of order.
This is where, you know, this is the hub model that it's been promoting.
Is that so bad, Pritish?
I mean, given the starting point, it seems to be a rather good strategy.
And by the way, exporting Rwandan coffee and making sure that the CEO of Starbucks comes to Rwanda and Starbucks is selling Rwandan coffee.
It couldn't be a better strategy.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
In many ways, you know, a lot of these things they've succeeded in.
And even in terms of the hotels, the first, when they were trying to push the tourism strategy, the World Bank refused to give them a loan.
At least this is what they say, that they refused to give them a loan.
And then the government built what is
Now the Serena hotels themselves.
So they've created this demonstration effect for other hotel companies to come in.
And a lot of this has been done well.
And I think there's a lot of positives to it.
Of course, Rwanda, from the beginning, since at least 2000, when the first Vision 2020 was written, that they leant into hiring public relations companies to sell this Rwanda brand.
And it's kind of remarkable how even people in India view Rwanda as a major tourism destination.
This was unthinkable 10 years ago that it would be so much on the agenda, so much on all these lists.
But tourism has its limits.
It doesn't create that many jobs, and it doesn't even create that many opportunities, especially if you're going for high-end tourism, for local entrepreneurs to retain their hotels in this competitive environment.
It's all focused on the very elite level.
So in this way, the kind of strategy they've chosen is a very unequal one, even in terms of exporting speciality coffee, which I've written a lot about.
There's a lot of inequalities within the chain that exist, and it only benefits in the end a small group of farmers and really the farmers that can outcompete the others.
And in an environment when they're overall trying to reduce their reliance on coffee, which they have actually done.
which is actually one of the most remarkable feats.
Many countries remain stuck in primary commodity dependence.
Rwanda has at least diversified its exports, although, of course, a lot of that diversification is minerals exports, and most of those minerals don't come from within the country.
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[Dan Banik]
Let's stay on this employment story.
I wasn't actually aware of this growing level of horizontal inequalities between the Tutsis and the Hutus.
I suppose there is that in urban centers.
but also the rural bias, I would say.
Reading your work, I just thought of Michael Lipton, you know, the idea of prioritizing the countryside in relation to food production.
And maybe the government was pursuing a strategy where you have this rural bias and then you have this service-led growth in the urban areas.
The result, I suppose, is more of a mixed bag and one has seen the rise in unemployment.
So if you were to characterize that urban-rural distinction, how would you put it?
I mean, has there been a focus on the rural or is it just the shiny, glittering Kigali that has been the focus of government strategy?
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[Pritish Behuria]
There was always a focus on the rural to some extent.
Now, the focus itself was, according to some critics of the government, it was more to get people off the land, to create more kind of wage labor within the rural areas.
So Michael Lipton's argument was really inverse farm size and productivity.
So it was privileging the fact that small farmers would be more productive than larger farmers.
But of course, that is debated even within the Marxist agrarian change literature, but also Collier's work, which argues for, for example, the productivity of large farms versus Lipton.
So this is heavily contested, I guess, within agrarian studies.
And Rwanda overall, I would say, still has this idea that it is still the most densely populated country in Africa.
And it has a large landless rural population.
And you have to create wage opportunities for that population.
And they failed to do that to some degree.
And that's even cited within the government reports.
The challenge is, this is where the donor kind of influence comes in.
And I think Rwanda has kind of, to some degree, fallen into that trap.
They've fallen into the trap that if you focus on health and education and entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs can emerge that will create their own job.
Now, Alice Sampson, for example, has long criticized this, saying this relies on a supply side logic and it leads to poverty persistence and the neglect of actual employment and the government's role in creating that employment.
So in that way, I think Rwanda's
Rwanda's development strategy has been a little bit confused with the interaction of donors, plus its own biases in some ways.
And it hasn't really, this jobs deficit has become an increasingly visible challenge.
Now, we don't know if it's horizontal inequalities in relation to ethnicity as such.
There's huge inequality that we know, but there is no census about ethnic groups in the last long.
Because they don't exist.
That's the public narrative in a way.
But there's no census, but we can presume that there is.
But this could be volatile.
And I think it really relates to what you've mentioned in an underlying kind of way.
A lot of conflict literature has long assumed that because there are high horizontal inequalities, this will lead to the end of the RPS rule.
And you can see this in the Rwanda literature for the last 20 years, that ultimately this is unsustainable.
And the conflict studies literature is largely driven by these two narratives.
There's Paul Collier's arguments that elites driven by greed lead to them fighting each other in relation to civil war, or the argument about the salience of horizontal inequalities.
I come from the tradition of thinking about this more relationally, whether it's Charles Tilly's work, David Kean's work, Christopher Kramer's work,
which argues that really it's about disenchanted elites mobilizing the popular grievances of segments of the population.
And that is the story that's missing in terms of thinking why Rwanda has retained stability.
They managed to ensure that any disenchanted elites cannot mobilize these grievances.
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[Dan Banik]
Any form of disagreement, disenchantment is not visible because you can't really protest.
There's one thing that I noticed is it was really difficult during my last visit to actually have frank conversations, you know.
People seem to be very reserved, perhaps afraid to talk.
to talk about private stuff or ethnic identities.
You could see this in the airports.
You could see serious looks on people's faces, the immigration officers.
And just after Rwanda, I'd gone to Malawi and there they were high-fiving and happy.
You could see the different culture.
As I understand from your work on Rwanda, and I see this in Ethiopia a lot, there's a lot of focus on that
that first wave of service-led growth, right?
So it's hotels and cleaning and restaurants and beauty parlors and saloons and whatever.
But now, as I understand it, Rwanda has moved to the second generation or the second wave.
So you have more IT, financial services, hub conferences,
Those are not creating the kind of jobs that the government had anticipated?
And if so, why not?
What went wrong?
I mean, if you were to say that kind of service-led growth was a good strategy, what went wrong?
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[Pritish Behuria]
I would say that it's not that focusing on services is not a good strategy.
In fact, it could...
There are many countries that should focus on even tourism and all a bit more than they have.
Ethiopia, at least during the EPRDF, was very skeptical of tourism as a strategy.
Rwanda, of course, lent fully into it.
Conference center, well, it definitely led to huge debt in the country.
There's no doubt about that.
The loans that were taken to build the conference center.
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[Dan Banik]
From whom?
Who did they get the loans from?
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[Pritish Behuria]
It was part of the Euro bond as well.
which they actually paid back.
They're one of the few countries that paid it back.
So they did do a lot of things successfully, and they are holding regular conferences.
That has picked up.
I mean, many people were skeptical about this, just the way they've managed to hold these big events, and they continue to do so, whether that's NBA, AFCA, or the cycling events, which are raising in status.
But the finance center has not picked up.
The big vision on Rwanda is to build up Kigali International Finance Center.
They've actually had one of the former Mauritian prime ministers, Ramasithanan, has been on the presidential advisory council for the last 20 years or so.
He's the person who is responsible for setting up the tax haven in Mauritius.
And Kigali has flirted with that idea of becoming a tax haven.
They've even signed double taxation avoidance agreements with several countries.
And that discussion is still ongoing.
It's part of the vision, I mean, to build up the financial center as well.
And BPOs have not picked up to the degree they have.
And these sectors will never create the kind of employment that will occur anywhere.
Actually, where employment is likely to pick up is within agriculture.
So I would say actually the biggest success in terms of export diversification is within agriculture, probably.
Of course, that comes with its own inequality.
If you have larger farms with people losing their land but resorting to wage labor, this has its own kind of inequality, which is common to all capitalist accumulation stories historically.
But it is unequal and dislocating.
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[Dan Banik]
But there have also been these stories.
I don't know to what extent they've been seen as propaganda of Volkswagen, you know, manufacturing electric cars.
This has really enhanced the Rwandan brand.
I remember a few years ago, I used to have a column in a magazine.
a national newspaper in Malawi, and I was writing about how Rwanda was assembling mobile phones, you know, the only ones, or building one, not just assembling.
So there are these stories, these projects of pharmaceuticals.
You also write about that.
So it's not like they were not trying to manufacture, but there are lots of problems for a small landlocked country to, you know, become a manufacturing hub.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Absolutely.
And I think...
But the challenge with these big stories, Volkswagen, pharmaceuticals, et cetera, is they've really been about inviting foreign investors in.
And the Volkswagen thing has not, it's more or less fallen apart now.
New big story is the African Medicines Agency, the pharmaceutical companies, BioNTech and others.
But again, this is a foreign investor with no domestic partner to transfer that technology emerging.
And that's part of the elite vulnerability story that has impeded structural transformation more generally.
But just to come back to the point of how industrialization, maybe Rwanda couldn't have been a manufacturing hub, but that land-linked idea that is so essential or characteristic for the RPF for its services trajectory.
And in a way, these Volkswagen and the pharmaceuticals feed into the services story, the nation brand, much more than the actual manufacturing.
What you could have done as Rwanda is focus more on the domestic and regional markets, which is something that they've really struggled to do.
And there is a part of the government that it is within their strategy to do it if the EAC's East African community succeeds.
if the African Continental Free Trade Area succeeds.
But it's kind of doing manufacturing after the services.
And can you actually compete?
There are stories like in the cement sector, where they tried really hard to become competitive with Ugandan cement importers.
But they haven't really, they did have momentary success, but they haven't been able to push it through.
And that's true for, you have the odd sector, you have the odd party-owned firm that does well in terms of capturing domestic and regional markets.
But there aren't really any domestic private firms that have emerged that have become competitive, even regionally.
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[Dan Banik]
And this is a challenge for very many countries, others that are landlocked.
But even when you're not landlocked, the market is so small, your domestic market is so small that you are dependent on exporting.
But there are so many restrictions.
And talking about pharmaceuticals, I was interacting with a lot of Chinese and Indian companies on the African continent.
It's part of a project that I recently completed.
And they said, it's just still cheaper and better for us to produce in India and China and ship it to Southern Africa than to produce there because there are so many hindrances.
The African free trade area really hasn't got up to speed.
The AU has been...
So, you know, they kept saying, can't we have an EU-like market in Africa?
That would make things a lot easier.
I wanted to ask you about some of the exports.
It's coffee.
It's also, how do you pronounce it?
Pyrethrum, the natural flower-based pesticide?
Yeah.
How do you pronounce it?
It's pyrethrum.
Pyrethrum.
And then there's also mining.
But I noticed something, and please help me understand.
You said that mining is still very dependent on the DRC Congo.
So what's going on there?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Well, Rwanda has always had a little bit of mining.
And they have, like, even till the 1990s, they've had this...
had a little bit of mining.
But the way even the Belgian colonial administration did it was they prioritized even geological investigations in the DRC, and they didn't really prioritize Rwanda.
And of course, the eastern DRC is very rich in minerals.
Historically, Rwanda has always been a conduit for minerals being exported through Rwanda.
out of the DRC.
And that has always happened.
Now, of course, it's mixed up with the Congo wars, with the current conflict that's ongoing.
And it is a complicated story.
But Rwanda still, despite all the tagging, since the 2010s, officially Rwanda has had to tag all the minerals.
Eastern DRC has had to tag all the minerals where they come from.
So in theory, there's a tagging system in place, so we should know where the minerals are coming from.
In practice, this tagging system has not worked, and this is well documented within the literature.
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[Dan Banik]
Why not?
Who's benefiting from not tagging?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Everyone's benefiting from not tagging.
So the way it was working was there was a narrative that the Congo wars are only taking place because of greedy elites in the area.
And that was part of the greed argument that has dominated a lot of ways of intervening in the Congo.
So this tagging system was put in place around 2013, the last time aid was cut because Rwanda was accused of supporting rebel groups in the DRC.
But this, actually the year it was, it happened, the tagging system was put in place, Rwanda's minerals exports shot up to the highest levels it had been for a long time.
And years later, of course, talking to people, it's widely, there's a consensus within the literature that, of course, a lot of the minerals are still passing through from the DRC.
Some are re-exports, some as originating in Rwanda.
Many of these minerals do not exist in Rwanda and have not been explored as yet in Rwanda.
So it is quite clear a lot of it is coming through the DRC.
Even in the mineral sector, it's quite interesting what Rwanda has been trying to do.
Rwanda sees itself as becoming a processing hub in, of course, a continent where there's very little investment in mineral processing.
And in theory, because of this position within the continent, they could become this.
But of course, a lot of it in theory is coming from the DRC and the DRC is not getting anything from it.
And this remains a point of contention.
It's far from being the only reason why the conflict continues and persists.
And placing a focus on this, on conflict minerals, has been shown across the years to be a leading reason why the conflict persists.
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[Dan Banik]
you already talked a bit about Belgium and the external, the role of donors.
So as I understand it, until 94, it was Belgium and Germany and France that were the big donors.
And then post 1994, you saw the US becoming more important, the UK, even though I'm told Germany is still around.
I was actually interacting with the Japanese ambassador when I was there and many other donors.
And what I said earlier is from those conversations, they felt that here it was a vision that the political leadership was telling the donors, you know, we need your help with education.
We need your help with infrastructure.
They were directing people so that there was actually some sort of harmonization taking place.
But it was not coming from the donors.
It was coming from the Rwandan government, which just seemed to be very positive.
Now, one of the things that I've written about, but I actually haven't finished the kind of article that I had hoped to write, is on apparel and secondhand clothes.
And I want to mention this because I remember a few years ago, I was doing this work in Malawi where, you know, secondhand clothes is of high quality and it is imported.
And there are lots of debates about domestic manufacturing, which is not seen to be high quality.
In fact, quality, branding, fashion always
All of these arguments were used for secondhand clothing.
Then comes President Kagame and says and frames the ban on importing secondhand clothes, particularly from the U.S., as being a matter of human dignity.
Why should we wear this?
But it was also a nice argument to spur domestic production, right?
But it got Rwanda into trouble with the US.
So help us understand that story.
If that is illustrative of some of the challenges that the country has faced.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, I think around 2012 was when they came up with the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2.
And in this, they highlighted a very clear jobs target.
So it became increasingly evident that they needed to create jobs.
There was an attempt to refocus on industrial policy at a time when industrial policy was also gaining some traction again.
So they had like a domestic market recapturing strategy, which sounded very much like import substitution again.
At the same time, of course, Kagame was taking leadership at the African Union, and he initiated several positions, including pushing the African Continental Free Trade Area, but leadership at this Continental Organization, leadership at the EAC, which he long held.
So he pushed the East African community to ban used clothing because it was a matter of dignity and it could spur domestic apparel production.
The US, of course, when we donate clothes here in Europe and North America, we assume that it's being given for free, but it's never done for free.
In the Global South, they still have to pay.
And there's a textiles association.
In the US, it's called SMART.
So SMART went to the US government and said, you know, we're being unfairly treated.
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[Dan Banik]
We are losing our jobs.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, we're losing our jobs.
And then they, it was Trump, I think.
And they forced, they said, if East African countries continue to do this, they'll lose AGOA support, which, of course, is preferential trade access to the U.S.
And Kenya in particular was exporting a lot of textiles and apparel through AGOA.
So Kenya fell first and then Uganda fell soon after.
And Rwanda actually stayed because they actually were not exporting anything much through Agoa anyway.
The theory was that, okay, this should spur domestic manufacturing.
At that time, they had just invited a Chinese firm, CNH Garments, to invest, to export to the US.
So that firm left immediately.
They had a domestic manufacturing firm, which is actually an East African Indian firm, which is still there, called Utexrua.
It's a very visible, it's a visible factory in Kigali.
And that was always securing domestic production, basically.
So this would benefit from them, but they had quite a frosty relationship with the government because they were set up during the last government in the 1980s.
But now, many years later, we do see some domestic production.
They've done some interesting things.
They put it together mostly for the domestic market.
They have a new Chinese firm that is exporting to a European market.
But what it's really benefited is the kind of high fashion that Rwanda is trying to push.
So they have a lot of high fashion designers that they have been trying to promote in terms of the lead end of African fashion.
And we're including the Kagame family wearing a lot of those brands.
And a lot of things come to light here as in why is this being pushed?
Again, is this really about the nation brand and not about manufacturing?
And also because one of the fashion designers that was promoted by the Kagame family and was worn by, say, Arsenal stars when they came in and became part of the national brand, one of them fell foul of the government.
And this became international news.
So it showed also how this can, when you have an externally dependent strategy, this can backfire when it goes against the presentation you're trying to
present to the world in a way.
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[Dan Banik]
PritishKage, it seems that you and I are engaged in a tussle war.
I'm trying to sort of highlight the successes and you're pointing out all the challenges.
But maybe the real truth is that it is a mixed bag.
But I have to say, because a lot of my reference point to this story is Malawi.
And so whenever I look at Rwanda, it just seems to be the shiny example of things that work.
The very fact that they're able to attract people
investors is for me a victory, you know, because it doesn't happen in many others.
The fact that it has all these ambitious plans, the fact that there are homegrown solutions that are talked about, the fact that the streets are spotless, that there is law and order.
I suppose we all look for these success stories because sometimes we feel there is no hope or little, right?
But one of the big sort of stories or the challenges is often, especially when you talk about Rwanda, is associated with the future.
And it has to do with the politics.
It has to do with the fact that the president said he wouldn't run for a third term.
And then the constitution was changed.
And then he is the president for life.
Very similar to China.
So what is your take on this?
I mean, is this this brand, this image or the mirage of the success of Rwanda?
It seems to be very closely related to the Kagame brand.
And what are the plans in place for the future?
Are there successes?
What is the talk of the town?
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[Pritish Behuria]
Yeah, it's a great question.
And I think it's, I agree, I have to say, I agree with you about Rwanda's success.
They have done a lot of successful things.
But there are two sides of the coin, and it is part of the same story.
I think when people talk about Rwanda, we have such a split narrative, you know, it's either that it's really successful, or it's really negative.
A lot of academic literature is extremely critical of Rwanda.
And the
the Rwandan government.
And there is another side of this that actually successful or unsuccessful capitalism has these two sides, that there is inequality associated with even successful capitalist accumulation and development stories everywhere, as also happened in East Asia.
And part of it is this story about one of the main things my book
is trying to say is that there is this image that Kagame or the RPF is this kind of cohesive structure that's driving Rwanda's development.
My argument is that actually the RPF is not that cohesive.
The biggest threat that the Rwandan government faces are from disenchanted elites who happen to be in exile.
The reason that political stability exists is because that elite vulnerability has meant that Kagame has cut off the route for these disenchanted elites to mobilize the population against the RPF.
But the other side of that, the negative side of that, is that there is distrust within the party that it doesn't support domestic capitalists enough to invest in structural transformation more generally.
Now, the story about Kagame and retaining leadership, it's a tricky one.
Of course, a lot of the donor policy has always been focused on creating political space.
And, you know, there are political parties, but Kagame has won more than 97% of the vote for several elections now.
And it's tricky to see how that would change in this moment if there are successors emerging.
There are always people who are prominent, but many of them have not been consistent over time.
And Kagame is still young, so I don't really see that happening.
But maybe is that really that major of a concern?
I mean, of course, no one wants one person to be in power for so long.
But the more pertinent issue for people living in the country, I think, is how do you create access to better livelihoods?
How do you create in this very difficult environment?
I do not believe it's easy to create jobs in the contemporary world economy anywhere.
right, for any country.
I mean, even the country where I'm from in India, there are very few jobs for most of the population.
It's a very difficult thing to do.
But the main concern for Rwandans is how to get a better livelihood.
And if that happens under Kagame or somebody else, I think that's the most secondary thing.
So for me, the future of Rwanda will be to be, will be
How can they adapt to the real concerns of the population in this very difficult geopolitical environment and global political economy that we're dealing with and changing so rapidly?
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[Dan Banik]
Pritish, this was great fun.
I really enjoyed reading your book.
Congrats and good luck with the promo and the tour.
And thank you so much for coming on my show today.
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[Pritish Behuria]
Thank you so much, Dan.
It's been such a pleasure.
And thank you so much for inviting me.