Rwanda Day celebration sparks dictatorship claims against President Kagame
President Paul Kagame has been accused of dictatorship amid the celebration of Rwanda Day.
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF), a pro-democracy non-profit organization headquartered in New York levelled the accusation against the president of the East African nation following his keynote speech at the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast Gathering in Washington D.C on February 1.
“Washington, D.C.’s National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday offered the stage to Rwanda’s dictator Paul Kagame, allowing a warmonger accused of crimes against humanity to grandstand before a large gathering of the capitol's most powerful…HRF condemns Kagame’s exploitation of the National Prayer Breakfast’s platform to whitewash his bloody crimes and project a deceitful image of peace-loving, benevolent, progressive, and legitimate leadership,” HRF wrote in a post directly responding to the official Presidency Rwanda account on X (formerly Twitter).
Spokesperson for the Rwanda government, Yolanda Makolo responded to the accusations by HRF through her official X account. “Your distortion of our history and progress made in the last 30 years has you sounding like spoiled children,” she said.
Before taking office as president in 2000 after the resignation of former President Pasteur Bizimungu, President Kagame held the positions of vice president and minister of defence for Rwanda under Bizimungu’s government from 1994 to 2000.
He was elected by government ministers rather than through a direct election, taking office during the period while the Transitional Constitution was still in force. In 2003, he triumphed in Rwanda's first multiparty election with a significant landslide.
He was reelected twice, in 2010 and 2017. The reason for his most recent reelection was a 2015 constitutional amendment that allowed him to run for a third seven-year term, replacing the nation’s 2003 constitution's two-term limit.
Throughout his term, Kagame has come under heavy fire for alleged violations of human rights and limitations on political freedom.
Diane Rwigara, a former presidential candidate from Rwanda who opposed President Kagame, was imprisoned for more than a year after her presidential bid in 2017 for tax evasion and inciting an insurrection, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
