Rwanda officials would have to be really foolish to organise hyped UK murder plot

By Frederick Golooba-Mutebi  (email the author)

Posted  Sunday, May 29 2011 at 14:17

As the attention of East Africans was firmly fixed on Uganda’s perennially fractious politics and the latest battle of wills between President Yoweri Museveni and his tough-as-nails nemesis, Dr Kiiza Besigye, Britain’s Metropolitan police kicked up a storm that has engulfed the Government of Rwanda and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office over the past week or so.

Armed with “credible intelligence” from the FCO, the force had dispatched officers to go find two men. One is a Rwandan national in exile, the other, a UK national of Rwandan extraction. The officers went bearing grim news: The government of Rwanda was plotting against the two men and their lives were at risk.

If my memory serves me right, news bulletins suggested that the officers even insinuated that assassins might already be on the way to the UK to bump them off. And then they dropped another proverbial bombshell: the Met could not guarantee their security, so they had better be creative about how to do it themselves. They may even consider leaving their current addresses for some time.

As with all titillating stories, the media picked this up and ran off with it. And as with all bad, sensational, or ‘exciting’ news about Rwanda, it hit the newspapers, radio bulletins and TV broadcasts with a bang! I was half-listening to news on radio, half reading newspapers when I heard it on the BBC one early morning.

I was intrigued. It came in the wake of President Kagame’s robust and widely-publicised online exchange with a cocky British journalist who, while tweeting, had allowed himself to dispense wisdom on what is and is not good in and for Rwanda and Rwandans, without ever setting foot there.

New -media-savvy Kagame, not one to take lectures from self-appointed Rwanda experts, shot back, punch for punch and more, leaving the journalist taken aback. Surely that had come and gone, and couldn’t possibly be the background to the new story.

I then recalled that two political groups seeking to unseat the Rwanda Patriotic Front led government, Victoire Ingabire’s FDU-Inkingi, and Lt. General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa’s Rwanda National Congress, had recently held a meeting in the United Kingdom.

I wondered if the two were not connected. It seems they are, as one of the two men, one Jonathan Musonera, had been a key organiser of the meeting. He is also known to have got into a brief but heated exchange with President Kagame on the BBC’s Africa Have Your Say programme in the recent past.

It did not take long before it became the subject of intense online and verbal discussion among Rwandans and outsiders, some of whom have more than passing interest in the country.

Those prone to arriving at easy conclusions saw an immediate connection between this particular story and that of the attempted murder of Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa last year, which some firmly believe was the handiwork of “the Rwandans,” although the South African judiciary is yet to come up with a definitive verdict.

A friend with whom I discussed the issue believed Musonera had “made a mistake” by “arguing with Kagame” on radio. For him that was reason enough for the Rwanda government to invest energy and resources in a plot to kill him. It goes to show how lightly Kagame is taken by some of his critics.

Predictably, reactions from Rwandan officials and commentators on public affairs have been livid and dismissive of the story as “pure fiction” and “completely without foundation.”

And now the Rwanda government has challenged the metropolitan police to produce firm evidence of their claims and insisted on a retraction should they not have it.

How the Met responds to that will go a long way towards shedding light on a rather extraordinary story. Should the Met refuse to come clean, it will only strengthen the view that the FCO’s “credible intelligence” is based on a bogus story. Rwandans and Rwandaphiles wait with bated breath.

For me, though, the question is whether, given Britain’s well-established reputation in Rwanda as one of the country’s key donors and the RPF government’s important and trusted ally in an otherwise judgmental and easily hostile, “international community,” Rwandan officials would be so daft as to risk ruining the relationship by killing two dissidents living thousands of miles outside the country.
Ruin it they would, and irreparably so, if the two men were to be killed and the murderer traced back to Rwanda and its government. The Met surely has the capacity to do that. One would have to be really foolish to organise that.