Change

Nothing stays the same anywhere; still, the pace of change in Kigali is astonishingly swift. The most high-tech traffic lights I’ve ever seen have been installed, fancy things that count down the seconds to the light change. Impressive, but for weeks the intersection on my way to work was jammed up and managed by traffic police, and pedestrians continue to dodge traffic regardless of the colour of the light. Still, Rwandans, who tend to be compliant with authority, are coming into the correct behaviour on these lights. And increasingly, they are stopping for pedestrians at zebra crossings. I’m all in favour of safer roads, but to a rural Canadian who lives on an island without traffic lights, these state of the art lights seem just a little excessive.

Also in the interest of road safety, two thousand moto-taxi drivers were called into a meeting at the stadium where an official impressed upon them that they were scooting around any which way much too fast. Specifically, they were told that their careless pulling out into the wild and lawless centre zone is responsible for the majority of traffic accidents. Now they are to obey the law that says motos must now adhere all the time to the extreme right lane. The drivers object, saying that their rush hour clients are paying them specifically to not stay stuck in the right lane behind slow moving traffic. I have not yet evidenced this right-hand rule in action.

We returned after a three-month absence to find that buses have been pushed out of the city centre. In the spirit of ‘Singaporization,’ which appears to mean cleanliness and order, the apparently unsightly bus areas have been removed to make room for taxis and cars. We went to catch the Kimironko bus home but in the place where tired workers would patiently queue at the end of the workday, there was not a bus to be seen. ‘That way,’ people said, and we started trekking in the direction of the pointing fingers, finding ourselves walking downhill on dirt roads through empty fields. Disbelieving, we kept asking and eventually, after a lengthy trek towards the prison, we found the bus. Here there were no crowds of people, no amputee beggars, no yelling bus touts. Just a clean new sign saying ‘Kimironko’ and a small group of people waiting. Coming back up to city centre from this bus stop on the paved road is thirteen sweaty minutes. ‘Pushing the riff-raff out of sight,’ said one acquaintance. Or a misguided notion of what makes a green and pedestrian friendly city.

The out of town buses are also being moved out. Their new home will be the Nyambugogo bus park, which has a nice new sign outside a freshly graveled field. This presents a problem because people buy tickets in advance and city centre was more convenient for many. The solution is going to be a move to e-tickets, which will also’ remove the problem of losing paper tickets’. I guess you can go to Nyambugogo and buy your e-ticket in advance if you don’t have a home computer or no money for network time or can’t afford to go to an internet café, but this e-system isn’t working in Britain, and so I’m not sure how it’s going to work here when so many cannot afford any internet access at all. But given the language barrier, I’m willing to consider that there’s something I don’t know about all of this.

Just so you don’t think that I’m utterly preoccupied with roads and buses, a couple of other news items. First, a kafuffle because of reports that a former ally of President Kagame, Theogene Rudasingwa, said he personally heard Mr. Kagame boast in 1994 that he ordered the shooting down of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana. The genocide began that night and so Rudasingwa views Kagame as responsible for what followed. Kagame denies. The story of this plane downing is still murky, but even murkier is the thinking that makes Kagame responsible for the genocidal massacres that followed.

Something else interesting. The World Future Council (WFC) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York announced that Rwanda’s national forestry policy won the 2011 Future Policy Award as the worlds most inspiring and innovative forest policy. Apparently, forest cover has already increased by 37 percent since 1990 due to massive reforestation. Planting activities that promote indigenous species and involve the local population have been undertaken. This is an amazing accomplishment, and one day I hope to find someone to show me. What I see planted in Kigali is mostly palm trees and colonial type hedges and what I mostly see in the countryside are eucalyptus, and I really want to see this indigenous reforestation.