Kigali is nearing completion of a link to an underseas fiber optic Internet connection, reports the BBC. This is a big development for Rwanda, and the greater region. President Paul Kagame—a leader of the Tutsi rebels that drove the genocidal Hutu militias (and their government sponsors) out of the country—is making an effort to turn Rwanda, one of the poorest African countries, into an information economy success story.
Mr. Kagame’s assumption—that bypassing the traditional route to development is possible through IT—raises questions, not the least of which is how many Rwandans will be adequately skilled in computers and information technologies to use the new broadband connection to their advantage. Rwanda remains one of the poorest countries in Africa, as nearly 90% of its population is involved in agricultural work, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Fifteen years on, Rwanda is still dealing with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide and the vicious regional war that followed. Mr. Kagame, the “hero” of the genocide, doesn’t display very strong democratic tendencies. Reporters Without Borders ranked Rwanda the 147th (of 169) country in the world for press freedoms in 2007, political dissidents have a nasty habit of disappearing, and Human Rights Watch has accused the police of numerous extra-judicial killings. The horrors of the genocide may be gone, but a steady banality of repression remains.
I’m a firm believer in the power of the information economy to help poor countries out of their plight. Broadband can help encourage entrepreneurship in ways that foreign aid has difficulty accomplishing. But these advances must be an accompaniment to an open, civil society, and not an alternative.
