Corruption, Political Murder, Potholes-God, Isn’t Burundi Just Too, Too Boring?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi

12 June 2011

column

Nairobi — Of the five members of the East African Community, Burundi is the one most ignored by media and pundits. Given the regularity with which the community’s other odd men out, Rwanda and Uganda make the headlines, this is rather surprising.

In case you’re wondering about the “odd men out” label, it derives from the contrasting ways in which the three countries have evolved politically since Independence in comparison with Kenya and Tanzania.

While the latter two have been generally stable and peaceful, in Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, violence has long been the elites’ strategy of choice for resolving the political questions of the day and effecting regime change.

One may argue that, with Kenya and Tanzania staging violent electoral processes in recent times and with both no longer seen as the “islands of peace” they once were, one ought to be less sanguine about such clear-cut categorisations.

Nonetheless, rightly or wrongly, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda are still seen as more prone to political violence and instability than the other two. For example, observers of Rwandan affairs will have heard repeated references to the country as “sitting on a powder keg” or “waiting to explode,” apparently because the Kagame regime has not paid sufficient attention to “issues of human and political rights.” As for Uganda, there is a view out there that as the years go by and Museveni digs in even deeper without showing any inclination to quit, peaceful change looks less and less likely.

Burundi, though, is something of a paradox. On the one hand, because it is ruled by members of the majority Hutu ethnic group, it is seen as having better prospects than Rwanda where members of the Tutsi minority are dominant. Some go as far as praising the Burundian government for the apparent power-sharing arrangements along ethnic lines and condemning its Rwandan counterpart for refusing to use ethnicity as the basis for intra-elite political bargaining.

But post-war Burundi is also the only country among the three odd men out where the government seems not to have adequate control over internal security, or where insecurity provides a cover for state-inspired violence.

I first went to Burundi in 2004. I went again in early 2010, in pursuit of an extraordinary man with a colourful past, whom I wanted to interview about his life. I went there via Kigali, where I had spent time interviewing people who cannot be accused of having led idle, boring, or cowardly lives.

The first thing that struck me was just how different Bujumbura looked in comparison with Kigali. From the unkempt airport building to the potholed and unswept roads to the unpainted buildings, to police personnel wearing a mix of well-worn police and civilian attire, Bujumbura looked to be frozen in time, a country sinking under the burden of post-conflict reconstruction.

In Bujumbura, as in Kampala but not in Kigali, stories of official corruption and self-enrichment by the ruling elite are everywhere, as are those of the weakness of state organs and their failure to live up to the expectations of the man and woman in the street.

But unlike in Kampala or Kigali, in Bujumbura one picks up numerous stories of politically motivated killings and the havoc they have wreaked on the delicate elite consensus that begot the carefully-crafted Arusha Accord of 2000, ending years of civil war.

As I listened to such stories, I wondered why it was that Burundi and its problems did not appear that often in the print and electronic media, and therefore in public debate in the region.

I visited again recently. I left Kigali on Good Friday, in a small group whose mission was to spend Easter catching up with friends and family. Unavoidable delays forced us to depart late in the afternoon.

The journey was quite frightening, rendered so by friends who asked us if we were “crazy” to travel to Bujumbura so late by road. Conflicting opinions from moneychangers and other people at the border crossing did not help. We decided to go, anyway, and arrived without incident.

A lot has changed. Bujumbura is cleaner than it was two years ago. As with Kampala and Kigali, a real estate boom makes it look like one large construction site.

However, corruption stories are still the stuff of everyday conversation. Something struck me: Most people, when asked what living in Bujumbura was like, emphasised how relatively safe it was, “except for politicians.” And so the question still remains: why do we hear so little about Burundi’s troubles?

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