Road trip to Kigali

“Is there press freedom in Rwanda?” “No.” “Is there access to information?” “No.”

My student, Jean Claude, peppered one of the journalists we met in Kigali. We made the trip to visit an international TV production house, the government-backed Radio Rwanda and the private City Radio. The journalist explained his answers. He had recently produced a story about a cholera outbreak. He described the steps he took to cover. To begin, he called the authority, the Minister of Health. He asked for information and numbers of people affected. He was shut down from the start -- given no information; the Minister refused, completely, to talk to journalists. So he visited the affected area, collected his own statistics as best he could and reported on them and the story as he saw it. The day the story aired the Health Ministry called to scold him. It held a press conference that night to release its figures. They didn’t jive with his. Doing journalism here baffles me. How do you get the facts? For a simple question like the price of a private drive from Butare to Lake Kivu, I might get five different answers if I asked five people. And all answers with the authority of the truth. Who can a journalist rely on for unbiased, fact-based opinion? Does the journalist have to do all the primary work of say Stats Can and the Health Ministry before being able to make a report? And if so, how can a journalist possibly report on breaking news? My students tell me that, for example, when covering an election issue such as the tax policy of the various candidates you can’t do what you might do in Canada: call up the smartest, most unpartisan tax lawyers/economists/professors in the country and drill them for their research and analysis. Everyone has an agenda. And many government authorities simply won’t talk to you. The agenda bit is, of course, true in Canada too and this is a good lesson, in that regard. When we arrived at Radio Rwanda, right behind the US embassy, we had to wait at the gate for 20 minutes or so in the scorching sun, fork over each of our identity cards (including my passport) to guards with machine guns and unfriendly faces, and then pass by the gate one by one as our names were read off our identity cards. The place was like a bunker. But the students were fascinated by the equipment and how everything worked. One said it would be an honour to work at the nation’s radio station. Another said he would never want to work at a place like because you would be under the arm of government. One student said if you watch Radio Rwanda, TV Rwanda and read the New Times you will get exactly the same stories : mostly press-release, unquestioning, government-messaged stories. There was lots of the good old-fashioned tape and razor blades as well as a digital editing system. The remote truck was interesting. Apparently there were three such trucks before “the war” (the word people use for the genocide) but the government made off with two of them to spread hate messages and Radio Rwanda hasn’t seen them since. RTLM and Radio Rwanda were used during “the war.” City Radio was cool. The few people working there looked like they belonged on Queen Street West or something. It’s a small operation but all digital. Lots of music and sports and some news. We drove back home as the sun set in shades of red, grey and blue. Up and down and up and down along the best-paved, hilly road in the country. This is not the country of a ‘mille collines,’ it seems, but more like the country of a million hills, says Roger and Ann and its true. We made a couple of pit stops for students to get goat brochettes on sticks and banana beer and water. One student sat beside me in the front seat so I would have someone to talk to on the trip home. He told me his life story of growing up in Uganda after his parents left during an earlier Tutsi backlash, in 1959. He said everyone is Rwandan now and he believes the more people mix marriages the better for the country, the world. I asked him about the Catholic church and the genocide. He said it was hard to understand how some of the priests were involved in the genocide but that it was the individuals and not the church (or the religion) who were to blame.

Sylvia Thomson Lecturer at National University of Rwanda Under Rwanda Initiative Carleton University