Late Fragments (N) by Kate Gross

Author:Kate Gross [Gross, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-12-02T22:00:00+00:00

There you stand, trying to rebuild a nation in an environment of raised expectations and short patience … After all, they voted for you because they had confidence in your ability to deliver – immediately. Only you cannot. Not because of the lack of financial resources, but simply because the capacity to implement whatever change you have in mind does not exist.

One country above all others changed the way I thought about my career. Look across Africa, from west to east, from bolshie little Liberia to massive, exuberant Kenya. Settle your gaze on a landscape of lakes and volcanoes, bang-splat in the middle of the continent. Here, in 1994, over the course of a hundred days, nearly a million people were killed. ‘Decimation,’ wrote Philip Gourevitch, ‘means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and summer of 1994 a programme of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda.’ Nearly a million people murdered by their friends, neighbours and colleagues. A generation destroyed, or carrying the weight of the destruction they had caused. The state had engineered a genocide, and in its wake the state combusted. What happened next? The Rwandan people voted, but as well as choosing their government they wanted to know they could sleep safe in their beds. Government must deliver security before anything else. Once a mother knows the family she has created will not be ripped apart before her eyes, she starts to ask questions about clean water for her children to drink, bed-nets to keep them safe from malarial mosquitoes, roads to take the mangoes she has grown to market, and electricity so she can study at night for a better job.

These things, which we take for granted, do not happen by magic. They require the state to act. Decisions, money, and after that, the steady drip-drip of bureaucracy to make sure the decisions are followed up and the money is well spent. Meetings. Coordination. Updates. More decisions. Paperclips. When I first visited Rwanda, thirteen years after the genocide, I found a cadre of public servants committed to refashioning their country. But they were young (even by my standards), and for some of them this was their first job since leaving a refugee camp. Switching on a computer and typing memos was, understandably, not part of their skill-set. But it was part of mine, it was in my bureaucrat’s blood. At the same time, I knew that the job of the man (or woman) at the top is a lonely one, and that the only person who really understands what it feels like to bear the responsibility of leading a country is someone who has, well, led a country. Rwanda showed me that there was the germ of an idea here, an idea that made my bureaucrat heart beat faster.

Today, seven years after I stepped off the plane in Kigali, there exists an organisation called the Africa Governance Initiative. I was its founding chief executive. Tony Blair is its patron.

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