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Rwanda: Never Give Up the Fight Against Corruption
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The New Times (Kigali)
11 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Kigali
Africa, and poverty and disease, have become synonymous - not least because we have failed to extricate ourselves from the iron grip of those wretched conditions, and they still hold the greater part of this continent hostage.
Depending as to how a politician is disposed, they will blame lack of industrialization, or colonialism, or their immediate past leaders, for the continued failure to bring tolerable health care systems to their countrymen, or provide adequately for the education of the same.
Then because indeed the west is, to some extent, culpable for the under-development of Africa, some few leaders from there will assuage the guilt of their forebears by donating generously to our foremost men and women so that this gross lack is redressed. And now this is where it gets interesting: our development partners send the aid, and in most cases this aid disappears in the pockets of unscrupulous Africans bent to secure their future at the expense of the greater humanity.
There should be no disputing the fact that if even one half of the aid that Africa gets from the west went into the purposes for which it had been secured, then poverty, ignorance and disease would indeed have been halved a long time ago. But unluckily for us, governments only pay lip service to fighting corruption. Some leaders speak with such conviction and thunder, as would make corruption itself tremble in fear.
So it is that our country and its government is universally acclaimed - its development is simply to be found in seriously pursuing what its leaders commit themselves to. Thus if it is zero tolerance to corruption, it is zero tolerance to corruption across the board, and woe unto the intrepid embezzler of public funds - be he a minister in this country, he will be prosecuted.
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This is the reason that men are being arrested following the Auditor General's report of 2006, where there were anomalies and outright theft of public money. Rwanda should never trudge the roads of other African countries which embrace corruption; it should cast its lot with upright governance mechanisms, which will surely deliver Rwandans from the common African malaise.
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