originally published in The East African, Kenya
There is no slowing down for Rwanda. Wars with the Congo? Let’s collaborate on energy projects.
Population density and land issues? Anyone who wants to return home still can.
Now, what about a global crisis that is making those with the deepest pockets the most stingy?
Here’s an offer you won’t resist:
The government is selling its stakes in a myriad national companies that have both resurrected and symbolised Rwanda. While America is nationalising, Rwanda says that it is in the middle of a process of privatisation that has long been in order.
It’s a moment in privatisation that comes at a time when money has been hard to find.
Despite generally weathering the economic storm — Rwanda says it will post 10 per cent gains in foreign investment and five per cent general economic growth in 2009 — the country is feeling the strain. Some foreign investors have had to pull back, and government jobs have been shed.
Now three new companies are on the market. They are the foundations of many developing countries: cellphones, insurance and beer.
Bralirwa, Rwanda’s brewery, was the first company started after independence, and was also the first to reopen after the genocide.
It is the only bottler in the country and takes care not just of the Primus/Mutzig/Amstel line, but produces Coca-Cola, Fanta and tonic water as well. Its office outside the resort town of Gisenyi on Lake Kivu has become popular for guest tours.
MTN, the South African telecom mogul, has its colours painted across half the country. It owns a gargantuan share of the cellphone market and has consistently been one of — if not the biggest — taxpayers to the government.
The floats come amid a swelling economic recession that is just now biting into Africa.
Rwanda’s economic transformation has been much heralded — 11.2 per cent growth last year, a burgeoning ICT and telecommunications sector where now both cellphones and computers are manufactured within the country; a robust, niche-market tourism industry that brought in nearly a million visitors in 2008.
But the third quarter has been a rough one for the country. Some of the most touted foreign-investment projects have been withdrawn in the withering economic climate.
Arabian investor Dubai World recently pulled most of its money out of a groundbreaking $230 million investment that was to include golf courses, resorts and eco-lodges throughout the country. Now, they’re going ahead with two.
Closer to home, supermarket chain Nakumatt, which opened its first foreign location in 2008 in Rwanda, pulled out of a multimillion dollar second investment to open a Gateway mall in one of Kigali’s poshest neighbourhoods. It was a promise dating back years, and the land has already been resold.
Then there’s another East African giant, Nation Media Group, that is to open radio and television stations in the country. They were due to arrive in June. Not yet.
The road to privatisation hasn’t been entirely paved with gold either. The country’s national airline, Rwandair Express, was privatised in 2006 and has — figuratively speaking — fallen out of the sky.
It’s codeshare agreement with Kenya Airways was stripped in 2008, and for the past two years it has been renting planes, pilots and flight attendants from a third-party.
“It’s not up to the standards we wish,” said Rwanda’s Finance Minister James Musoni.
One of Rwanda’s major development visions is to turn the country into an air-transport hub, competing regionally with Nairobi and Entebbe.
The government has not lost sight of its goals. “We can be landlocked, but we won’t be airlocked,” says Mr Musoni. “It makes business sense.”
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