POLITICS
The Rwanda Ministry of Finance released a statement debunking most of Mr Paduano ’ s claims , including his assertions that Rwanda was understating its Debt to GDP ratio , one of the indicators of a country ’ s debt sustainability , the howler of China ‘ financing and building ’ 70 % of Rwanda ’ s roads , and other false assertions . When Rwandans on Twitter cornered Mr Paduano and tasked him to explain why he published fake news to advance an agenda , he instead retreated to casting more aspersions on Rwanda by citing human rights watch , democracy , blah blah .
Mr Paduano ’ s and his ilk ’ s obsession with Rwanda raises curious questions . Paduano for example begins his article in The Atlantic by writing about Chinese ‘ gifts ’ of office buildings , and many Chinese construction companies , Chinese debt , etc to Rwanda . But China has also gifted Uganda with double a office complex that houses the Prime Ministers and President ’ s offices . Chances are that you have not heard about that . China has built The African Union offices . Chinese construction companies are winning contracts in Europe and America as well . Using Rwanda as an example of the assumed Chinese Red Menace sweeping over Africa , and putting the country in the headline for his piece , Mr . Paduano shows his prejudices against the country even before he puts pen to paper .
Mr . Paduano penned another anti-Rwanda screed for The Economist on August 15th , a piece that came at the heels of a Financial Times story questioning the veracity of Rwanda ’ s poverty statistics ( more on this later ). Mr Paduano piles onto the Financial Times accusations asserting that Rwanda ’ s poverty reduction numbers are fake . In this piece ’ s very first paragraph , Mr Paduano gives himself away when he refers to a “ genocide in 1994 when perhaps 500,000 people … were killed ,” in effect joining rabid genocide denier and conspiracy theorist , Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp in casting aspersions on Rwandans by doubting the scale of one of the worst ethnicbased atrocities in world history . Why , he could simply have got accurate information and cited the right figures and true nature of this crime against humanity . He chose not to !
In the Economist Piece , Paduano also suggests that Rwanda ’ s rapid GDP growth of 8 % a year has been exaggerated . Now , this is beyond absurd . The World Bank has been curating GDP data and other development indicators for Rwanda and other countries since at least 1965 . Surely this must be the conspiracy of the ages if international institutions like the World Bank , IMF , The OECD , and other international agencies collude with Rwanda all time , to lie about its statistics .
The next episode in the effort by western media and academic to sow doubt on Rwanda ’ s economic progress came in form of a Financial Times story on 13 th August . This one questioned Rwanda ’ s poverty figures and repeated many of the claims liberal academics in western universities as well as newspapers have made regarding Rwanda ’ s economic and political record for many years .
The FT article actually built onto a series of articles by anonymous bloggers that were published on the website of an obscure publication called Review of African Political Economy . This journal ’ s articles date as far back as May 2017 . These articles claim that Rwanda , in cahoots with donors fudge development performance statistics to depict a picture of the country that is rosier than the reality .
Of particular contention in all the missives is the conclusion by the Rwandan National Institute of Statistics in its Household Survey Report of 2015 that poverty had declined to 39 % from 45 % in the preceding three-year period . The financial Times story claimed that they initiated an independent study of the microdata from this survey and found that Rwanda had overstated a drop in its poverty figures .
From 2017 when these claims first came out , The World Bank firmly responded by insisting that Rwanda ’ s poverty statistics are legit , but this did not satisfy the naysayers .
In an unprecedented act , the Bank even commissioned an investigation whereby two of its experts examined Rwanda ’ s poverty data and found it legitimate . In an extensive paper titled “ Revisiting the Poverty Trend in Rwanda : 2010 / 11 to 2013 / 14 ,” published in 2018 , the Bank ’ s experts Freeha Fatima and Nobuo Yashida concluded that “ After adjusting for spatial
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