THIS WEEK

The discipline of renewal: What Rwanda teaches us about rebuilding nations

For a little over a week, I have been in Rwanda. I came for work, but Rwanda has taught me far beyond the rooms in which I came to teach. I have visited genocide memorial sites, listened to accounts of what happened in 1994 and stood before evidence of cruelty that is difficult to carry away unchanged. There are histories one reads, and there are histories that confront you. Rwanda has confronted me.

I have left those memorials with questions that refuse to leave me. What has to happen inside a human being before killing another human being becomes reasonable? How does a man become persuaded to kill a neighbor, sometimes for the promise of his land, property or material advantage? How does propaganda turn yesterday’s friend into today’s enemy? Why have ethnic and regional differences across Africa so often proved vulnerable to political manipulation? And why have we sometimes continued reproducing divisions that once served those who ruled us?

Perhaps these questions disturb me because they are not really questions about Rwanda. They are questions about people.

The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi claimed more than one million lives in approximately 100 days. Years of extremist propaganda, political manipulation and dehumanization helped create conditions in which mass killing became possible. To reduce such an atrocity simply to greed, ethnicity or ancient hatred would miss an important lesson: destructive human behaviour can be cultivated.

That realization frightens me. But Rwanda presents its opposite, too.

You eventually leave the memorials and step back into the country that exists today. You see roads, businesses, construction, order, technology and young people going about ordinary lives. Rwanda is not without challenges or political controversy, but the scale of reconstruction since 1994 is difficult to ignore.

And another question emerges: What has to happen inside a society before rebuilding together becomes possible?

Then there is the question of leadership. I find myself wondering about Paul Kagame. His family fled Rwanda when he was a young child amid anti-Tutsi violence, and he grew up as a refugee in Uganda. He later became a leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose forces took control of Rwanda in 1994. He subsequently became the dominant figure in Rwanda’s reconstruction and eventually its president. His long rule has also attracted criticism over political freedoms and the concentration of power. Both realities belong in any serious assessment of his leadership.

But another question interests me: Was discomfort part of the fuel for his courage? What converts displacement into determination? At what point does a person decide that circumstances are no longer merely to be endured but must be confronted? Whatever one’s assessment of Kagame, there is something worth examining in the resolve to fight for a country from which one’s family had been displaced and then participate in rebuilding it.

Perhaps this is what I have come to think of as the Discipline of Renewal: the capacity to confront what wounded a society, learn deliberately from it and organize people around a future that refuses to reproduce the past.

Renewal is not forgetting. Rwanda remembers deliberately. Memorials preserve the evidence, while national remembrance and reconciliation processes reflect attempts to confront a history that could easily have remained an open wound. The lesson is not that Rwanda found a perfect formula. It is that moving forward did not require pretending nothing had happened.

That distinction matters for Africa.

Across our continent, we carry histories of colonial violence, civil wars, military rule, ethnic conflict, political persecution and communal bloodshed. Sometimes we suppress painful history; sometimes we weaponize it. We change governments without necessarily changing behaviors that weaken institutions. We condemn yesterday’s ethnic divisions while reproducing them in today’s politics. We remember conflicts without always dismantling the conditions that produced them.

History does not have to become destiny.

At OPTIMISE Africa, I have consistently examined development through People, Purpose and Performance. Rwanda has made me think even more deeply about the first: people. Human beings can be persuaded to destroy, but they can also decide to rebuild. Leadership can exploit difference, but it can also organize people around a common future. Institutions can legitimize exclusion, but they can also be redesigned around belonging. Perhaps Africa’s greatest resource, and sometimes its greatest risk, remains its people.

I came to Rwanda expecting to teach. I leave with more questions than answers. Perhaps that, too, is part of learning.

But one question now travels with me beyond Rwanda: What will we do with what happened to us?

Every nation inherits memories it did not choose. We cannot rewrite them. But every generation can decide whether inherited pain becomes an excuse, a weapon, a warning or a teacher.

Nations cannot optimize their future by erasing their past.

They optimize it when they learn enough from the past to refuse to reproduce it.

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“Optimize! Africa” is a weekly leadership column focused on the issues that shape Africa’s future through the lens of people, purpose, and performance. It explores themes such as leadership, workforce optimization, education, employability, organizational culture, governance, productivity, institutional effectiveness, and human capital development across the continent. The column’s initiator/author is Amara C. Ezediniru, Ph.D., a Nigerian workforce optimization strategist.