Are you free when you're rich?

Rwanda and Burundi are throwbacks to a bygone era. Pierre Nkurunziza is channeling Robert Mugabe, Hosni Mubarak, Teodore Obiang and the rest of the I-am-here-to-stay Brigade. Paul Kagame is channeling Generalissimo Fransisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet and Lee Kuan Yew and their ilk who were African-style big men with a knack for economic miracles. In their world, a little draconian application of the law, some emasculation of the constitution, limited civil or political rights, were all a small price to pay for money in your pocket and a car in your garage. In Kagame's world, he's offering a little more money - and a cow.

Many Rwandans have bought what Mr Kagame is selling. None seems to have bought whatever it is that Mr Nkurunziza is peddling. It helps that Mr Kagame looks like an ascetic - thin, reedy-voiced, stern visage, forbidding rectitude, personal probity. Mr Nkurunziza, on the other hand, looks like an overgrown playboy with a wandering eye and a taste for the perversely western.

In Africa, there is gaining currency that a Lee Kuan Yew-like discipline is required to get the buses to run on time. In Mr Kagame many have found Mr Lee's spiritual successor; he has enforced a black-and-white interpretation of the rules that has made the Land of Thousand Hills a favoured destination of bring-back-corporal-punishment types. However, just as in Singapore, Rwanda has a near non-existent opposition whose opinions count for little even if principled. So long as those views do not fit within the inspired and disciplined leader's worldview, the are not worth the paper they will be published on.

A consequence of this kind of grip on power is that the people essentially become hostages of the dear leader in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. They cannot let go of their hostage-taker; after all, he has fed them, clothed them, protected them, and made many of them rich. Some will point out that Rwanda is rapidly making strides in the human development index and a few assassinations here and there are a price we should all be willing to pay for litter-free streets and a cow in the backyard.

That is not the history of mankind. One day, even for tiny Singapore, the bough will break, and the people will not be suppressed for longer. Despite the high standards of living in Singapore, at some point someone will demand an answer for an unanswerable question: why do you believe that being free is the same as being rich? If you think that one day Rwandas will be so rich they won't care they are living in a police state, you have clearly not been paying attention to Rwanda's history. Or the history of man.