AT SIX in the evening, as the streets start to throng with motorcycle taxis taking people home, a senior civil servant in Rwanda’s ministry of infrastructure sits back at his desk with a large flask of tea. The security officers on the entrance may have already left, but on the second floor officials are settling in for several more hours of work. Glance at their targets—more than doubling the amount of electricity generated in the country, providing infrastructure in cities to accommodate an urban population twice its current level, and all by 2018—and you can see why they are still at their desks. This is a country in a hurry. Twenty-two years since the start of a genocidal civil war that killed about a fifth of the population (and 70% of the minority Tutsis) and saw a third of the survivors fleeing across its borders, Rwanda is still racing to rebuild itself. And the sternest taskmaster is its president, Paul Kagame, who led the rebel forces that ended the genocide and has since shaped the country.
The country he liberated had suffered not just an unimaginable human disaster; it was also left wrecked at the end of the civil war. Soldiers and militias loyal to the genocidal Hutu regime had systematically destroyed power plants and factories as they retreated. Hospitals and universities were devastated, their staff butchered or in exile. “We lost a lot of scientists,” Gerardine Mukeshimana, the minister of agriculture, says matter-of-factly, when explaining why the country has only limited capacity for agricultural research.
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