I’ve never really understood the hatred so many British people have for Tony Blair. Sure, he was wrong on Iraq; sure, he must have lied about it. But which leader hasn’t lied to their people at some point? But the vicious internalised hatred I never quite got.
I get it now.
One of the highlights of the first day of the WEF Africa meeting was a discussion about partnerships in Africa. It wasn’t the topic, you understand, it was the people discussing it. Kagame, Howard Buffett (son of Warren and well-known philanthropist) and, in the moderator’s chair, Blair himself. Buffett was very interesting, a person who says he’s been to every country in Africa (take that, Jean-Jaques Cornish), and has been a permanent resident of South Africa for “over a decade”. He waxed lyrical about how important “stability and certainty” were to investors and aid agencies. That in Rwanda, if they said they would do something, they did it, that no other place worked in a partnership quite like this one.
By this stage we got it; Kagame’s presence was just to remove the need for a banner blaring “Rwanda’s the best”. Sometimes, you can see whether a moderator is actually interrogating, or just teeing up a person to get the best soundbite out of them. You can see if there’s some sort of agreed line. That was the case here. READM MORE