Emeka Alex Duru Kigali is the capital and largest city of Rwanda. Those that have visited the city in recent times, say it is a beauty to behold, perhaps, a reason for other Africans, including Nigerian leaders, trooping to it for retreats and conferences. But that is not the sense in which the capital city is being referenced here.
It is rather, a metaphor for intolerance and ethnic bigotry which resulted in senseless genocide that swept through Rwanda in 1994. The killing spree, which lasted 100 days before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel militia intervened in July 1994, claimed the lives of 800,000 people, largely Tutsis and moderate Hutus. It was a vicious exercise in which neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their wives of different ethnic groups – a rat race of sort.
Last April, Rwanda marked 30 years of the gory incident and paid solemn tribute to the genocide victims. But while the East African country is doing quite much to erase that ugly chapter from its history, signs of such madness happening in Nigeria are increasingly becoming obvious, if not checked now. While Rwanda boiled, sane minds across the world raised alarm.
Years after, visitors to the country could not come to terms with the level of bestiality that accompanied the genocide. Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu, was among the flustered visitors to Rwanda after the mayhem. On September 2, 2018, he penned a grisly piece of his shock at the magnitude of.