If you have ever had the displeasure of encountering a street con, hustling you to buy his product, you will quickly realize the similarities with Himbara, the weed smoking Rwanda National Congress propagandist.
They take sweet tablets and sell them off as vitamins with miraculous pharmaceutical properties. Con artist will try to sell you apples as oranges and vice versa, and in the process, they will attempt to confuse you failing to convince you.
Fugitive Himbara does just that, he attempts to confuse his readers for lack of a convincing argument. A closer look at his recent post on Offshore Banking exposed him for the fraudster that he truly is. He claims foreign aid to Rwanda is diverted to offshore accounts and then throws in a suicide that he labels as an assassination. The “mélange” is a classic case of confusing to convince.
Unable to read a table, Himbara completely misses the point of a research paper on foreign aid and offshore banking. It is public knowledge that Himbara faked his academic credentials yet the table is clear with two columns of “haven” and “non-haven” deposits. Only Himbara would add both, but he does so simply to obtain a higher number for his headline.
The table, from the research paper, presents data that actually paints a very different picture on Rwanda than the one Himbara is trying to create. Rwanda, in the table, has the fourth lowest rate of “haven deposits” growth with 0.06% and the lowest “non-haven deposit” at -1%. But most importantly, the figures in the table represent data from 1990 to 2010!
The classification as haven and non-haven deposit locations is very controversial. What the European Union considers a haven deposit location will be different from what the US, UK, Russia or South Africa considers being haven deposit locations. Crucially, the paper lists Belgium as a safe haven location.
Listing Belgium automatically skewed data for Rwanda. Belgium is the former colonial power of Rwanda and for that historic reason alone; Rwanda finds itself with a higher reported “haven deposit” figure. The fact that all transactions, since 1990, with its former colonial power automatically became black listed as a “haven” transaction should have prompted the researchers to clarify the anomaly.
Furthermore, the researchers fail to consider that in 1994, after the Genocide against Tutsi and the liberation of Rwanda, two key factors had to be considered. Firstly, the Genocidal regime fell and left looting everything in the central bank, hiding their proceeds in “haven” deposits. Secondly, Rwanda had to reconstruct everything including its banking sector. The requirement for development partners to initially operate from Offshore’s location cannot be considered as an indication of foreign aid diversion. A post-conflict country, either in terms of foreign aid received or in terms of legitimate use of offshore banking, cannot be captured in a mere table without adequate explanatory notes.
Our convinced or confused propagandist does more than misrepresenting facts by adding a subtraction. David Himbara decides to secure his sale by adding the suicide of a gospel artiste gone rogue in the mix. The idea is to throw as much mud as possible, hoping that some will stick, impresses his bankroller and smile his way to the bank.
The RNC propagandist behaves like the street hustle selling fake pills, desperately yapping that his pills will cure cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, impotence and skin diseases.
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