RNC mouthpiece Himbara recycles discredited and discarded WB document, in his mission to tarnish Rwanda

The self-publishing fraud Murunganwa aka David Himbara has recycled what he calls a document about off-shore banking and foreign aid. The document is as usual a pure fabrication by the RNC chief propagandist that’s in the pay of Museveni and Rujugiro – with a mission to tarnish anything about Rwanda. Though the so-called document has already been disowned by the World Bank, Himbara tries to equate offshore banking to be synonymous with corruption. To feed Murunganwa’s anti-Rwanda narrative, he tries to revive a busted report that erroneously linked three different concepts: foreign aid, off-shore banking, and tax haven banking.

The Economist magazine for instance, on the 13th of February 2020, reported on the trashed paper which tried to mix apples and oranges. It elaborated on how the rejected research initially began as a private paper and ended up receiving an expeditious stamp by a former World Bank Official Penny Goldberg. Goldberg, then quickly left the World Bank, barely 15 months after her World Bank appointment, leaving the institution to clean up her dirt, after her unilateral decision to approve an incoherent private research.

Offshore banking is basically banking outside your residential jurisdiction. There are many valid and legal reasons for the practice. The paper’s innuendo was that foreign aid was diverted to Offshore Banks – with no proof. Which was why the WB disowned, and deleted it. But Himbara, a paid liar, is still using it to tarnish Rwanda.

With the case of Rwanda, in 1994 the genocidal regime emptied the central bank and ran away with their loot. The paper, disturbingly, does not differentiate between 1990 to the 1994 genocide against Tutsis and the post conflict era. In the reconstruction effort, Rwanda received significant aid and grants from various development partners. The banking sector had to be rebuilt from scratch and confidence in national financial institutions restored. Of course some offshore banking had to be utilized.

Murunganwa’s insinuations that deposits in offshore banking always are “corruption moneys” is wrong and misleading. But if there are individuals of the calibre to misuse it for crooked means, Himbara can find no better example than his paymasters Museveni and Rujugiro.

By posting a link long removed by the World Bank, he only exposes desperation in that to keep getting a check, he has to keep concocting stuff.