Only the RNC terrorist mouthpiece, Davi Himbara, would use foreign aid levels as friendship gauge. To satisfy his sponsor Museveni and Rujugiro, Himbara aka Murunganwa, has to constantly create a new slanderous post on Rwanda. His latest invention is that UK’s diplomatic relations with Rwanda are not as good as before because Rwanda does not appear in UK’s aid top 10 beneficiaries list. While conventional wisdom calls for countries to break aid dependency, Himbara is gets it completely wrong just to suite his propaganda narrative.
Himbara used UK’s top 10 aid beneficiaries list to extrapolate that anyone not on the list is not such as good friend to UK. He forgets that some of UK’s closest allies like the US or Germany do not appear on his propaganda “friend list” and that some countries with difficult relations with UK (like Zimbabwe for example) appear on his list. After all, the donor and the beneficiary determine the level of foreign aid at a bilateral level. A country looted for the last 35 years by a despot like Museveni might require more aid to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Humanitarian aid, if well managed, generates national income and overtime reduced the need for aid but shifts to investment and other win-win scenarios.
In 2019, the Permanent Secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), Matthew Rycroft, announced that over the past two decades, UK aid to Rwanda had reached £1 Billion. It is therefore understandable that Rwanda no longer needs as much aid as it used to after the 1994 genocide against Tutsis.
In fact, that Rwanda is no longer on the top 10 beneficiaries shows that it is moving out of aid dependency. For example, Rwanda raised over $600 Million on the London Stock Exchange by issuing Eurobonds.
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