MEMORIAL: Presidents Kagame (L) and Museveni lay a foundation stone at Nyarugunga Primary School in Rwanda last week. PPU PHOTO

President Museveni had last visited Rwanda in 2009. Therefore another visit, coming after three years, was a surprise. But as the presidential jet delayed to touch soil at the Kigali International Airport, more people - Rwandans, Ugandans and others - in hundreds, gathered to welcome Mr Museveni, writes Benon Herbert Oluka
During the media briefing that marked the end of President Museveni four-day official visit to Rwanda, journalists besieged the Ugandan leader and his host, President Kagame, with incessant inquiries about what had gone on behind closed doors.
After giving each other the cold shoulder for a long time, there was evident curiosity about what the two leaders had discussed during the largely private, two-day retreat at President Kagame’s country home in Muhazi and what the state visit meant for future relations between the two countries.
For President Kagame, deflecting the inquiries seemed quite easy. Ordinarily, the Rwandan leader does not give away too much. And he stayed true to character in his response to the questions. He simply told the journalists to “keep reading the mood that has come out of this.”
The usually more verbose Museveni initially declined to say anything altogether. Then at one point, after a similar question was asked, he said whatever they discussed privately would remain secret. “What kind of leaders would we be if we told our secrets to journalists?” he asked.
Body language
The united stance on what to disclose and what to keep under wraps was the penultimate indicator of a visit that had gone well for either side. What the duo could not keep secret, though, was the body language and other non-verbal indicators of how the events had evolved.
After Uganda’s presidential jet touched down at Kigali International Airport, more than one hour later than scheduled, the distance between the two leaders as they stood at the welcome dais was so large that some of the Rwandan leaders’ handlers privately complained about the message it would send. One of them wondered why nobody had informed – their president at least – to bridge the gap.
Although the two leaders left the airport in the same car, Mr Kagame’s ESV Escalade, it was not clear yet how the visit would transpire or end. After all, President Museveni’s last visit to Rwanda in 2009 to receive a medal in his honour had left a bitter taste on either side. President Museveni was irked by the refusal of Rwanda’s immigration officials to allow his entire security detail to travel to Kigali. President Kagame on the other hand was apparently miffed that his counterpart had not acknowledged the Rwandan leader’s contribution to the National Resistance Army (NRA) war that brought Mr Museveni to power.
This time round, however, both sides seemed to have gone out of their way to attend to the other sides’ needs. Rwanda allowed all of Mr Museveni’s convoy, including two of the bullet-proof cars the President uses, his mobile toilet and a breakdown truck, to travel to Kigali. President Museveni’s team on the other hand was careful not to travel with any heavy visible weapons – leaving most of the responsibility of providing security for the two leaders to Rwanda’s Republican Guard.
The harmony, according to Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr Sam Kutesa, was down to the “new channels of communication” that the leaders from the two countries had opened in the renewed attempt to smoothen relations.
“We have opened channels of communications. When there are problems, we discuss them openly and we think that is the best way rather than let them hang around and poison the atmosphere,” he said. “I think when people visit each other, it is not a sign of trying to solve problems. It is a sign that they are friends. People don’t tend to visit people who are not their friends.”
The first hours of the visit, though evidently tense, seemed to go well despite a final hiccup. Towards 6pm, Mr Museveni in the company of Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo and a number of Uganda’s ministers to visit the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Site and the Heroes’ Cemetery in Remera. President Kagame and his wife Jeanette, on the other hand, went to Rwanda’s Parliament for a commemorative event.
In Parliament, Ms Museveni, who had hosted her Rwandan counterpart weeks earlier, seemed at ease as she made off-the-cuff remarks. She praised the role of Rwanda’s women and urged them to teach their Ugandan counterparts the spirit of Umuganda (communal work). However, there was a final hiccup at the end of the day when the two leaders were forced to cancel a dinner in which they should have been briefed about the results of the Joint Permanent Commission (JPC) meetings between ministers from the two countries that had taken place days earlier.
The next day, however, when President Museveni joined his Rwandan counterpart in the Umuganda, seemed to have provided the ice-breaker. President Museveni, whose largely conversational speech was delivered in a mixture Kiswahili, Runyakore and Kinyarwanda, sometimes called on the Rwandan leader, whom he referred to simply as Paulo, to help him out whenever he failed to get a message out accurately in the local dialect.
Towards the end of his speech, Mr Museveni excited locals when he announced a donation of $300,000 (about Shs780 million) to Nyarugunga Primary School, which has largely been built through the Umuganda programme.
While the gesture drew the ire of many in Uganda, who accused Mr Museveni of dishing out state funds to another country at a time when he seems indifferent to the demands of the different striking groups in Uganda, it received a warm reception in Rwanda, where most of the activities during his visit were aired live on state television.
By the time the two leaders got to their private tête-à-tête at President Kagame’s home in Muhazi, after visiting Rwanda’s Free Trade Zone, Inyange Milk Factory and a housing estate, the atmosphere had got increasingly more cordial.
Entry point
At Muhazi, according to sources who were present, the two leaders started off struggling to find topics of conversation when their handlers were around. However, on at least two occasions that they got the opportunity to be all by themselves, they spent between two to three hours in conversation.
When President Kagame later took Mr Museveni to tour his farm, he offered the Ugandan leader a boat ride and then drove him from one part of the farm to the other. Mr Kagame later donated 10 of his Inyambo cows to Mr Museveni, an avowed cattle lover.
The gifts, and whatever else happened at Muhazi, seemed to have cheered Mr Museveni up immensely. He lavished praise on Mr Kagame for the contribution that the latter and other Rwandans played in the war that brought him to power. President Kagame, on the other hand, praised Mr Museveni for beginning the liberation struggle that inspired them to liberate their own country.
During the press conference, President Kagame could not hide his satisfaction. “For us,” he said, “this visit was important absolutely because it continues to enable us to strengthen our relations; not only the leaders of the two countries but also the people of the two countries. You don’t expect visits like this to take place every day but it doesn’t mean that in between there are no good things happening.
“It is very important that it has come at the time it came after a long time without such a visit so we have been very happy. As you will notice, not only are we happy personally, at the government level, even at the level of ordinary citizens in this country; I think the visit has gone down very well. So we can only build on that to build an even better future and a better relationship in the future,” he added.
As the two leaders departed for Kigali International Airport on July 31, officials from either side were evidently excited about how the visit had gone. But with Uganda and Rwanda often having recurrent suspicions, questions abound on how long the new bridge will hold.
Flashback
Rwanda and Uganda have been here before. In 2005, the patched up relations broke down again after President Museveni’s team was denied entry to Rwanda during a visit. But about three years later, in 2008 when Uganda hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, they had normalised enough for Uganda to play a pivotal role in working towards the admission of Rwanda into the Commonwealth of Nations.
What is perhaps most instructive on where the relationship between the two leaders is headed is a statement that President Kagame made at the state banquet. He said the leaders of Uganda and Rwanda have to mutually exploit the vast resources in either country for the benefit of their people, if the two wars that each of them headed are to eventually be of lasting benefit.
“We owe it to the citizens of our countries and the region to work together for peace and development and, obviously and very importantly, our dignity because we all stand to benefit,” he said. “We can only blame ourselves if we do not fully seize the opportunity to exploit the new frontiers of technology, of modern infrastructure and investment potential that our region offers. It is then that our citizens will truly enjoy the freedoms and advantages of, for example, unrestricted movement and mutually beneficial cross-border trade and investment that come with meaningful cooperation.”