“Let me tell you this. Some people think it is their job to create the oppositions in Rwanda – and that is the biggest mistake they are making,” Kagame told journalists before he headed to the National Stadium to launch his election campaign.
“You may create an opposition, but who manages it: will you create it from outside and keep managing it from inside? It will be difficult for you and those you have created,” said Kagame.
“First of all, as an outsider, you have no business creating anything political in another country.”
The President was responding to questions by a Kenyan and Ugandan journalist who had asked whether the parties which are taking part in the presidential polls were the “legitimate opposition”. Critics have branded the three parties competing against the RPF in the polls which started Tuesday, as stooges of the ruling party.
In raised tone, and gesturing in seeming irritation, the President dismissed the use of the description “legitimate opposition” to refer to groups such as the FDU-Inkingi and its leader Ingabire Victoire.
“A legitimate opposition is that which develops by itself through the conditions that exist. Not the opposition you create in your mind or practically…then that is not a legitimate opposition,” said the President, who at some point seemed to be enjoying the questions the foreign journalists were putting to him.
Rights organizations and international media say by charging Ingabire and Bernard Ntaganda of PS Imberakuri, government is silencing the real opposition.
The President instead accused Europe and other countries he did not name of being the ones which are delaying the speedy trail of Ingabire, against who, he said government had overwhelming evidence.
The firry politician is facing some three counts including links to the FDLR rebels and Genocide ideology, but the Prosecutor General Martin Ngoga said in June that countries holding crucial evidence were not coming forth despite formal requests.
Ngoga named Holland, United States, Belgium, Switzerland, DR Congo and Burundi – as the countries where Ingabire networked with the FDLR militias.