Top 77 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Kagame - Page 2

Human rights groups are locked in a fierce competition for big checks from wealthy donors and they need to generate big headlines.

There are African leaders who have the dangerous habit of leading their people into an abyss. In Rwanda we've had presidents who killed. The one million people who died here were, to a certain extent, victims of their leader, President Juvénal Habyarimana, who died in a plane crash before the genocide began. He contributed to all that. The man who took over from him was running around ordering people to kill. If this president came back and landed in my hands, I would have him arrested and tried. Unfortunately, he died a natural death.

Rwanda is a democracy not a monarchy.

When people accuse us of taking coltan from Congo, I don't understand what they mean. The quality of our own coltan here from Rwanda is much better. But still people from the UN come here, we show them our coltan mines, we show them the documents, then they go and say: Rwanda smuggles coltan.

Moving container from Kigali to Mombasa used to take 22 days, now it takes 6 days.

The situation in Congo shows nothing for which you could hold Rwanda responsible.

Technology has brought many possibilities in education and health that are key to women.

I am not responsible for creating an opposition, neither am I responsible for appointing my own successor. My job is to allow for the opposition to exist within what the realms of the law. There is space in Rwanda for political parties - if fact we have about a dozen of them - as long as their objective is not to take us back twenty two years. On that point, we are and will always be very vigilant.

Infrastructure is key, but also how it's used, and that's political.

It is the first time in the history of Rwanda that political change in the highest leadership of the country has taken place in peace and security.

Up to a certain extent the UN soldiers are useful. But they are consuming a lot of resources in relation to the little work they are doing.

Aid makes itself superfluous if it is working well. Good aid takes care to provide functioning structures and good training that enables the recipient country to later get by without foreign aid. Otherwise, it is bad aid.

I do not want to be cynical, but if developing nations are kept backward by being told, again and again, you belong to the poor and you are there, where you actually belong, then nothing will change.

Reconciliation takes time. Sometimes many decades, as the example of Europe shows. It is hard work.

It is better for a country to have a strong leader, this applies to the United States as well as to Rwanda.

Rwanda is not over needing aid, but we can survive with less aid than before.

Rwanda has its own problems and never sought to blame others or cause others trouble. I advise Burundi to do the same.