Rwanda: The Million Dollar Lady
She lived in London and Switzerland, then Clare Akamanzi moved back to Rwanda. It manages the construction of the country, the recovery slowly reaches the villages
This is Rwanda: a Garden of Eden, between hills and volcanoes, clad in lush jungle like a shirt. Here the modern age for the African continent should be initiated. Ironically, here, the land of the ashes, scattered over a thousand hills, blown over banana plantations and tea fields. Because this is Rwanda: stained with blood and guilt. And left alone by the world at the moment of greatest agony. Until the beginning of this millennium, there was no tomorrow in Rwanda. Not to mention investments.
In this story, in Pumps and Pepita costume, occurs Clare Akamanzi, 29 years old. Tall, beautiful, with quiet eyes and calm nature. Modestly she introduces herself: Clare, Deputy Director of the Rwandan investment promotion company Riepa. Clare Akamanzi wants to try to explain what Riepa is. But she does not succeed because she can never complete a sentence without her phone ringing. And she says in quick order, "Hello, Mr. Minister," "Hello, Mr. Ambassador," "Hello, Your Excellency." And she then without point and point of tax exemptions, bank guarantees, project applications and architect drafts talks and promises immediate settlement.
Clare telephones while walking, while driving a car, only in step aerobics her phone remains in the locker room. She almost never comes to eat in peace, she always has to go back to the next appointment before the waiter has placed the order. Because that too is Rwanda: a country where the morning is better today, the future should begin as soon as possible.
Rwanda wants to become model country for Africa. With the help of sheikhs from Dubai, millionaires from Libya, entrepreneurs from Germany. Billions of projects are designed to liberate the country from its poverty and from the haze of the pastTo take it to the forefront of African tourism, make it the number one African player in the market of services. This requires banks and IT companies, a good infrastructure, railways, a resilient power grid. You need accounts and credit cards, training centers and universities, congress halls, hotels.
Hotels, built by Chinese, financed by Arabs - and Clare pulls the strings
Hardly any of them have Rwanda and no money. But his beauty. The jungle, the Virunga volcanoes, the mountain gorillas. A stable policy. The at least. A clean capital. A low rate of corruption and a promising growth rate of 6.5 percent last year.
An entrepreneur from Libya is investing $ 229 million to build a convention center in the capital, Kigali. A Dubai-based company is investing $ 23.5 billion in hotels and lodges. President Paul Kagame has made connections with Microsoft and Google, brought Chinese road builders and German railroaders into the country and made sure that the Coffeeshop chain Starbucks Rwandan coffee in the cup. The wife of eBay founder Pierre Omydiar, who invests private funds in ecotourism, also contributes to the preservation of the national parks.
Globalization and turbo-capitalism have a new playground. And Clare Akamanzi threads the deals. In Rwanda, a simple formula is taken into account: political stability plus investment equally auspicious future. President Paul Kagame dreams of a flourishing country, and Clare's job is to make that dream come true.
Kigali, one of the most beautiful capitals in Africa, quieter and cleaner than others, is spread over four hills. Between poverty areas and villa areas lie Clares investment projects: Row house settlements for the new middle class and glass office towers, luxury hotels, a conference center for the rich of Rwanda and abroad.
Clare has been working for Riepa for two years. In the past year, she has attracted $ 23 million more in investment than the government expected. One can tune into the rhetoric of optimism. Or give the thinker.
Then such a dialogue unfolds: "Clare, is not it also a sell-out of the country? Financially strong investment companies could shop themselves, pull their profits from the country and be up and away again?" - "The whole world is interconnected," Clare says. "We all depend on each other, there is no turning back. For me, the most important thing is to move my country forward."-" And what if the political system tips? How stable is the balance of the states of East Africa really? What if today's investments pave the way for a tyrant? "-" Where's the alternative? To leave Africa where it is? My country in its poverty, perceived in the world as the site of a terrible genocide? The time of hesitation must be over. "
Rwanda is a young country. Ancient Rwanda, the manipulation and exploitation by colonial rulers; the one in which once succeeded in imposing a racial theory on once mixed ethnic groups that eventually turned them into murderous enemies - this Rwanda no longer exists. It ended in 1994 when in just three months the Hutu majority slaughtered one million Tutsi and watched the rest of the world.It could have been prevented, but there was no one who wanted to seriously prevent it.
Clare was living in exile in Uganda because her family was from the Tutsi tribe. As early as 1959, when the Hutus in Rwanda began to hunt and kill Tutsis, Clare's grandmother had taken her three children by the hand and gone on foot from her village of Ruhengeri in the northwest to Uganda. Clare was born in 1978 in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, as the fourth of six children. The father worked as a controller at the airport, the mother was a teacher, Clare felt as a Ugandan. She experienced peace while pogroms took place in Rwanda.
In 1989, her parents reported her home for the first time. Five years later, hell broke loose in Rwanda. Clare was just 17 when the rebel army general, Paul Kagame, took over the capital Kigali, ending the killing and taking over the government. When her parents in Uganda packed up and returned, wishing to be part of the new Rwanda.
Her grandmother, a Tutsi, fled to Uganda in 1959 - today it is forbidden to speak of Tutsi or Hutu
They came to an apocalyptic state full of mistrust. "It was a cemetery," says Clare, completely without emotion. She looks back without anger, like many Rwandans. The government demands unity. Hutu, Tutsi, these concepts no longer exist, and those who uphold racial ideology face punishment. And so this country lives under a prescribed peaceful coexistence, the victims live again among the perpetrators.
Only when you understand that, and also that Clare Akamanzi is a part of this new authority that petrifies the pain by decree, you are no longer surprised when your stories sometimes sound as if they were talking about another. So much more will not be heard about it from Clare's mouth. "We want to show that we can do better than what our story seems to show, we want to move forward," says Clare.
At that time, in 1995, Clare was homesick for Kampala. She returns, studies law, specializes in commercial law and investment. With a grant from the EU, she lands in Switzerland in 2004, stays for two years and then moves to London as an employee of the Rwandan embassy. After six months, she meets what she calls a "call of duty": Clare should return to her country and help shape the future.
And so was Clare Akamanzi from the exile child to one of the most important women in the country, The 29-year-old has no husband and no children. Unusual for Rwanda, where you marry at 22. Not surprising for a woman who works as much as Clare. At seven o'clock in the morning she sits in her office, and when she drives home, the African night has long since settled over Kigali.
She lives in a townhouse with her equally single brother, they share the costs and also the occasional loneliness. In front of the door a small garden, inside earthy reds, a wide leather sofa. Much more than the furniture tells her wardrobe about a woman who is difficult to lure from the protection of their restraint: It contains 50 pairs of shoes or more. And you can laugh together and break the distance with this universal female shoe-stick. For a short time.
The working Clare usually meets in the "Serena Hotel", the first address of the city. Whoever descends there, has business in mind. Clare stands there at the table in the lobby almost every day, bent over PowerPoint presentations and catalogs of demands. Her English is a little rough, her French is throaty, and in addition she has four other African languages that are less used. Whoever invests in Rwanda is rarely an African.
Politics, conferences, step aerobics - only breaks makes Clare rare. She takes care of her private life later
But he has courage. Or a sense of adventure. As Christian Angermayer, 30, a daredevil on the German investor scene, managing director of asset management Altira Group, specializing in IT and real estate in future markets with high potential. For him, Clare has prepared a deal with Rwanda's largest bank, in which Angermayer's group will take the major part. He came to handle this deal. Angermayer wants to be seen as a friend of this country, he already has an office in Kigali and a friend in the president's house. "He rules this country like a company," he says. "I like that."
For the visit of the Angermayer group, Clare has organized a cocktail party, two meals, including one with ministers, a visit to the president and trips to the gorillas and a national park. A four-day panoramic view of the country, its people and the opportunities it offers. On these occasions, Clare likes to refer to the speed of Rwanda in customs and visa issues. And it always resonates in her voice: Now. Not tomorrow.
There are two ways investors work with Clare Akamanzi. Either they have money and not their own ideas, then Clare presents the projects they want in their country.For example, the convention center now being built was a Rwandan wish, with a German architect already presenting a finished design, which Clare then made interesting to interested developers from Libya.
Or: Someone has ideas, but no idea of the Rwandan conditions. For such cases, Clare charters a light aircraft and lets her clients see the land from above. Or she drags her through the dense forests, under the slopes of the Virunga Mountains with their mountain gorillas.
The investor recruitment and support is planned in the Riepa building. Outwardly it's not a place for big deals, an unattractive construction in a dirty yellow on one of Kigali's hills. In the only meeting room of the house sits Clare with its approximately 30 coworkers. More than half are women, almost all are under 30. Clare is sitting at the end of the table, the phone next to him. She takes off the pumps as she always does when she concentrates. Above her head, in a plastic frame, the image of her president, he sends a stern look around.
Theme of today's meeting: Planning an international investor conference. 600 people are expected, interesting participants must be picked out, invitations sent, hotels booked, dinners organized, speakers brought in, conference folders prepared and distributed, small souvenirs organized for the participants, streets decorated. Who can turn a commercial, who takes over the poster, where do we put flags and how do we decorate the way from the airport?
Clare's employees are organized like a task force. Everyone has their job, the time to settle is always tight, there are no exceptions, and there are no excuses. If someone does not fully present results, Clare wants to know why. And when to expect the result. Not tomorrow. Even today. Equal.
How does it work, such a life? At eye level with men who are white and rich and powerful? You must not be fooled. Rwanda is also Africa; Just outside of Clare's investor world, outside of Kigali, is the bitterest poverty. And does not Clare even know about this gap between modernity in Europe and modernity in Africa, regardless of whether her pumps and costume are as chic as European businesswomen?
There is no answer, just three more typical Akamanzi sentences. First: "I have to be better than expected." Second, "I have to seize every opportunity." Third, "I have to overcome it," the past and current obstacles.
The next day a visit to the president. A long conversation in the boardroom of Parliament. Paul Kagame talks about the new Rwanda and the need to govern with a firm hand. To have to go forward. Sometimes he lacks numbers, details for specific designs. Impossible, Clare may have guessed these questions, and yet she responds like gunning when the president turns to her.
"This is the new Rwanda," Kagame concludes, "rebuilt from nothing." Then he shakes everybody's hand seriously, the German investors and the ministers present. Only Clare not. She's already on the phone, nods. "Yes, Minister." She fishes under the table for her shoes. Immediately she is up and away again.
