Paul Kagame kills stress
Lanky and soft-spoken, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame portrays himself as a modern-day politician who sees social media as a way of championing democracy and development.
However, his opponents accuse him of being the latest in a long line of authoritarian rulers in Africa, who will win the 4 August election after his regime brutally suppressed the opposition and killed some of his most vocal critics – a charge his allies vehemently deny.
One of the first African leaders to set up a website with a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flickr, Mr Kagame believes the IT revolution has meant there are “few excuses” for political intolerance and poverty.
“There is a global awareness of national events – for example, in China, and days before that, in Iran, that is due to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and relatively inexpensive access to technology,” the 59-year-old Rwandan leader said at the World Technology Summit in 2009, long before many other African leaders had grasped the significance of social media.