“Are these boreholes that give people water?” Kagame said in a widely quoted criticism about the number of churches in the city.
“I don’t think we have as many boreholes. Do we even have as many factories? This has been a mess,” he added in his remarks at a national leadership retreat last week.
David Himbara, a Rwandan international development advocate based in Canada, called the government’s justification for the closures bogus and said the “real reason … is fear and paranoia.”
“Kagame tightly controls the media, political parties, and civil society at large,” Himbara wrote on Medium. “The churches constituted the last open space. Kagame knows this. The localized community of churches offered a slight space for daring to imagine and talk about change.”
Himbara argued that hygiene problems are widespread in Kigali, which does not have a sewage system or treatment plant.
The most recent case of a house of worship collapsing in the city occurred a decade ago, when a Catholic church crumbled to the ground while under construction, killing two people and injuring 14.
