The news that Ken Livingstone is going to take up an advisory role with Hugo Chavez must mean that he has given up all hope of returning to a political career, mustn’t it? This is contrast to his sentiments in the immediate aftermath of the election when it seemed he might think about running again.
Livinstone’s links with Chavez while in office, were always some of his most shameful moments. This must mark the end for Livingstone in UK politics.
The TRG is sorry to see the death of Lord Sandy Bruce-Lockhart.
Alistair Burt, Conservative MP for NE Bedfordshire and Vice-President of the TRG, said, ” I am so sorry to hear this news. It is a great sadness for his family, of whom we are all thinking, but also for public life.
“I worked with Sandy in a number of roles over the years. He was a model public servant: compassionate, perceptive and patient. He made a tremendous contribution to local government and was constantly thinking about its future development.
“He coupled leadership with warmth, a rare combination. His contribution to one nation Conservatism will always be remembered. We are all the poorer for his passing.”
Conservative Home has published an article by me about my experiences in Rwanda. You can read and comment on it here.
This will be my last post on Project Umubano. It was an extremely rewarding experience for me and and I enjoyed it immensely. If you would be interested in taking part in future, please feel free to email me and I will be happy to answer questions or to pass you on to the organisers.
The WebCameron team were represented in Rwanda, too, and have just released this five minute video giving an overview of what took place.
(There is a VERY brief shot of me about 1′33″ in, so you know I really was there!).
The TRG’s Summer Jazz Party was only just over three weeks ago, but it already seems as thought the Summer may be over!
So, to relive those sunnier evenings check out some of the photos! Click on the box on the right hand side to see some of the shots on our Flickr page or here.
Alternatively, if you are a member of Facebook, you can find even more photos on our Facebook page by clicking here. If you are not a member of Facebook, join now by clicking on the link on the front of our website – it really is the easiest way for us to keep you up to date with the latest TRG events and activities and for you to meet other TRG members online!
Situated in the south Rwandan town of Butare, the National University of Rwanda (NUR) is a broad-based, multi-faculty institution that has all of the things you would expect of such an institution.
This was the location for the second of our three-day workshops in entrepreneurship, which looked at business planning, market entry strategies and how to build entrepreneurial teams. There were some 45 students in all, slightly more than at KIST last week.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP was kind enough to make time for us to come and present certificates to participants. Mark Malley, a London-based serial entrepreneur, presented the prize for the best presentation in the Lion’s Den. The winner presented her idea for a service business to help ex-pats moving into Rwanda with making housing arrangements, resolving visa issues and other practical requirements.
While I was staying Butare, the town also hosted a local trade expo that showcased the best of Rwanda produce, from local coffee and tea to soap made by a women’s co-operative for HIV+ mothers. All very handy for present buying tourists like myself!
More photos of NUR can be seen here.
Nice piece in The Times, yesterday, about the project. The writer, Murad Ahmed, has been with our group for a week or so and is really getting to grips with what is happening here. I hope he gets a chance to file again before the end.
Yesterday, about 30 members of our group went to the site of a terrible massacre that took place during the height of the 1994 genocide. The place was called Mirambi and is a two and a half-hour drive south of Kigali.
The school there is set on the top of a hill and the area is quite green and undeveloped. In 1994, the school had just opened and the first cohort of students had not yet graduated.
When the first violence began, the local authorities suggested to local Tutsis that they move to the school where they could be more easily protected. Over a matter of days 50,000 people gathered there and they were offered just one policeman to watch over them. Then the same authorities turned off the water supply.
Weakened by lack of food and water after only a few days, the army arrived. This was not the young militia that did so much damage elsewhere, but the regular army, fleeing the Tutsi invasion force from the north. They surrounded the school and began a siege. No one could enter or leave.
Each night they held a barbecue and drank. On the third day they advanced up the hill with their guns and machetes ready. They began to kill.
Every room had a barricaded door that had to be knocked in. Despite having no weapons, the men attempted to defend the besieged community while the women sheltered the children. There was nothing about the scene that could have been described as anything other than desperate or inevitable.
50,000 were killed at close quarters over two days.
But this is not just a site where killing took place. It is a memorial centre. There are plans to mount displays, although the funds have not yet been found to make that possible. One of the class rooms contains racks with some of the few clothes that were left on the bodies of the dead. Most were looted along with anything else of value that could be found.
Remarkably, there are also two survivors of the massacre that work at the centre, telling their stories to visitors. 
One man, Emmanuel, still has a bullet in his brain. He was shot, passed out, and came back round shortly after dusk on the second day of killing. The soldiers had gone and his very survival was a miracle. He crawled for three nights and two days to get to the Burundi border and into a refugee camp. He lost seventeen members of his family, including his wife and children.
Another survivor was a Hutu lady. She was present because she was married to a Tutsi and was thus cast out by her own family. She was saved when her husband pushed her through the open door just as the army rushed in. He shouted that she was, “One of you – don’t harm her!”, and in the confusion, one of the soldiers stepped in to protect her long enough for her to escape the fury. She followed her protector for two weeks after that and eventually made it to a group of her relatives with her youngest baby on her back. Her five other children were murdered at Mirambi.
I do not know how many other living survivors there are from Mirambi. I suspect not many. But at this memorial site there are still other witnesses to what took place. A decision was taken after the war was over to uncover the dead from their mass graves and to rebury most of them with the respect they had not previously received. Some of the bodies, however, were not reburied. They were preserved in lime and are now held in the classrooms of the former school. Laid out on pallets there is nothing to prepare you for the site of death in such indecorous surroundings. It is brutal and minimal. 
The point is clear. It is to mark what took place and to ask visitors to remember. There is nothing to preach conclusions. No notes, names or words, just bodies. Some still have items of clothing left on, some have clumps of hair that has not yet decayed. Many of the bodies show the signs of their deaths with battered skulls, separated parts or gunshot wounds. We had been told what to expect to see but you could not prepare for that. Reactions from our group varied from those who turned white, those that looked stern faced and emotionless, to those individuals who felt nauseous or openly cried. That may have been the most human reaction of all.
Before we had even arrived, there had been some discussion of how we might show respect for those whose remains are present and preserved. One view suggested that it might be disrespectful to take photos of the dead. While I understood that position, I disagreed with it. I took several photographs and have posted them online so that it might be possible to share something of what we experienced and to offer any lessons that it might be possible to communicate through them. They are hard to look at and if they offend, I apologise. My intention is to take something, anything, from the state in which they now find themselves. Please remember what took place at Mirambi and allow it to influence your thinking in the future.
For me, respect in these circumstances meant going into every room in which there were bodies to witness them. They had not chosen where they rested and it seemed disrespectful to not see some of them simply because I had seen enough already.
Incredibly, the French soldiers that moved into the school site at the end of the genocide period, ostensibly to oversee the peace, showed no respect. Upset by the smell of the burial pits they poured concrete over the top of them to create a flat area where they could play volleyball. As I have noted elsewhere, their role in what took place in Rwanda must not be forgotten, either.
As with so many of the sites connected to the genocide, my words fail me. I can think only in clichés. The horror is absolute and if you did not know that it had happened here and in many other places, it would be believable. On our bus back to Kigali there was no conversation for the first half an hour. Then someone made a joke. Whether planned or not, it broke the mood and many of us started to talk again, but it was noticeable that none of us really talked about what we had just seen.
In a piece that is certainly worth a look, Rob Halfon, PPC for Harlow, has written on his view of our visit on Conservative Home. There are more of my photos here, but please be aware that some images may be upsetting.
The MP’s and members of the embassy staff faced a local Rwandan cricket team, earlier today.
It goes without saying that the local team, 20 years younger on average and used to playing on a concrete wicket 2000m up, had the advantage. The margin of loss was not as great as it may have been, however, due to a top-notch opening knock by Francis Maude for the visiting side.
My main focus on this trip is to run various training activities around the subject of entrepreneurship, which is pretty much my day job in the UK, which makes this something of a busman’s holiday, really.
The first of my two workshops of three-days each finished today. We held it at the Kiga
li Institute of Science and Technology and opened it up to a handful of students from the School of Finance and Business, too. There were about 35 students present in all.
At the end of the three days, we held a mini version of “Dragon’s Den” that we renamed “Lion’s Den” to add a little local flavour! All 35 students presented, and the winner was the unanimous choice of the judges for the idea of producing artificial baby milk made from local products that could be given to HIV- babied born of HIV+ mothers, to prevent after birth infection.
The “Lions” were two of the entrepreneurs that also came to Rwanda as part of our group: Steve Ogden and Mark Pawsey, who is also the PPC for Rugby. Both did an excellent job and my thanks to them!
The prizes for the best presentations were made by the UK ambassador to Rwanda, Nick Canon, who was very generous with his time.
There are plenty more photos of the workshop, participants and prize giving here.
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UK Population Growth and the NEED for Immigration
Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, has produced a series of figures predicting member nations’ population growth over the coming 50-odd years.
The headline that the BBC chose to pick out, was that by 2060, the UK is predicted to be the most populace country in the EU.
Seemingly worried about how this information would be used to fuel anti-immigration stories with the nonsense idea that we cannot fit that many people into our 94,526 sq miles, a Home Office spokesman says this all justifies the points system for immigration that is being introduced.
Now it seems to me that a points-based system is probably not a bad idea and the Australians seem to have done a good job with theirs, but it is the implied presumption that we all think that immigration is a bad thing that worried me.
If you really want to be worried about these figures, you should read on:
Now this should alarm everyone involved in government, politics, economics, business, education, the NHS or pretty well everyone that does anything.
More than 4 out of every 10 people will be above retirement age, that is nearly double the current level. Take away those who at school, infirm or not working at you are left with only 3 people in every 10 working to pay the taxes to support the rest!
Without immigration, particularly of skilled workers, we cannot support such a top-heavy population skew. We can do things to ease the burden such as raising the retirement age or cutting some pretty established services, but taxes will have to go up and we will still need to import more people of working age.
Unless anyone can tell me why I am wrong?