President Kagame arrives at Nyamirambo campaign rally in Kigali, during the July-August 2024 general elections. The biggest percentage of who attended all the rallies were youth. The writer argues in this article that Kagame has put in place all the fundumentals. The youth must take up the challenge to move Rwanda to next generation
Every year on October 1st, Rwanda marks Patriotism Day a date carved into the bedrock of our national consciousness. On this morning in 1990, a generation of young men and women made an extraordinary, life-altering choice.
They discarded personal comfort, abandoned university lecture halls, left behind budding careers, and walked away from exile to cross the Kagitumba border into Rwanda. They were the soldiers of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA-Inkotanyi), and they chose to fight for a country that the world had left for dead.
Their sacrifice was not an abstract gesture; it was paid in real blood and brutal hardship. In the freezing, unforgiving terrain of the Virunga Mountains, under-equipped and heavily outnumbered, they endured hunger, disease, and the devastating loss of their founding commander, Major General Fred Gisa Rwigema, just days into the campaign. Yet, they refused to collapse.
Driven by an unyielding resolve to end decades of forced statelessness, systemic division, and tyranny, they forged ahead. Four years later, when the genocidal regime launched the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, it was these very young fighters who stopped the slaughter, saved millions of Tutsi on the verge of extermination, liberated the nation, and restored human dignity to a fractured land.
Look around Rwanda today. The vibrant, safe, and ambitious nation we wake up in did not happen by chance. It was built from ashes by people who were no older than the youth walking the streets of Kigali today.
Today, Rwanda stands as a global beacon of post-conflict recovery and economic transformation. We host international summits like the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), World Economic Forum events, and major global sports conventions. World leaders, innovators, and investors fly into Kigali international conference centers not out of luck, but because the RPF-Inkotanyi, under the visionary leadership of its Chairman and President of the Republic, Paul Kagame, established ironclad security, zero tolerance for corruption, and visionary governance. From a state once labeled a hopeless failure, Rwanda has become Africa’s premier MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions) destination.
However, comfortable national success brings a subtle danger: the illusion that stability is permanent.
To the youth of Rwanda: you are the luckiest generation in our history, but luck is not a strategy. You walk on paved roads paid for by the lives of teenagers who bled in the trenches. You sleep soundly because others stayed awake in the cold, holding rifles so that you could hold university degrees, business plans, and technological innovations.
The struggle of 1990 was fought with boots and rifles; the struggle of today must be fought with intellect, relentless discipline, and unwavering patriotism. The enemies of progress have not vanished; they have changed weapons. They use economic pressure, narrative warfare, and digital disinformation to undermine what was built with blood.
Leaving your comfort zone today does not mean heading into the jungle with a weapon, rather, it means refusing mediocrity. It means refusing to be passive consumers of foreign narratives. It means building industries, defending Rwanda’s sovereignty on global platforms, maintaining absolute integrity, and serving this nation with the same fierce devotion that defined the Inkotanyi.
Nothing worth having comes without sacrifice. As we celebrate October 1st, let us honor the heroes not just with applause, but with action. The past belonged to the Inkotanyi who gave us a country; the future belongs to the youth who must prove they were worth dying for, preserve the hard-won gains and further national development.
