Rwanda to Slash Public Sector

By Thrishni Subramoney

Rwandan Energy and Communications Minister, Sam Nkusi says his country's
government aims to slash sixty percent of its public service.

"I have 350 people working at in my department right now, when I go home, I
will have eighteen," said Rwandan Energy and Communications Minister, Sam
Nkusi, speaking at the Telecom Africa 2004 conference in Cairo, Egypt.

Addressing a plenary session on information technology development case
studies, Nkusi described Rwanda's public sector as being "bloated". He
mentioned the move as part Rwanda's plans to streamline it's services so
that it provide new services like ICTs.

"You guys probably don't even know about it," he said gesturing towards a
group of fellow Rwandans in the audience, "We don't just want to get rid of
people. We're going to de-centralize and in that way, make them work."

Nkusi says the aim is to create autonomous institutions, and put people into
those, in the effort to take a burden away from government.

The minister from the central African country says the ICTs have been
prioritized as "an engine" for the country's economic growth. However, he
lamented the fact that investment was hard to come by.

"When you have an ugly past of genocide, we are trying to transform our
society from being agri-based to knowledge-based, and we have to work really
hard to sweet talk investors," he said, provoking laughter from the
audience.

He laughingly recalls when South African based mobile network, MTN
considered investing in the country and wanted to know the GDP per capita.

"Right after the war, our people weren't even using banks," he says shaking
his head, "You could tell if someone was wealthy or not by the way they got
up in the morning, if they shook their heads like this (he shakes his head
from side to side), you knew they were rich because they had a lot of money
under their pillow!"

Seemingly a lone voice at this conference, on the subject, Nkusi adds that
his government is not prepared to rely too much on the public sector because
there was little point in introducing services that Rwandans couldn't
afford.

Despite a long term plan of being competently connected by 2020, the Rwandan
minister says government is being "realistic". He says they are aiming for
"universal access" and not "universal service".

"We're just trying to reduce the distances people have to travel top get to
phones. Our people are still looking for places to sleep. We can't offer
services that they can't afford."
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