Pierre Nkurunziza in May 2020.

| AFP

Mwagiru: Memories of another Pierre Nkurunziza

Looking down from the upper floors of the rather modest United Nations complex in Bujumbura, one can today clearly see a commendably well-tended plot of multiple graves.

Serene as it seems, the graveyard, a sort of heroes’ square, is a solemn reminder of Burundi’s recent macabre history. Dating back to 1962, when the country gained independence from Belgium, it is the history of a land drenched in blood.

That was the kind of environment the late Pierre Nkurunziza was born into on December 18, 1964, in Bujumbura. Throughout his childhood and youth, Burundi was dogged by genocidal violence between the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu ethnic groups.

Matters became really bad in 1993 when Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated by hardline Tutsi soldiers. A Hutu and the country’s first democratically elected president, he was killed alongside some members of his Cabinet just four months after his election.

The event constituted a major spanner in the works in an already incendiary political climate. Just a year later, the National Council for the Defence of Democracy, CNDD, was founded. It later set up the Forces for the Defence of Democracy, an armed wing, and became CNDD-FDD.

Surprising move

Nobody could have guessed then that Nkurunziza would eventually assume the leadership of the movement, much less rise to become the leader of his country. As he told an interviewer in an August 2004 interview, he had been a lecturer at Burundi University, and was a witness when the Tutsi army attacked the campus and killed 200 students in 1995.

“They tried to kill me too,” he explained. “The attackers shot at my car, but I got out and ran away. They torched my car. I then joined the CNDD-FDD as a soldier. This war was forced on us; we did not start it.”

That was the beginning of the long and eventful journey that saw Nkurunziza becoming president in August 2005, exactly 10 years after joining the CNDD-FDD. Unfortunately, by then, Burundi was a nation that was practically impossible to stabilise, a Herculean undertaking that Nkurunziza – himself the son of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother – evidently recognised.

The impression I had ever since catching a glimpse of Nkurunziza years before his death was that of a simple, rather self-effacing man. I never met him personally, but the Nkurunziza I had observed from close quarters cut anything but the image of a nasty African dictator.

My neighbour

As it happened, not long before his eventual ascent to power, Nkurunziza was, for some days, my neighbour on the upper floor of the Hotel Source du Nil in Bujumbura. I was working as a translator for the Facilitation of the Burundi Peace Negotiations, and several times a day I had to pass by his suite on entering or leaving my room.

Nkurunziza was at the time being treated as a VIP, and his personal security was taken very seriously. In fact, he was heavily guarded around the clock by South African soldiers encamped right outside his suite. 

Polite to a fault, several times a day, the security detail, which included a clutch of comely but otherwise business-like and tough-looking heavily-armed young women, would let in his wife Denise Bucumi whenever she took the lift to the suite.

The couple had been married nearly a decade earlier, in 1994, but for years had been separated as a result of the civil war that had been raging in Burundi since the mid-1990s.

Dutifully visiting her husband’s suite at mealtimes, the homely Denise would be in the company of trusted female companions. They would be carrying traditional baskets containing home-made goodies that Nkurunziza seemed to prefer in lieu of hotel food.

Pierre Nkurunziza with his wife, Denise, in Buye, northern Burundi, in 2018.

Photo credit: AFP/STR

Speaking earlier during the 2004 interview, Nkurunziza had poignantly said that since independence, the country’s ruling elites had relied on raw force, killing their opponents without any regard to tolerance or dialogue. His father Eustache Ngabisha, was a case in point.

Elected to the National Assembly in 1965, he had become the governor of two provinces -- Ngozi and Kayansi. He was, however, killed in the anti-Hutu genocide in 1972, when Nkurunziza, who was one of seven children, was in primary school. 

According to Nkurunziza himself, two of his siblings were killed after the 1993 civil war started, while three others died while serving in the CNDD-FDD. Eventually, only Nkurunziza and a sister survived.

Such sordid stories are common in Burundi, which recently commemorated, as it does every year, the assassination of Ndadaye, who was killed on October 21, 1993. Pointedly, this year’s commemoration was held just two days after former military ruler Pierre Buyoya was sentenced to life in jail by a Burundi court for his role in the assassination. Apart from being Ndadaye’s predecessor, he was also his vanquished opponent in the presidential contest.

20 years

The court also sentenced 18 other accused persons, three of whom were given 20 years in prison. Ironically, though, Buyoya and many of those convicted were abroad during the hearings, and hence did not appear in court. 

Those developments aside, soon it will be five months since the unexpected death of President Nkurunziza. Aged only 55, the government said he died unexpectedly of heart failure on June 8, 2020. The demise came shortly before the official end of his third term, and way ahead of the projected handover of power in August to his successor, Évariste Ndayishimiye. After deciding not to seek a fourth term of office, Nkurunziza had endorsed his candidacy.

Despite the official statement on the cause of his death, there were rumours that Nkurunziza could have died from Covid-19 complications. Pointedly, his wife had contracted the virus less than two weeks before her husband’s death, and had been airlifted to Nairobi for treatment. She was still in hospital when her husband died.

Evariste Ndayishimiye at his swearing-in at Ingoma stadium in Gitega, Burundi, in 2020.

Photo credit: Tchandrou Nitanga | AFP

Such tribulations aside, just months after his death, Nkurunziza’s memory already seems to be rapidly fading into oblivion. Condemned and demonised by the Western media as a typical African dictator, he unfortunately seems to have been destined for the dustheap of history.

Those who knew Nkurunziza well, however, remember him as an affable, soft-spoken, football-loving, populist leader, and one never directly implicated in corruption. A reputedly devout evangelical and self-proclaimed pastor, Nkurunziza certainly did not fit the mould of the quintessential African despot, typically depicted by a gleeful western media as a bloodthirsty, sadistic, greedy and vain whisky-swigging monster!

Instead Nkurunziza’s personal odyssey tells a riveting story of patriotism and heroism. For starters, he was, among other things, the longest-ruling president in Burundian history, having held the presidency for three terms. By the time of his death, Nkurunziza had ruled Burundi, a truly volatile nation of 11 million people, for almost 15 years.

By any definition, such staying power was no mean feat in a country where leaders were sitting ducks, their lives perpetually on the line. Notably, too, unlike the stereotypical African dictator, Nkurunziza actually ascended to power through largely peaceful parliamentary elections held on July 4, 2005. His newly-registered CNDD-FDD party won a credible majority of the vote, which paved the way for Nkurunziza to be nominated unopposed – by the national Parliament no less – as president on August 19.

Major step

After a decade-long civil war, Nkurunziza’s swearing-in as the president was widely hailed as a major step towards peace and democracy. He did not disappoint the Burundian electorate, and in fact, his first term in office was generally deemed a success.

It is certainly true that corruption and persistent human rights violations were increasingly denounced, particularly during his second mandate, which ran between 2010 and 2015. Equally true is the fact that Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third mandate ruffled many feathers. Not surprisingly, his re-election in 2015 resulted in more conflict, and began to thoroughly sully a reputation that had for years remained enviable by Burundian standards.

All those latter developments, however, hardly detract from the admirable image of the late Nkurunziza millions still retain. Lumping him with notorious dictators is patently unfair. Moreover, the degradation appears to be aimed at denying him an otherwise well-deserved legacy as a leading warrior for the emergence of democracy in Burundi.

A hero

Although Nkurunziza was reportedly loathed by some, media reports on his state funeral on Friday June 26, 2020 suggest that he was ultimately a hero to many Burundians. Pointedly, the day of his final farewell, which had been declared a national holiday, saw thousands of citizens, including school children in uniform, lining the roads waiting for the funeral convoy to pass by.

Media images later showed thousands of Burundians, clad in white, who were gathered at the funeral venue inside the Ingoma stadium in Gitega, Burundi’s political capital. The arrival of Nkurunziza's remains, in a coffin draped in the country's national flag and borne on a ceremonial vehicle, elicited spontaneous screams from the crowd. 

Long before the solemn occasion, the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi had been signed on August 28, 2000. It had taken long for Nkurunziza to come into the fold, but in January 2005, his CNDD-FDD was finally registered as a legal political party. 

But even before that event, which took place in Bujumbura at about the time of our shared residency at the Hotel Source du Nil, I had been able to observe Nkurunziza at close quarters several times. That happened during meetings held at the Golden Palm Hotel in Dar-es-Salaam several years after the signing of the Arusha agreement.

Pierre Nkurunziza's national funeral at the Ingoma stadium in Gitega, Burundi, in 2020.

Photo credit: Tchandrou Nitanga | AFP

Although not having been a signatory himself, Nkurunziza was by then the undisputed leader of the powerful CNDD-FDD party. He had also soared above other youthful rebel leaders to become the top crusader against those in power in Burundi.

Although deceptively calm, when push came to shove, he could be extremely tough. At one time in April 2003, for instance, his FDD forces fired more than 100 rockets into Bujumbura, killing at least six civilians. Chillingly, Mr Nkurunziza then warned that later attacks would be "catastrophic".

Among the other rebel leaders were such personalities as Agathon Rwasa, Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye, Cossan Kabura and Alain Mugabarabona. Tough as nails, to a man, they had great contempt for the ruling authorities in Bujumbura, whom they viewed as Tutsi die-hards.

Not surprisingly, both the late presidents Nyerere and Mandela, when acting as the facilitators of the Burundi Peace Negotiations in Arusha and elsewhere, were hard put to bring the leaders of the armed factions to the negotiation table.

Avowed nemesis

As for the Dar meetings, they were aimed at drawing Nkurunziza into discussions with his namesake, Major Pierre Buyoya, Burundi’s then military ruler. The latter, a serial putschist who had presided over Burundi’s most tumultuous period, had over the years become Nkurunziza’s avowed nemesis.

Efforts had for a long time been made to bring the two together with a view to smoothening the way for the implementation of the already signed peace agreement. The two adversaries were strange bedfellows, however, and spent endless hours running rings around each other.

Jacob Zuma, then South Africa’s deputy president, chaired the Dar sessions, and would mirthfully cajole the two implacable foes to adopt the mien of suitors seeking the favours of a young lady.