Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood

Chapter Six. Desperation on the New Frontier: Urban Youth and the Government

D E S P E R A T I O N O N T H E N E W F R O N T I E R 143 c h A P t e r S i x Desperation on the New Frontier u r B A n y o u t h A n d t h e g o v e r n m e n t nothing moves forward. Parents are crying here. they have lost. Female youth, age seventeen it’s terrible. the urban youth are very poor. nobody cares about them. i wonder what their future will be. it’s like they’ve been abandoned. Adult man, age forty-four there are some who say that prison is better than this life. Male youth, age twenty-eight instead of dying of hunger, i’ll steal. we are sad. it makes me sad to see my sister prostitute herself around because i cannot do anything for her. So i’ll steal, and let them kill me. death is death. Male youth, age twenty-nine Kigali is Rwanda’s new frontier.While the literature on rural Rwanda is deep and diverse, there is precious little documentation about urban Rwanda.This state of affairs persists despite the fact that the roof of restrictions on urban migration has receded and Kigali’s population is rapidly advancing.The urban youth situation is so dire as to be no longer ignorable,and the urban outlet for frustrated or adventuresome rural youth has become well established.Informal housing booms while government restrictions,policies and plans are unrolled. Formal employment is limited, unemployment and crime are rampant—yet ever more rural youth enter the city. The three chapters in this part of the book mainly draw from interviews with one hundred male youth,thirty-nine female youth and twenty-six adults in two urban sectors (one densely urban, the other peri-urban), as well as C H A P T E R S I X 144 government officials from all levels of Kigali’s government structure: umudugudu , cell, sector, and the city council. The sample of Kigali’s urban youth described here cannot reflect the entire state of the urban youth population. That is not the intention.Instead,it provides a window into Kigali life for the urban youth majority there. What follows in this part is a description of the pressing concerns, conditions, and context of Kigali’s burgeoning majority of poor, undereducated youth. Before turning to their story, however, a word is necessary about the minority of urban youth whose education and economic status tower above the desperate majority.As the nation’s capital and primary urban center,Kigali is, of course,also home to many members of the small demographic of Rwandan youth with secondary or university education. Yet a good number of them, reportedly, are similarly unemployed: comments during interviews about severe competition for jobs that they may qualify for were common. In this regard, it certainly appears that unemployment, stress, and difficulty in urban life applies to urban youth in nearly all walks of life. If life is reportedly hard for educated and unemployed urban youth, the blanket of difficulty spreads much more heavily and completely over members of their poorer, lesser educated brethren. As the epigraphs beginning this chapter illustrate,not one of the 335 youth interviewed for this book described the youth situation in Kigali as anything but desperate. This included youth who graduated from secondary school.Adult or government and nongovernment officials similarly described the situation as difficult for some youth and overwhelming for others. Moreover, the government’s task, as virtually all of part 3 suggests, is a long way from easy. Much of what is described here is not specific to Kigali’s poor youth.Urban youth situations in other developing countries are also dire.1 Yet the Kigali youth story is only just coming to light.Thus part 3 should be seen as a contribution toward understanding the particular plight of Rwanda’s desperately poor and undereducated urban youth majority. governance amid rapid expansion The current regime is Rwanda’s first ever to loosen constraints on the movement of Rwandans. The urban outlet has opened an escape hatch from a pregenocide rural life so constrained that Uvin called it a “prison without escape in which poverty, infantilization, social inferiority, and powerlessness D E S P E R A T I...