Rwanda’s sports fever, a pillar of development or sportswashing?

There is a link between Arsenal, Paris Saint Germain, and Bayern Munich, three of the world’s biggest soccer teams: they all have sponsorship deals with the Rwandan government to promote the small African country as a tourist destination. On players’ shirts and advertising hoardings, the Visit Rwanda logo is highly visible in European stadiums. The same slogan has been appearing everywhere for four years at the Basketball Africa League playoffs (an NBA franchise), which have been held in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, since 2021. Kigali will host the road cycling world championship next year and, in the medium term, aspires to stage a much more ambitious event: if negotiations are successful, the first Formula 1 Grand Prix to take place on African soil since the South African Grand Prix was last held in 1993.

According to the government of President Paul Kagame, in power in Rwanda since 2000, this sporting gold rush is the result of a meticulous plan to encourage investment and attract visitors. The official version speaks of a strategic bet to consolidate the country as an African power in global sport, of an axis of development that, like the emphasis on technology (another pillar of Rwandan prosperity in the long term), will bring wealth and wellbeing to citizens. For Human Rights Watch and other international human rights organizations, however, it is a cosmetic operation: using the glamour of high-level competition to cover up the authoritarian miseries of the regime. Vigorous bodies and dazzling passion to camouflage — or at least make less noticeable — the lack of freedoms. In short, the practice known as sportswashing.

Simon Chadwick, author of The Geopolitical Economy of Sport, does not like the term, a neologism whose common use dates back no more than a decade, when it was coined to denounce the dark side of sporting glory in oil dictatorships such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia. Chadwick admits that Rwanda is using sport, “like everyone else, to generate a positive global attitude towards the country.” But he believes that this policy runs parallel to — in some ways subordinate to — the essential objective of promoting development.

For Michela Wrong, whose highly critical book Do Not Disturb was praised by novelist John Le Carré, it is “obvious” that the goal of this commitment to sport lies in the realm of “branding” for a state that is selling a success story after “rising from the ashes of the genocide of the 1990s.” In the story of a “feminist, progressive, and ecological” Rwanda, Wrong says, photos of “famous footballers hugging gorillas alongside Kagame” would be the icing on the cake. An image makeover that, the British author adds, also includes the Rwandan president’s megalomaniacal impulses: “He loves luxury, red carpets, and being talked about all the time.”

Motivations aside, it is surprising that a country with less than $1,000 of GDP per capita is spending obscene amounts on sponsoring already very rich soccer clubs and organizing hugely expensive sporting events. There is a notable difference between Rwanda and a country like Qatar: the former does not have a surplus of petrodollars for expenses that some might consider superfluous or, at least, of low priority.

Victoire Ingabire, a prominent figure in the Rwandan opposition who spent years in prison for political reasons, regrets in a conversation with this newspaper that this money “is not spent on education or agriculture, where 80% of the population works, or on building infrastructure for the whole country, not just for some areas of the capital and tourist sites.”

Ingabire does not understand why the government “is asking for loans to finance these investments, while in rural areas people continue to live in abject poverty.” Although she has no proof, Wrong suspects that a good part of the sum destined for sport comes from gold illegally extracted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo before being exported from Rwanda. According to a recent document issued by the U.S. government, the Rwandan army and M23, a Congolese rebel group, are involved in these smuggling operations.

Nnamdi Madichie, a Nigerian researcher at the Bloomsbury Institute in London, lived in Rwanda from 2021 until just a few months ago. There he observed Rwanda’s rise as an African power in the organization of sporting and other events. “Every week there is a major international meeting in Kigali,” he says. In his opinion, the ultimate test to confirm or deny the Kagame regime’s misuse of sport would be the economic benefits it is, or is not, bringing to the country. “If there is a return on investment, there is no point in talking about sportswashing,” he says.

Madichie refers to a column published last year in The East African by Clare Akamanzi, former CEO of the Rwanda Development Council and now director of NBA Africa. In her article, Akamanzi — who did not respond to this newspaper’s request for an interview, in the same way as five other members of the Rwandan government — argued that investing in sport “has a real impact on the lives” of the people of Rwanda, although without providing many figures. She simply stressed that the strategy “has contributed to the country receiving more than a million visitors” a year. She added that, in the case of sponsorships with European soccer clubs, these had generated over $150 million in earned media value (EMV), a metric to calculate the success of actions to raise awareness of a brand.

A self-confessed admirer of the Rwandan development model, Madichie lists all that he believes sport is bringing to the country: “Jobs, infrastructure, and a more diversified economy.” Asked about the pressing needs of large sections of the Rwandan population, the researcher argues that poverty alleviation cannot be addressed only with a short-term mentality, “handing out handfuls of rice door to door.”

Broadening the scope, Chadwick reflects on the moral dilemma of doing business in sports in countries that “do not meet Western democratic standards.” Where is the red line? Who draws it? Leaving aside cold economic calculations by teams and organizations, even assuming that they genuinely care about human rights in such countries, is it better to refuse any kind of deal with authoritarian regimes or to negotiate without much consideration?

In the absence of easy answers, Chadwick appeals to “the transformative power of sport” and cites two examples. One is current: “In Saudi Arabia, a significant number of senior positions associated with sport are held by women who, five or six years ago, would never have imagined they could get there, even though Saudi society remains very patriarchal.” The second example dates back to the 1980s: “When it was decided at the beginning of that decade that Seoul would host the 1988 Olympics, South Korea was a military dictatorship. Nobody talked about wanting to whitewash anything then. Today, it is a fully democratic country and there is no doubt that the Olympic Games contributed to change.”

The author of The Geopolitical Economy of Sport points to other facets of the concept of sportswashing, nuances that add complexity to the term and plunge it into a nebula of tangled agenda priorities and possible hypocrisies in the shadows. Chadwick mentions a little-known fact. “During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, there was a huge scandal because the captains of some European teams were banned from wearing armbands in support of the LGBTQI+ community. What not so many people know is that Morocco and Qatar itself tried, in vain, to do the same by calling for a free Palestine. Most Western media gave a lot of importance to the rainbow armbands and ignored those in support of the Palestinian people.”

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