Kigali transits from sleepy town to Africa’s Singapore

Rwanda’s capital is changing from a sleepy backwater where most things closed at 9pm to a future Singapore with gleaming office blocks and all-night shopping.

Ten years ago, ordering a coffee got you an imported tin of the worst kind of Nescafe accompanied by a pot of powdered milk.

Now you can choose from expresso, macchiato or mocha from home-grown beans and the milk comes frothing out of a steamer.

Rwanda’s ambitious “Vision 2020” plan seeks to transform the central African state into a middle-income country and acknowledges: “this will not be achieved unless we transform from a subsistence agriculture economy to a knowledge-based society”.

The country has already successfully promoted top-end eco-tourism around the endangered mountain gorillas that live on the mist-clad slopes of the Virunga volcanoes.

It has also positioned its coffee output at the speciality end of the market.

“Kigali is one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa and we are committed to ensuring future growth is based on very good planning,” city Mayor Aisa Kirabo Kacyira told AFP.

The Colorado-based OZ Architecture firm has developed a 50-year master plan for Kigali, incorporating a new international airport, and with entire districts of town given over respectively to shopping, offices, technology and medical facilities.

“They are trying to make Rwanda the most sustainable, high-tech, wired country in Africa, a little bit like what Singapore became,” to Southeast Asia, OZ senior architect Carl Worthington told Metropolis magazine. “They are trying to re-invent the whole country.”

“Before 1994 Kigali wasn’t a planned city,” explained Vivian Kayitesi, who manages the division of the Rwanda Development Board (RDB) charged notably with investment promotion.
Kirabo Kacyira wants the future city to be “as beautiful and as sustainable” as the current one, even if its population of one million is poised to double.

Giant yellow cranes are busy on the construction of a convention centre that will include 300 top-end hotel rooms and conference facilities for more than 2,000 delegates, with conference tourism something that the RDB is pushing.

An additional 200 top-end rooms are under construction at a hotel in town, also Chinese-built.

“The target is to go from 700 to 4,800 rooms by the end of 2010,” Kayitesi said, referring to the small highland country as a whole.

To reduce sprawl, the authorities are encouraging investors to go in for 10-plus storey buildings.

Patrick Sebatigita, the managing director of Ujenge, an engineering company, started up two years ago in a room in his house “with a PC and a pickup” and has expanded quickly.