Kigali, Rwanda – Lush hills covered in fresh greenery belie the controversy over two sites in Kigali that could soon host hundreds of people who were never meant to live in Rwanda.
Hope Hostel in northern Kigali is perched on a hill overlooking the capital.
Across town in the south-west is the Bwiza Riverside Estate, where well-kept green spaces, fences and small lots paint the picture of a quaint neighborhood that, despite its suburban charm, feels sterile and artificial. You can also feel the atmosphere.
The Rwandan government is set to take in asylum seekers due to be sent from Britain as part of a £220 million ($272 million) deal to relocate refugees who land on British shores to the East African country. I specified these two locations.
After months of debate and concerns over the human rights implications of the deal, Britain's parliament passed the bill late Monday.
Despite a series of questions about the plan's feasibility, cost and legality, as well as continued criticism from refugee rights activists, the plan is expected to pass soon.
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The Hope Hostel area on the outskirts of Kigali is buzzing with street vendors, motorbike taxis and stately villas.
Managing director Ismael Bakina said the hostel has 50 double rooms and can accommodate up to 100 guests.
Initially, the hostel had another purpose. Until two years ago, it housed survivors of the 1994 genocide, which killed around 1 million people, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority. However, after former British Home Secretary Priti Patel visited the site on a tightly controlled tour in 2022, the survivors were evacuated without alternative housing.
For now, the hostel is empty, waiting for the UK's political process to reach its conclusion. Bakina told Al Jazeera that the country will be ready to accept asylum seekers as soon as the first plane takes off.
Rwandans in the surrounding region were reluctant to talk to Al Jazeera about the deal. Human rights groups have often criticized Rwanda's repressive political environment and restrictions on freedom of expression. Journalists, opposition figures, and activists have also been jailed or disappeared after criticizing the government. Those who did voice their opinions did so anonymously, and some expressed more neutral views.
A 35-year-old woman named Datibu told Al Jazeera that the plan sounds like a great idea because it would bring money into Rwanda and asylum seekers would bring more employees into the service sector. he said. Rwanda's economy relies primarily on services, tourism, and agriculture.
A 45-year-old man who works as a taxi driver in the same neighborhood, who declined to give his name, said it could go both ways. Rwandans have access to more jobs, but migrant asylum seekers also have the opportunity to compete with locals for jobs.
A Rwandan government spokesperson said asylum seekers from the UK would be trained and introduced to the job market.
However, according to the World Bank, Rwandans are facing an employment crisis in which 15% of the workforce will be unemployed by 2023, and youth unemployment is even higher, at more than 20%.
These concerns are shared by some citizens on condition of anonymity. A middle-aged man in a suit from Kigali told Al Jazeera that asylum seekers “came to Britain in search of a better life, not to get a ticket to come here.” Ta.
“Will the government give them jobs or something here? They didn't go. [to the UK] I'm looking forward to it, so when they come, do you think they're going to have the same life here that they had there? ”
Unemployment and the housing crisis
The UK will provide Rwanda with an initial £220 million ($272 million) to host asylum seekers for five years, with an additional 370 million pounds ($272 million) over the next five years, regardless of the number of people sent to Rwanda. 10,000 pounds ($456 million). But the law, if passed, will cost British taxpayers about 1.8 million pounds ($2.2 million) per asylum seeker, according to Britain's auditor general.
“We can't give them jobs. They'll get money from the UK, but what happens when that ends?” said Frank Habineza, leader of Rwanda's Democratic Green Party and the only opposition politician elected to parliament. He told Al Jazeera.
“Our economy is small, the unemployment rate is high, and there are few jobs,” he added, aspiring to be a candidate in July's presidential election.
Kigali has a population of over 1.2 million people and is growing, while Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the World Bank, more than half of the country's estimated 13 million people live on less than $2 a day.
As Kigali's population expands, so does the demand for housing, and the government's decision to repurpose space for asylum seekers has sparked a maelstrom of opinion behind closed doors.
In 2019, the government demolished informal housing in Kigali and provided only about $100 per person for temporary relocation to the owners of the land occupied at the time of demolition, leaving thousands of people homeless.
The Kigali administration estimates that 60 percent of the population lives in informal settlements exposed to natural risks from climate change, while only 9 percent of Rwandans can afford the cheapest housing on the market. are doing. The average monthly income per household is approximately $100.
The lack of affordable housing is expected to double by 2050 as the city's population grows and the government fails to meet housing development targets.
“PR movement”
Bwiza Riverside Estate in southern Kigali looks deserted. The facility was promoted as a place for asylum seekers to be held during a carefully controlled visit by former British Home Secretary Suela Bravemen.
The development was built with assistance from the Kigali government to provide affordable housing to Rwandans. The homes, which come in a variety of price ranges and sizes and sell for less than $30,000, can only be purchased through a government program that helps people buy affordable homes with loans from the Development Bank of Rwanda. For homes priced above that, the client, a multifamily developer, deals directly with ADHI.
ADHI's managing director told local media in February that it had sold almost 70% of the affordable homes that were meant to house asylum seekers from the UK. A government spokesperson told Al Jazeera that this figure is “completely untrue” as the government has been involved in the development of the complex in partnership with ADHI from the beginning. The developer has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
“The Rwandan government wanted to show Suela Braveman that there was enough housing for refugees, so they showed her the mansion in Bwiza,” said the opposition politician, who was once imprisoned and banned from politics for strongly criticizing the government. Victoire Ingabire said.
“It was a PR move because they didn't know if the deal was going to happen, so they just wanted to show something. That's what they had at the time. .”
A government spokesperson told Al Jazeera that Rwanda is negotiating agreements with other facilities and plans to sign leases once flights are confirmed, but did not provide details.
Hope Hostel and Bwiza Riverside Estate will be able to accommodate an estimated 500 people in total. In 2023, around 30,000 people arrived in the UK by small boat. Leaked Home Office documents show it would cost £5 billion ($6.2 billion) to send the same number of asylum seekers to Rwanda in the first five years.
“We are clear that there is no upper limit to our plans and we remain focused on getting flights into service as soon as possible,” an Interior Ministry spokesperson told Al Jazeera.
Fear of rights infringement
Mr Ingabire said that while British funding could be beneficial to the country, Rwandans needed to “recognize that we are talking about people here”.
The deal has been widely seen as illegal and immoral, in violation of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, which protects the right to asylum, and European and British law.
“Human rights are also an issue because they did not come here by choice. They are choosing to go to the UK and the United Nations requires countries to take in refugees,” Hubineza said. said.
“Rwanda welcomes refugees, but only if they want to be here, not forced to come here. That is why this agreement is illegal and contrary to the dignity of refugees and our people. It is,” he added.
The UK government has repeatedly stated that Rwanda is a safe country with a strong history of providing protection, safety and sanctuary for refugees, despite UK Supreme Court rulings to the contrary.
Rwanda is home to more than 135,000 refugees from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries in the region, but they are supported not by the Rwandan government but by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Al Jazeera visited Nkamira refugee camp in western Rwanda, which opened last year and is home to about 7,000 Congolese refugees. They are fed one meal a day of corn and beans, no schools for their children, no mats or sanitary products, and few resources to treat serious medical problems.
“We already have some patients who are malnourished. We have pregnant women who need special nutrition, but we don't have the funds to take seriously ill people to the hospital,” Nkamila camp. Director David Lwayonga said.
At Gashora transit camp, about an hour southeast of Kigali, Eritrean, Sudanese and Somali refugees are awaiting decisions on their asylum claims to European and North American countries. The environment is better than in Nkamila, with schools and sports facilities, but asylum seekers have complained in the past that they feel left in limbo.
Gashora was established as a European Union-funded scheme to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda from Libya, where reports of human rights abuses have abounded over the years. This was seen as the inspiration for the UK-Rwanda agreement, a way of outsourcing asylum procedures to third countries.
Existing refugees in Rwanda do not receive the same treatment as refugees arriving from the UK.
A UK Home Office spokesperson said: “People who have migrated to Rwanda will not be living in refugee camps. … They will initially be housed in reception centres, before moving to long-term accommodation.”
Rwanda had a similar agreement with Israel in 2015 that sent 4,000 asylum seekers to the East African country, but all left and the agreement was terminated in 2018. Some of those asylum seekers were driven en masse to the Ugandan border without jobs. or documented, and many began to take the central Mediterranean route to Europe.
“People will come here and then go back to the UK in a few months,” Ingabire said, comparing the latest deal to Israel's. The Rwandan government is aware of this, she said, but is still pursuing the proposal because of financial incentives.
The first deportations will take place in early July, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said, after the UK's Rwanda deal was given final approval this week.
“I don't have any positive words to say about this deal,” Habineza said. “There is a risk of division within the country, and we don't want politics that revolve around ethnic, cultural, and religious divisions, so we need to be careful about the impact our policies have on those divisions.”
