Rwanda President Paul Kagame, has finally spoken out on the controversy a migrant transfer deal with the UK has been generating, saying the insinuations that his country is trading on people is false as the aim of the deal is actually to help the migrants.
Under the deal which was finalised by the UK earlier this week, asylum seekers who arrive in the UK on small boats will be relocated to Rwanda for processing and possible resettlement.
The deal worth a whopping £120m ($15m) to the East African country has drawn global condemnation and criticism for the countries with the Rwandan government accused of accepting the deal because of the money involved.
But Kagame, in his first comment since the deal was brokered, said it was a mistake for people to think Rwanda was just getting money for the migrants by trading on them.
“We are not trading human beings, please, we are actually helping them,” he said during a virtual seminar with US’s Brown University.
He added that the UK approached Rwanda because of “what we managed in the Libyan case” when he, as Chairman of the African Union in 2018, offered shelter to migrants stuck in Libya while trying to cross to Europe.
“Nearly 1,000 migrants were brought to Rwanda for processing, with two-thirds of them being relocated to European countries and Canada,” he said.
The Rwandan President said rather than criticizing his country, Rwanda should be praised for helping to deal with migrant smuggling, noting that the UK wanted “an orderly way of sorting out people they’ll accept and others they can say no to.”