I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the price of common food staples had increased by 35% but residents estimated it to be much higher. Gas, electricity and housing prices were also soaring. My interlocutors asked whether I knew the cost of potatoes, bus transport, and rent, wondering if as a muzungu (white foreigner), I was shielded from these economic pressures. In Rwanda, where politics is an uneasy and potentially threatening topic, inflation was a shared device through which individuals across social classes could comfortably voice critiques of rising social and class inequality. I build on Amri’s (2023) concept of ‘inflation-talk’ to argue that small talk on the rising cost of living, with its outward apolitical nature and indefinite causes, provided a safe discursive space for disclosing class and political frustrations.

When I asked around the tech ecosystem why life in Kigali was getting so expensive, responses generally converged around the hypothesized causes of inflation, such as the war in Ukraine, low local agricultural productivity, and the continuous devaluation of the Rwandan franc. As one person commented, ‘there’s huge inequality now. The rich get richer, and the market follows the haves’. The rising inequality in Rwanda sat awkwardly with the Government of Rwanda’s confirmation of the country’s teleological trajectory towards becoming a prosperous ICT-based economy as outlined in the guiding policy document Vision 2050. During tech conferences, held in nicely air-conditioned halls with swanky Afro-fusion decorations, international delegates and heads of state would praise President Paul Kagame for his vision in transforming Rwanda from a country once torn apart by genocidal violence towards becoming a continental leader for ICT development. Yet, outside such spaces, interlocutors commented on how the rising cost of living made their participation in this tech universe more difficult. Founders let go of staff, cancelled their coworking memberships and confessed their worries about possible consequences for their social and business reputations.

In the economic literature, financial crises and a rapid rise in food prices are frequently correlated with civic action and social unrest (see Bellemare 2015). But very few of my interlocutors in Kigali openly criticized the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda’s ruling party for the past 30 years. Returnee diaspora, which made up a sizeable portion of the tech ecosystem, would actively participate in the online defence of president Kagame, most virulently on X, with hashtags such as #TeamPK. Following the announcement on 15 July 2024 of Kagame’s re-election with 99% of the vote, Rwandans were quick to defend the results after Human Rights Watch reported a lack of genuine political competition. As one tweet stated, “Rwanda is a sovereign country and its President doesn’t have anything to answer to Western colonisers trying to impose their so called order on it…”. The RPF’s post-genocide ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ (Kinyarwanda for ‘I am Rwandan’) strategy of national reconciliation criminalized references to ethnic identity and further obliged Rwandans to reject all forms of social division (Purdeková & Mwambari 2022) to embrace a front of unity. Lists of permissible and forbidden citizen behaviours were pasted on the walls of schools and at the entrance of villages. Talking negatively about the country was identified as subject to discipline and punishment. Publicly voicing political critiques could result in accusations of anti-patriotism or worse, of harbouring genocidal ideologies.

In studies of Rwanda, scholars, most notably Thomson (2013), have sought to identify through James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985) instances of resistance towards the Rwandan state. Yet, as Rollason (2019) underscores, such studies pre-suppose defiance in citizens’ engagements with authorities and reify a division between the ruling and the ruled. Yet, many of my interlocutors, like Rollason’s, navigated the same social circles as government functionaries and held varying levels of political privilege gained through patronage or familial connections. In private conversations, they expressed an ambivalence towards the country’s politics rather than a stark opposition or deference to power. Some Rwandans expressed continued indebtedness to Kagame for allowing their families’ return, whilst other African nationals saw restricted political freedom as part of a trade-off for government effectiveness, saying ‘here at least you know where the money is going’. Paul Kagame’s presidency was part of an accepted order that could just as easily be toppled over. As a friend related, ‘everyone here says that they are for the president. But the last president, before the genocide, he also got 99% of the vote’. There was a longer history of dissimulation in Rwanda and maintaining an image of stability in contrast to its more turbulent neighbours.

It is in this climate of ‘quiet insecurity’ (Grant 2015) that conversations about the cost of living, first described in apolitical economic terms as concerns over rising food prices or other essentials, became an avenue by which people voice political and class frustrations. When housesitting for friends in a predominantly expat neighbourhood, I was approached by their cleaner, Hope, who asked whether I was looking for additional house help. I awkwardly replied no but promised to keep an ear out. Mopping the floors of the study, Hope would occasionally pause to volunteer bits of her familial history. She narrated the loss of her father and siblings during the genocide, with herself and surviving members fleeing to Uganda before eventually settling back in Kigali in the early 2000s. Hope struggled to cover her monthly rent and feared eviction. As usual for discussions on politics in Rwanda, she began with praise for the President to avoid reproach before delving into frustrations. She said, “I like Kagame because he saved many people, but Rwanda has too many rules…working three days a week is not enough, the cost of food in Rwanda is now very high. I support my mother…. It’s very difficult being poor in Rwanda, the genocide was not nice, very sad. In Uganda, the poor can sell food on the street, the women can make money, but in Rwanda it’s illegal, you can get into big trouble…” Hope was referring to the RPF’s criminalization of hawking, petty trading and street food vending (Finn 2017). Such measures aimed at making Kigali a ‘clean and modern city’ constrained the urban poor’s ability to multiple hustles and weather rising costs.

More privileged Rwandans also felt government policies were often out of touch with the socio-economic realities of most Kigalians. I met up with a founder friend over lunch, Shema, who recounted how his startup had experienced some recent financial setbacks. He mentioned that the new school budgets introduced by the Ministry of Education were barely adjusted for inflation, leaving little room for schools to spend on ed-tech products. School directors were more concerned with retaining quality teaching staff than investing in e-learning. As Shema explained, “the cost of Irish potatoes for one 1kg has now gone up to 1500 Rwf [approx. 1.50 USD] but the average salary for a teacher in Rwanda is now 70 000 Rwf [approx. 70 USD], how can people afford that?”

Being the youngest child of a single-parent household, Shema was proud of how he had risen from kitchen staff to managerial positions in the hospitality industry before dedicating himself to his startup. He felt the city’s rich kids, who often occupied key positions in the Presidential office, would likely not understand his, or his clients’, financial struggles: “It’s almost as if these guys are not Rwandans, they can sometimes barely speak Kinyarwanda and in their summers, they go on vacation to France or the US or Canada…these guys have probably never shopped at Nymirambo market, they go and get their groceries from Sawa Citi or Simba [supermarket chains]… They are the ones who then go study abroad and come back and make policies, but they don’t know what life is like in Rwanda. You know Claire Kamanzi [CEO of Rwanda Development Board], she wasn’t even in Rwanda before, how can they know the country, they only know about it from reading reports…”. Picking up on his comments, I inquired further as to what needs to change in Rwanda, to which he replied, “it would be if the system was for the masses, here it is the elites who in charge”. As reflected in the conversation with Shema, talk on the felt effects of inflation opened a portal to discussions on middle-class and elite urban divides and how such schisms mapped onto political decision-making.

The rising cost-of-living further hindered my interlocutors’ aspirations to attain or preserve middle-class living in Kigali and its accompanying social norms. Like Nairobi’s peri-urban population studied by Lockwood (2020), current socio-economic inequalities in Kigali were not seen as a permanent condition, but as part of a challenge to ‘make it’ and achieve the standard of living possessed by others. Foreign entrepreneurs from the Global North could weather the franc’s continuous devaluation and primarily resided in upmarket neighbourhoods.

But local young founders, predominantly men, complained about how it was now impossible to save for a house within your twenties, adding that girls now were more interested in dating older men with money. Male homeownership in Rwanda remained a prerequisite for marriage and the social transition to adulthood. Many mentioned how their irregular incomes had caused issues with their girlfriends, as they cynically joked that ‘it was becoming too expensive to adult’. Some were equally forced to relocate to neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Kigali and expressed feeling squeezed out of the city. Economic pressure further caused a series of aches and pains, as colleagues and entrepreneurs complained of burnout, fatigue and anxiety.

In a context where politics is laden with couched terms, speaking on inflation and its felt effects allowed interlocutors to share pointed political critiques and reveal class-based social tensions. The cost-of-living crisis threatened the aspirational livelihoods of my predominantly middle-class interlocutors and undid the image of a prosperous nation that the government endeavoured to maintain. For my interlocutors, commentary on inflation did not stand alone; it provided a means of contextualizing and reflecting on the socio-economic, gendered and political make-up of life in post-genocide Kigali and its resultant inequalities. It further opened questions on who would ultimately profit from the country’s push towards modernization.

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Alexandrine Royer is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work centres on digital economies, startup culture and development practices in East Africa, with a focus on Rwanda.

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References

Bellemare, M. F. (2015). Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 97(1), 1–21.

Grant, A. M. (2015). ‘Quiet Insecurity and Quiet Agency in Post-Genocide Rwanda’. Ethnofoor 27(2): 15-36

Finn, B. (2017). Quietly Chasing Kigali: Young Men and the Intolerance of Informality in Rwanda’s Capital City. Urban Forum (Johannesburg), 29(2), 205-218.

Lockwood, P. (2020). The Greedy Eaters: A moral politics of continuity and consumption in urbanising central Kenya [Apollo – University of Cambridge Repository]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.65545

Purdeková, A. & D. Mwambari (2022) Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda, Critical African Studies, 14:1, 19-37, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1938404

Rollason, W. (2019) ‘Motorbike People Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets’. Lanham: Lexington Books. 

Thomson, S. 2013. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Cite as: Royer, Alexandrine 2024. “‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-royer-in-kigali-life-is-expensivehow-everyday-inflation-talk-gives-voice-to-political-and-class-frustrations/