Samuel Baker BYANSI

Leading @M28Investigates. Rwandan Journalist & Author. Investigative Researcher. Great Lakes Region. Int’l Comm & Media, Peace, Security & Strategic Studies.

[Kakwenza Rukirabashaija @KakwenzaRukira]

You waste your youthful energy and years protecting an imbecile, defending him and whitewashing their criminal records and then boom! You’re arrested by that same imbecile and imprisoned for several years and die in prison. I can never do such things. That’s why I criticise or insult everyone especially in political circles. Those goons can change colours like a chameleon.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Ni ikihe cyaha umuntu wakurinze “personal bodyguard” imyaka 20 yakora kikakunanira kumubabarira ugahitamo kumwicira muri gereza? Muzarekera Aho ryari ubu bwicanyi koko? This is too much.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Col. Tom Byabagamba served and guarded @PaulKagame for two decades. Then he was jailed for criticising him, and has now died behind bars, 12 years after his arrest (RIP).

The @UN ruled his detention arbitrary in 2017. His co-accused, Gen. Frank Rusagara, died in the same prison last year. We Rwandans bury our own - a reminder of how ruthless our dictator and his @rpfinkotanyi regime remain.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

This is propaganda and treat it as such. @ScoviaMutesi isn’t a persecuted journalist, she chairs @RMC_Rwanda, the body that regulates every other journalist in Rwanda. @PaulKagame isn’t defending press freedom, he’s defending his own appointee working under @GovernanceRw.

The RMC is “self-regulatory” in name only, I’ve documented how @RwandaGov hollowed it out in my book “From watchdogs to traitors: The less you know, The more you believe”. Its chair has repeatedly defended M23/RDF from inside eastern #DRCongo. That’s an information operation, not journalism.

Rwanda ranks 139/180 on the @RSF_inter index. So, guys spare us the media-freedom performance, it’s a distraction from the economy, sanctions, DASSO brutality, and poverty Rwandans actually can’t discuss.

[The Chronicles @ChroniclesRW]

Kagame Again Comes to Defense of Media Freedom in Dispute Between Journalist Umutesi Scovia and Rwanda's Foreign Minister https://t.co/WfEl0LNpq9

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Kagame is a ruthless dictator, but also a magician. He pulled a rabbit out of a hat and everyone’s focused on it instead of everything his regime @RwandaGov has failed to fix.

A long-forgotten spat between a journalist @ScoviaMutesi and an official @onduhungirehe now matters more than a tanking economy, sanctions biting, a water crisis, DASSO brutality, trade disputes with liquor exporters and importers, youth unemployment, rampant poverty etc.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Kagame didn't correct his foreign minister @onduhungirehe because he cares about the man's conduct. In his regime, humiliating a senior official in public is rarely the end of a story, it's usually the first line of one. By the time an official is dropped, the public has already been taught to see him as arrogant, sloppy, and expendable, so the fall reads as deserved, even inevitable.

So watch what's being set up. And watch what this "language spat" is conveniently pulling your attention away from.

Because the other possibility is diversion. Manufacture a non-issue “French vs. Kinyarwanda” and let the public argue about that instead of the questions that actually matter.

Then scrutinise the press conference itself. Who was chosen to ask questions? Who was in the room, and who wasn't? Who paid for the people who showed up? We saw a comedian, @crazy_kennar, and Nollywood figures in attendance, are those journalists now? These events are curated. The "spontaneous" moment almost never is.

Either way, the minister's conduct is the pretext, not the point. Setup or distraction, both do the same job which is keeping Rwandans looking anywhere but at the real crises.

[Kakwenza Rukirabashaija @KakwenzaRukira]

Every writer is known for a specific genre yet other stories quietly gather in the margins over time. I made my name in social protest literature (four titles strong). But erotic writing has been steadily filling the well of my pen, and my publisher finally decided it was time to let it loose.

So here it is but not for children, strictly for adults as it is packed with innumerable explicit sex scenes.

WANYITA is an erotic romance that ends in a sharp legal thriller.

Handle with care. Good luck

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

@kiizaeron So sorry @kiizaeron. My condolences to you and the family.

[Kakwenza Rukirabashaija @KakwenzaRukira]

https://t.co/AUkmCBoymN

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Kagame regime has spent decades selling Rwanda as the “Singapore of Africa,” but the @WorldBankGroup’s own numbers tell a plainer story. GDP per capita crept from $830 in 2021 to roughly $1,000 in 2024, a real rise, and yet the country still ends the period as one of the poorest on the list.

Over the same years #Togo went $962 to $1,119, #Mali $1,027 to $1,095, #Uganda $883 to $1,078, while #Chad ($946 to $962) and Burkina Faso ($896 & $982) - states living through insurgency and coups sit right alongside it. Rwanda climbed and still couldn’t clear that company.

For all of @RwandaGov’s PR about the country’s economic transformation, the reality is that the vast majority of Rwandans continue to live in poverty, many in extreme poverty. This is something the government would rather people didn’t focus on. But facts are stubborn.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

While ordinary Rwandans queue for water, @PaulKagame keeps spending to sanitize his image. It’s 2026, and this is happening inside @CityofKigali itself, the regime’s showcase capital.

Entire neighborhoods go weeks, sometimes months, without running water, because this @RwandaGov has decided beautification and photo-ops matter more than whether its own citizens live with basic dignity.

In the wealthy districts, where the elites, diplomats, and foreign “experts” live, the taps never run dry. In the poorer neighborhoods, they stay dry for weeks on end. That is a choice and not an infrastructure failure.

And while families ration from jerrycans, Kagame’s regime is chasing a @F1 Grand Prix costed at a reported $1.2 billion for cars going in circles, so the regime can look modern on international television. Money for the circus; none, apparently, to fix the pipes. The hypocrisy is obscene.

If this is Kigali, home to roughly two million people +, the part of Rwanda the regime most wants the world to see, then picture what the other eleven million endure in the countryside every single day.

And remember: this is only the water crisis. The same order of priorities runs through everything else - health, education, agriculture. Kagame’s regime spends on prestige. Rwandans pay the price.

[Carine Kanimba @ckanimba]

From Rwanda to Idaho… this one feels special. 🏔️❤️

@AnaiseKanimba & I finally made it to @SenatorRisch’s home state. He was instrumental in bringing our dad, Paul Rusesabagina of #HotelRwanda, home after 939 days wrongfully detained in Rwanda.

Forever grateful to him & @tomozeus. 🇺🇸

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

@KanyarwandaWacu Kubera…?

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Congratulations Hillary.

[justice hunter 🇺🇬🇺🇸 @hillarytaylorvi]

he said yes 💍❤️

i love you, @sirrningaa.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

@onyekanwelue “I understand it’s accurate…”, “Would you like to comment?”, “My deadline is 6:30pm” and the email sent 5:12pm and that mean you have 1hr 18mins to reply?. wow…! Just wow…!

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Watch @egide_ruhashya, a Kagame’s regime propagandist: he claims Burundians hunted Tutsi with a deliberate policy of killing them slowly, never at once & then boasts he studied alongside President Habyarimana’s children. Sit with that. The man narrating a Tutsi extermination campaign places himself inside the Hutu-power elite that Rwanda’s own history ties to 1994. The persona collapses under its own weight. This is the tell of an information operation, not testimony.

And it serves a function. Rwanda’s “reconciliation” was engineered as a material fact, ethnicity struck from IDs, “divisionism” criminalized but the psyche was never healed, only frozen. A frozen wound is an asset. These recurring “the genocide is returning” performances order citizens to forget and to fear at once. A society that can’t resolve that contradiction can’t organize around anything else. The dissonance isn’t reconciliation failing, it’s governance working exactly as designed, harvesting reconciliation abroad and relapse-anxiety at home, from the same wound.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

iOS Lockdown Mode, Apple’s shield for spyware-targeted journalists, dissidents and human rights defenders, disables 2G and 3G. Rwanda under Kagame’s regime, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, still runs on 2G and 3G. So in a state built to surveil you, you must choose between being protected or connected, never both. The defense fails exactly where it’s needed most.

This is why I’m asking @Apple: for the people this mode was built to protect, it has to keep them reachable on the networks they actually live on. Please make Lockdown Mode viable in 2G/3G-dependent countries, not just in the 4G/5G world it currently assumes.

[Marc Owen Jones @marcowenjones]

3/ This open source investigation documents a pattern of manufactured influence: coordinated account creation, shared studios, pseudo-news sites, AI-assisted content, and systematic amplification across platforms.

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

Tito Rutaremara, an @rpfinkotanyi founding figure isn’t mourning Gatumba’s 166 dead, he’s doing Kagame’s messaging, stretching “génocidaire” to brand Burundi amid a proxy war. The regime that buried the #DRCongo Mapping Report lectures neighbours on impunity. Kagame’s regime doesn’t commemorate the dead; it conscripts them. https://t.co/A6jl56TaYL

[Samuel Baker BYANSI @SamuelBaker_B]

The DRC–Rwanda peace process has produced six JSCM meetings, an October “planning conference,” a forthcoming Operations Order, and a Sept 16-17 date for the next one. What it hasn’t produced: a single verified withdrawal. Process as substitute for enforcement. https://t.co/PWupykulKA