President Kagame starts mobile telephone wiretap system.
Paul Kagame ,a progressive autocratic leader .
Rwanda Internal and external intelligence agencies continue to wiretap mobile phones of any person communicating to or from Rwanda.
In addition to listening to conversations, Rwanda started charging enormous fees to Rwandan consumers, including any business operating from Rwanda, for any telephone conversation originating outside Rwanda. The official date for such policy was July 2, 2012.
The way it was working before this RURA policy change, was that all Tigo and Rwandatel customers were receiving call without charge. Now, all customers will have to pay a rate of Rwfr 132, 20/per minute.
In addition to harassing people, this extra telephone fee or taxes, whatever you can call it, is a way of sucking the little income from all Rwandan consumers, which are already suffering from high price inflation. Remember, consumer have already paid such fee when the country endures price inflation, which is the case in Rwanda right now. The higher an inflation is, the less your money will buy in goods and services. When income does not grow with, or beyond, inflation, it is a tax on your income.
Diego Camperos, Tigo Rwanda representative echoed the same concern about this RURA new policy, saying that they are already noticing some negative effects on telephone mobile consumers; but he still believe it was early to predict long term outcome.
On RURA side, they are explaining the reason of such change in policy by saying that, with time, they will be able to know Rwanda mobile telephone outside consumers’ behavior, using the complicated tool of business analytics. This sounds a well design explanation of such discriminatory policy; but RURA has a long history of distorting their motive. They only people that could benefit from this change are President Paul Kagame inner circle, who continue amassing a lot of money from Rwandan people.