Rwanda: Gadaffi – Where Oil, Religion And Business Mix

The visit by Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadaffi to Uganda and the inauguration of the Mosque at Old Kampala was a huge statement about the Libyan leader’s strategic interests in Africa. Among the galaxy of African leaders who were there for the opening of the mosque, neither his host President Yoweri Museveni, nor President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, are known for piousness in their own religion (Christianity), let alone desiring to go through the rigours of another religion at an advanced age.

Apart from Museveni who openly expressed happiness for Gadaffi’s remark that all monotheists are Muslims, theirs was not a pilgrimage, and I do not envisage any of them doing the Hajj any time soon as Gadaffi suggested.
The leaders had business on their mind as shown after that mosque ceremony, by the signing of the pipeline deal. Uganda, Rwanda and Tamoil Africa, a Libyan company, signed the Kampala-Kigali oil pipeline deal in the presence of Gadaffi, probably to ship Libyan, and hopefully Ugandan oil later through this pipeline. So never mind the reported bruising, gun-drawing scuffles among the presidential bodyguards; the visit was worth every ounce of energy and air mile by the presidential jets.

So, do the leaders care about the remarks made by the Libyan leader about the falsehoods he says are in the Bible? Hardly. Museveni couldn’t care less. He is a known critic of Christianity, sometimes calling them as the Bible states ‘whitewashed tombs full of rotting bones.’ On this issue, Museveni is more aligned to Gadaffi than to Bishops Niringiye and Sekamanya’s Christianity.

Kagame would probably not be drawn into a ‘useless’ argument. He might probably give you a pragmatic answer, to tell you that oil does not have a religion, and if the oil well happens to be in a mosque, he would go for it anyway. So the argument about the reliability of the Bible record is not an issue to both Museveni and Kagame.

AllAfrica