Today, August 4, Rwanda goes to the polls to elect their next president. There are four candidates contesting the election—including the incumbent, Paul Kagame—but there is little doubt who will triumph. As a recent article in The Economist put it, “on August 4th Rwandans will re-elect Mr Kagame. The outcome is not in doubt. He has always won more than 90% of the vote in the past.” If—or rather, when—Kagame wins the election, he will enter his twenty-third year as the de facto leader of Rwanda. He first took power in 1994 as vice president and defence minister—at the time, essentially the leader of the country—then became president in 2000. In 2015, he presided over a referendum that amended Rwanda’s constitution to allow him to run for a third term in office and potentially serve for another seven years. The process could see him in power until 2034. The African political landscape is, of course, dotted with leaders whose rule stretches well over two decades. Many of these strongmen are democratically elected, if only in theory, but hold on to power with an autocratic grip. A good many of them are 70 or older on a continent where, according to UN data, the average age of the population is 19.5 years. Few of them are favourably regarded outside of their countries. Kagame is a notable exception. Kagame has long been a favourite of the international donor community and of what The Economist refers to as “the Davos crowd,” the elite group of global business leaders, politicians and economists who meet annually at the World Economic Forum. Kagame’s achievements as a leader are indeed considerable. He came to power in Rwanda after a genocide in which over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the most horrific ways at the hands of the extremist Hutu regime. About one-third of Rwanda's ethnic minority, the indigenous Twa, were also wiped out. Kagame managed to transform a country ravaged by civil war into one with an impressive record in development and fighting corruption. Rwanda is one of the few countries with a female-majority parliament—64 percent, the highest in the world. Its annual GDP growth averaged 8% between 2001-2015. Rwanda’s citizens have access to basic healthcare and cabinet ministers are held accountable for their performance. But evidence suggests that the stability and level of development the country currently enjoys have come at a cost, and that Rwanda is a police state where dissenters, both at home and abroad, are silenced, imprisoned or killed. In their 2015 report, Freedom House alleged that Kagame's government is actively engaged in suppressing formal political opposition. According to The Economist, “speech is less free in Rwanda than in any other African country, except Eritrea.” As one of Kagame’s former economic advisers expressed it: “For Western governments, financiers and opinion leaders, Rwandan president Paul Kagame offers a Faustian bargain: Overlook my brutal behavior, and I will offer you a model for economic growth in an African nation.” Election campaigns are not only about presidents. They are also fought by people on the ground. Adjumani in Uganda in 2006. Photo By Pernille Bærendtsen. Yet there are those who argue that the suppression of certain freedoms is reasonable and justified given Rwanda’s history, and that “service delivery” is what matters. Or as the headline of a Global Voices piece about the 2015 referendum put it, “Is It Not Democracy If Voters in Rwanda Want a “Life President?” The Kenyan academic Wandia Njoya, for instance, slammed the Economist article on Twitter , calling it “immoral and wrong on so many levels.” The conversation sparked by Njoya’s comment went down a familiar path, with criticism of the Rwandan leader being conflated with minimising the 1994 genocide. (Making false claims about the 1994 genocide is, not unreasonably, a criminal offence in Rwanda). The country maintains a well-oiled and sophisticated public relations machine that portrays any criticism as being anti-progress, and promotes the idea that without Kagame at the helm, Rwanda will descend once again into chaos. The fear of challenging leaders who cling to power is, for some Africans, rooted in anxiety and fear about unknown alternatives—alternatives which, as in Rwanda, where genuine political opposition has been all but suppressed, remain weak and unknown because they are never allowed to emerge and develop. In 2015 Nigerians elected former military leader Muhammadu Buhari as president. Buhari was the country’s head of state from December 1983 to August 1985, after taking power in a military coup d’etat. Buhari was elected on the platform of being a strong leader capable of stopping the extremist terrorist group Boko Haram.