Ian Kagame, the son of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, has joined the elite Republican Guard, a unit of the Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) that is tasked with protecting the President.
Lieutenant Kagame’s first appearance as part of the security team was during the national prayer breakfast on Sunday, where pictures of him keeping an eye on his father and his surroundings have gone viral.
Lieutenant Kagame graduated from the United Kingdom’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in August 2022, and the following month he graduated from the Rwanda Military Academy in Gako, Bugesera District to become an RDF officer.
He joins a long list of children of heads of state who have been thrust close to power through the military. In Zimbabwe, Captain Sean Mnangagwa, son of President Emmerson Mnangagwa, is a member of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA)’s Presidential Guard. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni’s son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba is the commander of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces and a candidate to take over from his father. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Joseph Kabila, the son of the late president Laurent-Désiré Kabila, trained at China’s National Defence University and eventually rose to become chief of staff of the land forces as a major general until his father’s death.
Similarly, in Chad, the late president Idriss Derby’s son Mahamat, a military general, rose to lead the interim ruling military council after his father’s death. In Botswana, Ian Khama, the son of the country’s founding father Seretse Khama, left the military as commander of the Botswana Defence Forces in 1998 to become vice president and president in 2008, a position he held until 2018.
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Joseph Omoniyi
- Tags: Ian Kagame, National Guard, Rwanda, security
