What leadership can build in one generation

Nobody warned me about the streets. I landed in Kigali expecting to be moved by a memorial, and I was, but what caught me first was a city with no cigarette butts on its pavements, no plastic bags in its gutters, orderly traffic and a simplicity that made everything feel calm and deliberate. In 1994, Rwanda was devastated by a genocide that killed more than one million people in one hundred days and tore the country apart. Thirty-two years later, I was looking at something very different. So I did what I always do. I talked to people. Augustine, who drove me around Kigali, explained how the genocide is taught in schools and what children are meant to take from a history most of them had never lived through. The message, he said, was simple: never again. For Augustine, those old divisions had no place in the Rwanda he knew: “We are all alike. We are Rwandan.” The next day, another driver took me to Volcanoes National Park to see the golden monkeys. The road was narrow and immaculate, the villages we passed were spotless, and at one bend an old woman was sweeping the roadside with a broom. The more people I spoke to, drivers, guides, hotel staff, people I met along the way, the more I wanted to understand what had carried a country from the trauma of 1994 to what I was seeing thirty-two years later. The answer kept coming back to the same word: leadership. I had heard an answer to that question before, from the man who has led Rwanda through most of those thirty-two years. Seven years ago, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, I interviewed President Paul Kagame and asked him how a country that had endured war and genocide, with few natural resources, had managed to make such progress within a few decades. He told me there had been “no rule book”. Rwanda tried what it knew, experimented where necessary and concentrated on bringing people together. Its greatest resource, he said, was its people, and the investment went into their education, health and ability to work together. Seven years later, walking through Kigali, those words were easier to understand. Rwanda teaches the genocide in schools, preserves its memory through memorials and marks one hundred days of remembrance every year from April 7. Communities work together on public spaces during Umuganda on the last Saturday of every month. Plastic bags have been banned since 2008. National identity was rebuilt after 1994 around citizenship rather than ethnic classification. Education, public behaviour, the environment and social cohesion were being shaped in the same direction. The old woman with the broom belonged to that system. Leadership is usually discussed through personalities and speeches. History shows its deeper effect over time, when decisions become institutions and institutions begin to change a country’s trajectory. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is perhaps the clearest example: within a generation, sustained leadership helped transform a vulnerable new state into a global economic centre. The UAE began its transformation in 1971. Fifty-five years later, it offers another measure of what leadership can build within one generation and carry into the next. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum set the direction around unity, institution-building, education, infrastructure and openness to the world. The generation that followed expanded that ambition. Under President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE moved into advanced industry, technology, artificial intelligence, clean energy, global trade and investment, while building a model of government defined by long-term planning, speed of execution and a constant willingness to raise the ceiling of what the country could achieve. Back in Dubai, I read a letter Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid had published to his son Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, marking twenty years since Sheikh Hamdan’s appointment as Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai. Part of Sheikh Mohammed’s new book, “The Letters”, it condensed nearly six decades in government into principles he wanted carried forward: justice, mercy, accountability, truthful advisers and closeness to people. To Sheikh Hamdan he writes: “If people look at you with their eyes, look at them with your heart, Hamdan.” I teared up when I read that line. Reading the letter after Kigali gave it another dimension for me. Sheikh Hamdan became Chairman of The Executive Council in 2006, Crown Prince in 2008, and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence in 2024. By then, he had already spent nearly eighteen years at the centre of Dubai’s government. Leadership continuity in the UAE has been built through years of responsibility, exposure to government and direct involvement in decision-making, long before each new responsibility arrives. This may be the part of leadership that receives the least attention. Transforming a country requires vision and executio