Rwanda defeats Algeria in vote to host African Medicines Agency

Algeria has been reduced to its real diplomatic size on the African continent as members of the African Union voted for Rwanda as the host of the African Medicines Agency. A new setback that adds to a series of blows for the diplomacy of the ailing military regime.

Algeria has sent a delegation led by its foreign minister accompanied by pharmaceutics minister to Lusaka where African countries picked Rwanda given its competitiveness in pharmaceuticals and leadership to launch the agency.

Myopic to its real size in Africa and disillusioned by its own propaganda, Algeria insisted on conducting a vote which left it exposed as an isolated country.

Playing the bad loser, the Algerian military regime has responded to the defeat by orchestrating a despicable campaign against Rwanda. TSA news outlet has described Rwanda as a small country of 12 million people with a poverty rate of 55% and a GDP of 10 billion dollars!

But what made the scandal is Algerian attempts to buy off the vote by promising to inject 200 million dollars into the agency and pay for its operations in the first two years if Algiers was picked as a host, a vow that went unnoticed among African sovereign states.

“Isolated, this country (Algeria) can no longer weigh on the sovereign decision of African countries despite its lobbying in the corridors of the executive council in Lusaka and regardless of its attempts to intimidate Rwanda to give up its victory. Such attempts have only astonished and triggered the indignation of the participants,” said Senego, a Senegalese news outlet.

The victory of Rwanda is reflective of its President Paul Kagame’s leadership and the respect the country enjoys amid African peers, something that Algerian military junta lack.

Algeria unfortunately has come to embody all that Africa is struggling to get rid of: military rule, authoritarianism and the rentier economy.