By Mulengera Reporters
In his Tuesday appearance on BBC’s Focus on Africa program, Ambassador Claude Nikobisanzwe who for two months now has been representing Rwanda at the newly opened diplomatic mission in Mozambique, described the death OF Louis Baziga as a very big loss to Kigali. He was that very Tuesday brutally gunned down inside his car as he returned from lunch at his residence located in the Maputo upscale neighborhood of Matola.
Baziga had largely passed off as a prominent Rwandan businessman running a huge medicines trading empire in Maputo. He was also for an eternity the Chairman of the Rwandan Diaspora Association of Maputo Mozambique where he first fled at the height of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
A comprehensive report in the Uganda state-owned Bukedde newspaper shows that besides doing Diaspora work and personal business errands, Baziga also worked as an undercover operative for National Intelligence & Security Services (NISS) which is at the apex of Rwanda’s security apparatus. That the medicines business was just a decoy meant to disguise his spying activities mostly targeting dissidents who live in the SADC region. That he even had been allocated or assigned a special room in the Kigali embassy in Maputo which was only opened in June and Kigali deployed there Nikobisanzwe, who had years earlier been expelled by South Africa following the gruesome murder of Patrick Karegyeya in Michelangelo Towers hotel SA on 1st January 2014. SA accused the Ambassador of being privy to the plot to bump off Karegyeya and subsequently sent him back home in Kigali.
The Bukedde story shows that Baziga would base in that office to coordinate his spying operations and eventually directly ring Kagame in Kigali to give him regular updates on the activities of the dissidents in the SADC region. The state newspaper says Baziga was complicit in the Karegyeya murder and in coordinating the failed attempt on the life of former Rwandan army chief of staff Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa in 2010. Nikobisanzwe told the BBC that the assailants fled the scene after shooting Baziga inside his car and that none has been arrested so far. A terribly bleeding Baziga was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
He had badly been wounded in the head and chest and succumbed to extreme bleeding. Some news sites say that the killing of Baziga, who first settled in Maputo at the height of the 1994 genocide, was an act of revenge after he was accused of not doing enough to alert or prevent the October 2012 death of former Rwanda Development Bank boss Theogene Turatsinze who was kidnapped in Maputo, brutally murdered and his body dumped in the lake. Turatsinze had fled to Maputo after falling out with authorities in Kigali.
The Bukedde report indicates that Baziga simply knew too much to be allowed to live for long. That having coordinated many deadly missions for Kigali over the years, Baziga had lately had his loyalty doubted as some perceived him as a 5th columnist in close collaboration with Kayumba Nyamwasa to whose group the state newspaper story implies he had secretly defected recently. That this must have offended some in Kigali who were apprehensive he was already leaking their decades’ old dirty operational secrets to the dissidents who are capable of using such information for propaganda purposes on social media to demonize the authorities in Kigali.
Baziga is just the latest of the eminent Rwandans who have died in a similar fashion on the foreign soil. Others departed earlier include Patrick Karegyeya who was 54, the 47-year-old Seth Sendashonga the former internal affairs Minister who shot dead 16th May 1998 on the streets of Nairobi and more recently Camir Nkurunziza, a former Kagame escort, who was gunned down in Cape Town SA on 30th May 2019.