“IF YOU have plastic bags, please leave them on the plane,” the cabin crew warn. Welcome to Kigali, Rwanda’s spotless capital. Plastic bags are banned. Traffic is orderly. Crime is rare. Hawkers, beggars and street prostitutes are nowhere to be seen. Motorcyclists even wear helmets.

Organisations that dish out development aid love Rwanda. So do foreign businessfolk. “It’s the best-run country in Africa,” says one. “It’s a shining star,” says another. “The professionalism; the way the government deals with us...everywhere else in Africa you feel [corruption] from the traffic cop to the top. Here, no one has asked me for a bribe.”

Under President Paul Kagame, who has been in charge since 1994, Rwanda has been transformed. After the genocide, the country was in ruins. Independent estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people had been hacked or clubbed to death; the government says it was twice as many. Most of the middle class had fled or been killed. Nothing worked. Hardly anyone had enough to eat.

Mr Kagame, whose seizing of power ended the genocide, reimposed order. He executed some of the ringleaders and put ordinary killers through informal village courts that encouraged confession and contrition. Some 2m of the 6m Rwandans still alive in 1994 were eventually put on trial—that is, most of the adult population.

In the two decades of Mr Kagame’s rule, Rwanda has become a much more peaceful place. It has also, in a modest way, started to become a prosperous one, with strong and consistent growth. Rwanda’s income per person halved to $150 during the civil war of 1990-94. Today it is $700. This revival involved a great deal of foreign aid. In 2006 aid was a quarter of GDP and half the government’s budget; those figures are now 5% and 17%, respectively. For the most part, this cash was neither squandered nor stolen. Buoyed by better farm incomes, since 2000 Rwanda has notched up growth rates of 8% a year, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world (though still one of the poorest). Many talk of a “Rwandan miracle”, and look to it for lessons in development.

Born in blood

Yet consider those clean streets in Kigali. Why, if Rwanda is so harmonious, are there soldiers everywhere? And what happened to all the hawkers, beggars and prostitutes? Human Rights Watch, an American NGO that cannot operate openly in Rwanda, says they are rounded up and put in “transit camps”, where they are held without charge and flogged. “They correct us by beating us with sticks,” one detainee told the group.

Johnston Busingye, the justice minister, says the camps are to reform drug takers and other petty criminals. “You don’t have the right to be delinquent,” he told The Economist in May. Wrongdoers are taught new skills, he says, and street vendors urged to form co-operatives. As for beatings, he says: “I will investigate that.”

On August 4th Rwandans will vote to give Mr Kagame another seven-year term. He will undoubtedly win. He captured 95% of the vote in 2003 and 93% in 2010. At that point he was constitutionally barred from standing again. But in 2015 the ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), organised a “spontaneous” petition to let him stay on. Some 4m signed it; only ten people openly opposed it. A constitutional amendment then passed with 98% of the vote. Mr Kagame can in theory remain president until 2034, when he will be 77.

Mr Kagame’s supporters and admirers take the view that a strongman with a long-term plan can be better for development than lots of squabbling factions. Too often in Africa, multiparty politics has degenerated into tribal feuding. Rwanda, of all places, cannot take that risk. His detractors note that, however keen you are on strong and stable government, 40 years in power is too much. They argue that the Rwandan growth “miracle” is less impressive than it seems. And they say Rwanda is calm and orderly because Rwandans are terrified of Mr Kagame—a recipe neither for happiness nor for durable peace. Where the likes of Tony Blair see “a visionary leader”, people like David Himbara, a former aide now in exile, see the creator of “a repressive totalitarian apparatus that controls almost all aspects of national life”. The run-up to the election illustrates how narrow is the space for dissent. No independent media are tolerated (though foreign journalists can visit easily enough). Opposition candidates are allowed, but barely permitted to campaign. One of Mr Kagame’s opponents is Diane Rwigara, whose father, a businessman, died in a car crash in 2015. The family believes he was murdered, perhaps because he did not let ruling-party bigwigs muscle in on his business. Two days after Ms Rwigara announced she was running, naked photographs of her appeared on the internet. She sees this as an attempt to intimidate her. “To resolve issues in our country, first we need to be able to talk about them,” she says. Few Rwandans have heard her message. The election commission has refused to let her register her candidacy. Frank Habineza, the head of the Green Party, did manage to get on the ballot. But he complains of constant harassment and intimidation. His deputy was beheaded in 2010 by unknown killers. Party members are denounced as “enemies of the people” at village meetings, and risk losing their jobs and welfare benefits. “Local authorities say: ‘We’ll take away your cows,’” says Mr Habineza. (The government has a much-praised programme to provide a cow to poor rural families.) “They say: ‘Get cows from the Green Party.’”

Rwandans hesitate to complain, even in private. In the countryside RPF representatives watch over each unit of ten households. In Mbyo, a village south of Kigali, Jeanette Mukabyagaju, a leader of a farming co-operative, says that everyone will vote for Mr Kagame. “It’s a shame the election is so far away,” she says. “We want to vote for him now.”

The man she says everyone will vote for is an enigma. He presents himself as a soft-spoken, austere technocrat. He talks of running Rwanda like a business, always open to innovation. He often cites a programme to deliver blood to clinics via flying drone. He is “very good at telling you what you want to hear”, says a long-time observer.

When Mr Kagame was born, in 1957, Belgium still ruled Rwanda. His family were of the Tutsi minority. The official dogma in Rwanda today is that there are no Hutus or Tutsis, only Rwandans, but that is not necessarily how people think. A stereotypical Tutsi is tall and thin (like Mr Kagame), and owns cows. A stereotypical Hutu is shorter, has broader features and grows crops. As independence drew near, anti-Tutsi pogroms broke out. Mr Kagame’s family was one of thousands that fled, settling in Uganda when he was five.

In 1981 Mr Kagame joined a tiny group of rebels led by Yoweri Museveni. In 1986 they ousted Uganda’s vile military regime and seized power. Mr Museveni became president, which he still is; Mr Kagame became his head of military intelligence.

Arms and the man

Four years later, to Mr Museveni’s surprise and fury, a fifth of his army defected overnight, taking their weapons with them. The Tutsi exiles who had helped him to power, enraged by discrimination against their kin in Rwanda, had set out to bring the Hutu dictatorship down. After their original leader was killed, Mr Kagame flew back from America, where he was attending a course for staff officers, to take charge. His forces were outnumbered and outgunned, but motivated, meritocratic and well led. Colonel Richard Orth, an American who observed the subsequent civil war, came to rate Mr Kagame as “among the top” military leaders in the world.

After the two sides reached a ceasefire in 1993, Hutu officers who did not want to share power decided to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda. The spark came in April 1994, when a plane carrying the Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down by unknown assassins. Soldiers and militiamen immediately started murdering Tutsis and unco-operative Hutus. Hate radio howled for blood, warning that the Tutsi rebels were devils with bulbous eyes and tails. Bureaucrats organised villagers into death squads.

The road from certain suffering...

Thacién Nkundiye, a poor Hutu farmer, remembers it well. “There were village meetings in the morning, and [a local official] told us where to go,” he says. “They said anyone who doesn’t kill isn’t really a Hutu, and we’ll kill him.” Some peasants were supplied with machetes; others brought their own weapons. “I had a club with nails in it. I made it myself.”

Mr Nkundiye killed two Tutsis, both of them neighbours he found cowering in the bushes. “I hit them with the club. It was not difficult. We didn’t think it was a sin.” Afterwards, “we took their cows, their land and the contents of their houses. We killed the cows and had a party, to celebrate our achievement. We bought banana beer with the money we found on the dead.”

The genocide stopped only when Mr Kagame swept the génocidaires out of power and into eastern Congo (or Zaire, as it was then called). From the rainforest, the génocidaires regrouped and led raids into Rwanda. Mr Kagame responded by invading Congo, a state 27 times larger and ten times more populous than Rwanda.

His initial aim was to crush the génocidaires. To that end his men killed an estimated 200,000, including many civilians, in Congo in 1996 and 1997. In the process they discovered that Congo, which is rich in mineral deposits, would be surprisingly easy to conquer. Its ailing kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had given the génocidaires haven, was not popular. When confronted by a disciplined enemy, his unpaid soldiers ran away.

The Rwandans found a local front man, Laurent Kabila, and put him at the head of what was billed as a Congolese rebellion. In fact, Rwanda provided most of the organisation and much of the muscle. Mr Kagame’s men marched 1,600 kilometres through the rainforest in Wellington boots, toppled Mobutu and installed Kabila as president. Hardly any outsiders realised what had happened. The headlines said that Mobutu had been ousted by a home-grown revolution.

However, Kabila refused to be a puppet. He double-crossed Mr Kagame and started helping the génocidaires, so the Rwandans invaded again in 1998. This time, instead of marching all the way across the country, they carried out a lightning airborne strike, seized the dam that powered Kinshasa, the capital, and turned off the lights.

The raid was bold and brilliant. The pilot of the first plane, a commandeered Boeing 707, was terrified that he would die trying to land at a fortified Congolese air base. A Rwandan officer assured him that the garrison commander had defected and radioed him to prove it. A voice said the plane was all clear to land. In fact, the voice belonged to another Rwandan officer at the back of the plane.

Mr Kagame would probably have overthrown Kabila, had Angola and Zimbabwe not intervened to save him. As it was, Rwanda’s second invasion of Congo helped spark a continent-wide war of great brutality. Estimates of the country’s population before and after suggest that between 800,000 and 5m perished. Kabila himself was murdered by a bodyguard three years in. No one knows who ordered the hit.

Mr Kagame’s claim to be acting out of self-defence looked increasingly hollow as Rwandans systematically looted Congolese minerals. Rwanda officially pulled out of Congo in 2009, but maintains a network of spies and allies in the eastern part of the country. The génocidaires in Congo are no longer a security threat, though they remain an ideological one, says Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s foreign minister.

These days Mr Kagame wants Rwanda to be the “Singapore of Africa”, where multinationals set up regional headquarters and hold conferences—and where visitors pay big bucks to watch gorillas. As the sun sets over Kigali, the dome of a new convention centre lights up. It cost $300m.

...to seeming prosperity

His government has pursued some useful reforms. To help electrify the country, it has encouraged foreign investors to build solar farms, a peat-power plant and floating rigs that extract methane from the depths of Lake Kivu. With help from the World Bank, it has tried to raise output on the small farms that support three-quarters of Rwandans. It has terraced hills to create more cropland, built dams and dug irrigation canals. In the decade to 2011, says the government, farmers’ earnings rose by a third. Between 2011 and 2014, it says, poverty fell by six percentage points, to 39%, and the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, improved from 0.49 to 0.45. “Growth strong, poverty rapidly down, inequality falling: that’s a rare hat-trick,” says Paul Collier of Oxford University.

Some, however, doubt the government’s statistics. Among them is Mr Himbara. In “Kagame’s Economic Mirage”, a book, he claims that the country routinely fiddles its numbers. Filip Reyntjens of the University of Antwerp argues that, by changing its definition of poverty, the government has masked a hefty increase in the share of Rwandans who are poor.

It is hard to assess such claims. As elsewhere in Africa, much of Rwanda’s economy is rural and informal, so that any estimate of GDP includes heroic guesses about how much maize small farmers have grown and sold to their neighbours. Household surveys may be unreliable in a country where people are scared to upset local officials. However numbers that are hard to fake, such as tax receipts, have risen steadily, suggesting that much of the growth is real.

Is it sustainable? Rural productivity growth is slowing as farmers approach the limits of what can be done on their small plots. The government has borrowed heavily to build hotels, the conference centre and an $800m airport. Rwandair, the loss-making national airline, is sucking in subsidies as it opens new routes. Net external debt has jumped to nearly 18% of GDP from less than 4% five years ago.

Some see this as a necessary gamble. Others fret that Rwanda has hocked itself to fund projects that may be marred by cronyism. Crystal Ventures, the investment arm of the ruling party, owns stakes in most big concerns in Rwanda, including the convention centre. Along with the Horizon Group, which reports to the Ministry of Defence, it dominates the economy.

Some economists argue that a small landlocked country in a rough region cannot easily attract private investment, so it makes sense for the state to step in and kick-start things. But it is hard to see why the ruling party, rather than the government, should control such a big chunk of the economy. Local businessmen whisper that the RPF muscles in on their operations, demanding a stake and slowly squeezing them out. Several have had their assets seized; some have met fatal accidents.

Foreign investors who bring valuable technology are generally treated well. But many see clues that Rwanda is not a normal country. One describes being told that all his workers had decided to donate a large slice of their wages that month to the ruling party. The workers all agreed that this was entirely voluntary.

Not yet Singapore

Rwanda is tranquil, but it is an eerie tranquillity. The country is run by Mr Kagame and people like him—Tutsis who returned from exile. It is risky for a member of the Hutu majority to point this out, however, or to criticise the president in any way. Human-rights groups fear that the tensions within Rwanda could one day explode.

Nonsense, says Ms Mukabyagaju, who lost her mother and father during the genocide, and hid in the bush for weeks. Now she lives next to Mr Nkundiye, the peasant who killed his previous neighbours with a club. Yet she says she feels safe. Mr Nkundiye spent eight years in prison but was then released, having confessed and begged forgiveness. “There was anger before. Now we are friendly,” he says. The two live in a government-sponsored “reconciliation village”, where perpetrators and survivors live side-by-side in neat, subsidised homes. Ms Mukabyagaju says everyone in the village is happy, and everyone has made up. Then she sells baskets she has woven to visiting journalists.