Morose and neglected in the past, this city’s current splendour cannot go unnoticed: the former colonial capital Gitega, located in the centre of the country, became the political capital of Burundi in 2019. It is also, and above all, the city where the current President of the Republic, Evariste Ndayishimiye, was born. Gitega now seems to be benefiting from a combination of historical, political and geographical factors — with new hotels springing up everywhere, new businesses opening up (particularly building material stores), and the daily sound of sirens blaring in the streets to clear the way for a minister on his way to a conference, a high-ranking army officer visiting his farm, or a senior official of the ruling party (the CNDD-FDD) returning from a political meeting.
Doubts about this allure arise when one looks away from the large construction sites and turns to the ordinary citizens in the streets or on the hills. We are in front of Matergo, one of the city’s most popular new hotels, frequented by authorities, diplomats, businessmen and others. Two vehicles are parked side by side, fuel tanks open. A man standing between the two cars emptied one to fill the other. “It’s a good deal”, whispered a passer-by. “The buyer may have offered him five times the normal price, or even more. That’s the new business here, if you have a car. You queue for days at a petrol station, and if you’re lucky enough to get fuel, you sell it to someone who is not willing to wait. That’s Burundi today. My country is in a really bad shape!”, continued the man, looking around him nervously to make sure his words have not fallen on prying ears. His safety depends on it. In Burundi, even the streets now seem to have ears. To say that the country is in bad shape, that the lives of its citizens are at a standstill because of a widespread fuel shortage that has now lasted more than three years, is to challenge the official narrative — that of a country flowing with milk and honey. As a matter of fact, there can only be joy in ‘the Garden of Eden’, as President Evariste Ndayishimiye has boldly christened Burundi.
Gitega is a city under heavy surveillance. Like the rest of Burundi, in fact. The parliamentary and municipal elections held on the 5th of June took place in a context of political lockdown: most political opponents have been in exile for 10 years, and those who have remained in the country have almost all been neutralised. As a result, the CNDD-FDD secured 100 percent of the seats in the National Assembly at the end of the election, a North Korea-style score never before achieved by any other party since the introduction of a multi-party system in the 1990s.
In the streets of Gitega, tension is palpable. Hundreds of people from the youth wing of the ruling party, the Imbonerakure — described as a militia by the United Nations — dressed in jogging gear, sometimes armed and in combat uniform, chant martial songs while the police carry out thorough checks. Rumours of Burundian rebels infiltrating the country are rife. The police are searching for weapons caches under car seats, in boots, everywhere. Added to this is the regional context with the M23 rebel movement (supported by Rwanda, according to several reports) at the gates of Bujumbura, the economic capital of Burundi. The rebels already control the city of Bukavu, in addition to Goma, the respective capitals of South and North Kivu, which form the eastern province of the DRC. Bukavu is only a four-hour drive from Bujumbura. The Burundian regime, whose diplomatic relations with Rwanda have been abysmal for almost ten years, fears that the war in eastern DRC will spill over onto its soil. The threat is the biggest since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of Burundians fled into exile following the decision of Pierre Nkurunziza (who died in 2020) to run for a third term, and the political crisis that ensued. Rwanda took in a large number of the refugees. Since then, the Burundian regime has constantly accused Kigali of harbouring rebels who want to overthrow it.
Young people, the main target
Curiously, it is not only weapons that are sought after. Beer is targeted as well, surprisingly enough. But not just any beer: Primus and/or Amstel, products of Brarudi, the country’s largest and oldest brewery. Just like fuel, finding Brarudi beer is like looking for a needle in a haystack. What was once the drink of ‘Everyman’ for decades, the most accessible even in the remotest corners of the country, has become a luxury product that can only be found in the country’s major hotels. And the state has taken on the difficult task of regulating the distribution of products that are in short supply. “The fuel shortage will have an impact on the election results, because what little fuel there is goes to the ruling party for campaigning. The same is true for beer”, said a journalist who followed the election campaign. “In Bururi, in the south of the country, I went to a bar to buy a beer, very close to where the CNDD-FDD was holding a meeting. I was told that all the drinks available in the entire locality had been taken by the ruling party.”
Brarudi, the country’s largest taxpayer (with an estimated 68 billion Burundian francs in taxes in 2024, or more than 21 million dollars), announced last year that it was running out of malt, an essential raw material for the production of its beverages, due to a “lack of foreign currency”, the brewery explained. Burundi, currently ranked as the second poorest country in the world just ahead of South Sudan, relied on international aid as its main source of foreign currency, mainly from the European Union. This support ended in 2016 following the regime’s refusal to engage in dialogue with its opponents. Burundi is now characterised by a volatile political context (undermined by internal wars between its powerful generals), a national economy in dire straits (87 percent of the population living on less than 1.90 USD per day according to the World Bank) and problems of good governance — including cases of large-scale corruption and embezzlement, the exact extent of which is still unknown (at the end of 2023, when he was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting a coup d’état, it was revealed that Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni, the former Prime Minister, owned nearly 150 houses in Bujumbura alone). Evariste Ndayishimiye’s regime now seems to face a double risk: national economic collapse and its own political collapse.
For the population, the stakes go beyond economic survival, as explained by an analyst who requested anonymity: “Burundians are used to living on what little they have. Burundi has never been a developed country with all the abundance that goes with it, but this has never been seen as the end of the world by the local population. Today, the big challenge is that the country is becoming increasingly unliveable. There is no hope for the future for young people who are fleeing the country in droves. Not so long ago, it was inconceivable to see a man with grandchildren leaving his family behind and leaving the country. Burundians are very attached to their families. Unfortunately, the fabric of family life is increasingly being torn apart. The regime has infiltrated everything, right down to the family unit. People are suffering, but they cannot talk about it, not even at home. Espionage has reached into households.”
A historic school dropout rate of 70 percent
“Young people fleeing the country in all directions” is perhaps the most worrying trend for the future of this small East African country of 13 million inhabitants, 65 percent of whom are under the age of 25. The exodus has not stopped since the bloody crackdown against opposition to Pierre Nkurunziza’s third term ten years ago. Today, the major regional capitals, Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi, are teeming with young Burundians — sometimes children. Last February, two local media outlets devoted a special edition to raising the alarm about a historic school dropout rate of 70 percent, citing the “more than 4,500 students” who dropped out in just three months in a single province, Kayanza (northern Burundi), during the 2024-2025 school year. These same young people, even minors, who no longer believe in what school can offer them (in Burundi, it is said that a membership card for the ruling party is now worth more than a diploma), now wander as far as the rural hills of Kenya, sometimes without any legal papers, selling peanuts and doughnuts to passers-by. One of them explained: “This business at least allows us to send something to our families who live in unspeakable poverty in Burundi.” He claimed to be able to send at least 3,000 Kenyan shillings per month, more than 150,000 Burundian francs (about 23 USD, which is more than some civil servants in Burundi earn). Young girls are sent to Arab countries via intermediary agencies, some of which are owned by officials from the ruling party. Tens of thousands more young people, most of them from wealthier families, have migrated to Europe via Serbia (Voice of America reported 20,000 departures between January and October 2022). Thousands of unemployed doctors have fled to find work in neighbouring countries. Burundi had 0.1 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants in 2020, ten times less than the minimum recommended by the World Health Organisation.
During the election campaign, faced with widespread poverty, the Burundian president had to bring out the heavy artillery to try to convince the crowds: on the 15th of May, he guaranteed one million francs to every Burundian within two years. He was in Gitega, his home town. In fact, that “one million Burundian francs” (roughly 150 dollars) in two years’ time may have lost more than twice its current value if the economy continues to deteriorate. Will the promise even be kept? In 2020, when he took power, he used almost the same words, promising “money in every pocket”. Five years later, should Burundians still believe him? The country seems to need relief more than promises.
