Book excerpt: Rwanda’s Stillborn Middle-Income Economy shows how Rwanda’s head of state, Paul Kagame, and his international backers, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jim Yong Kim, and the World Bank failed to create prosperity in Rwanda, their claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Vision 2020, under which Rwanda was to become a middle-income economy, was a fiasco. Rwanda remains appallingly poor, unable to provide food security for its people. The book offers a lens into the Rwandan ruler’s manipulative power by examining a range of false or dubious proclamations and the myriad ways in which he misled the world into believing that he had turned Rwanda into a prosperous African nation. The book also reveals how Western politicians such as Clinton and Blair ruthlessly promote themselves while immorally benefiting from fighting poverty in countries such as Rwanda. Clinton and Blair need Kagame, just as Kagame needs them. They are in mutually beneficial relationships of opportunism and greed in which poverty is a valuable commodity.