VIDEO: To keep Rwanda clean, govt detains vendors, prostitutes, beggars, call them 'Undesirables'

Rwanda’s capital Kigali, is known as the cleanest and tidiest city in Africa. Sex workers, street children, beggars, street vendors, are rarely seen on the streets.

They are always on the lookout for the police and ready to pack up their goods at a moment’s notice.

As we’re finding out, this is because of a deliberate practice by the Rwanda National Police of rounding up those termed as “undesirable.”

They are then taken to a place called Gikondo Transit Center, located at a suburb of Kigali, where they would be detained.

The government calls it a Transit Center for re-education and rehabilitation, but inmates are subjected to all kinds of human rights abuses, including starvation, lack of medical care, poor hygiene conditions that render many sick, before they’re released back to the streets.

Usually with orders to leave the capital so they’ll stop being a menace. This is why many describe it as a prison.

Apart from prostitutes and beggars, Gikondo also house thousands of genocide prisoners, political prisoners, protesters, and those the government has labeled as not willing to confess.

The prison built in the 1930s was meant to house a few thousand inmates, but at the end of the genocide, the population jumped to more than 50,000. Today, there are more than 90,000 undesired Rwandans in Gikondo.

Many of the inmates are not tried in court, yet they are detained. There is no lawful basis for depriving the majority of Gikondo’s detainees of their liberty, especially with no judicial body regulating their detention.

The video below shows family members bringing food for their loved ones in Gikondo.