Rwandan President Paul Kagame said on Thursday that the way powerful nations treat Africa mirrors the logic of nepotism, where rulers of old handed territories to relatives and allies to control and exploit and called on African leaders and business executives to stop accepting that arrangement.

President Kagame made the remarks during a session at the 2026 Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, the continent’s largest annual private sector gathering, which opened on Thursday, May 14, at the Kigali Convention Centre. The two-day event brought together approximately 2,800 participants from more than 70 countries, including several heads of state, chief executives, and investors.

“In the old days, the kings and so on and so forth used to give their in-laws, their children, powers to say, go and control something somewhere,” President Kagame said. “And that’s happening today here. They just give somebody a say, go and get whatever you want to and do whatever you want to do in that region. That is how Africa is treated.”

President Kagame directed his criticism at external powers he described as arriving on the continent with lectures on governance while simultaneously extracting its wealth. “These powers you see that come here lecturing people on democracy, human rights, they are doing it with one arm, and with the other, they are just taking away everything that people own,” he said.

He called on African heads of state, chief executives, and citizens present at the forum to reject that dynamic. “We need to give ourselves value of some kind. We can’t just be people who are waiting to be ripped off by somebody who is shrewd enough and has the power to come. No, we must be able to say no.”

President Kagame addressed the use of sanctions as a coercive instrument, drawing on Rwanda’s own experience. “Sanctions are used as a method to get countries to capitulate. Are you going to capitulate? I never capitulated in a worse situation,” he said, adding that while sanctions are designed to inflict pain, the calculation was straightforward. “It costs more to say yes to the wrong thing.”

He closed with a longer-term argument, saying those who had been positioned to exploit the continent would not outlast the consequences of their actions. “Even those who have been given the gift of messing us up, one day they will not live long enough to see the gains from exploiting people or doing unjust things.”

President Kagame urged African countries to act together. “Each one of us, countries in Africa, and mainly and most importantly together, there is a lot we can do to raise Africa to the level where it should be,” he said.

The 2026 Africa CEO Forum is running under the theme “Scale or Fail: Why Africa Must Embrace Shared Ownership.” It is the third time Rwanda has hosted the event, following previous editions in 2019 and 2024. The forum was founded by Jeune Afrique Media Group and is co-hosted by the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group.