Draft:Tribert Rujugiro Ayabatwa

Tribert Rujugiro Ayabatwa is a Rwandan entrepreneur and tobacco manufacturer.

Early life
Ayabatwa never knew when exactly was he born but estimates that he was born in the early 1940s. He was born in Rwanda and at age 12 he lost his mother to illness. At 16 he was expelled from school by the colonial administration when he was doing Grade 8 and had to fend for himself after that. When the colonial administration continued to ferment ethnic tensions between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi, the latter to which Ayabatwa belonged, he fled home as he saw no future in Rwanda. He left to live in neighbouring Burundi as a refugee at the age of 19

Employment
Ayabatwa started as a worker in Burundi in 1960, working for the Regional Post office that serviced communications between Rwanda and Burundi. He left this job and went to work for a petroleum-storage company, rising through the ranks to occupy a manager's position at around the age of 22.

Business career
Ayabatwa's first business was a pickup truck he bought and hired a driver to transport people and goods with. From 1968 and 1978, Ayabatwa found business a viable option and at age 29 he started a bakery while in Burundi, with shops and supermarkets ordering his breads and soon he began importing wheat, flour and salt from neighbouring countries to sell in Burundi. When armed conflicts in Tanzania disturbed his salt business, Ayabatwa found routes in territories controlled by rebels to continue the import to Burundi.

In 1974, he began importing cigarettes from Tanzania to Burundi and subsequently formed Burundi Tobacco Company, a manufacturing plant and another in Democratic Republic of Congo. Ayabatwa lost the Burundi plant when President Pierre Buyoya nationalised it and imprisoned him for three years in 1987, accusing him of funding his political opponents. He was a known funder for the Rwanda Patriotic Front which operated in exile in Burundi to fight to bring change in Rwanda and which fought Burundi President Juvénal Habyarimana. Fleeing from prison, Ayabatwa arrived in South Africa in 1990 - starting from scratch in a foreign country - and established Mastermind Tobacco South Africa (Pty) Ltd in East London, which built up a manufacturing plant that produced cheap cigarettes brands like Yes and Forum from the province of Eastern Cape and supplied across South Africa.

He grew in business to establishing the Pan African Tobacco Group (PTG), until his retirement in 2013 and left the company to elder son Paul Nkwaya and younger son Richard Rujugiro.

Legal battles
He was fined R250-million in 2009 by a South African High Court for defrauding the South African Revenue Service. The imposed fine was suspended for 5 years on condition that Ayabatwa swiftly pay the South African government R57-million in punishments for defrauding the tax institution, after Ayabatwa falsely represented tax payments.

Ayabatwa never had a good relationship with any of the leaders that ruled Rwanda, his country of birth. His shopping complex in Rwanda, the Union Trade Centre, worth around $20million and the biggest in the country, was seized by Paul Kagame's government in 2015 and was declared an "abandoned property" because its owner, Ayabatwa, lives outside Rwanda, following a fallout with Kagame. Two years later the Kagame's government sold the mall at an outrageous auction for US$8 million, which was more than half its value. Ayabatwa went to court and in August 2022 the East African Court of Justice ruled in his favour; that the seizure of his mall was illegal. But before their fallout, Kagame and Ayabatwa were very close friends. Kagame's sister married Ayabatwa's cousin and Kagame's mother was reportedly taken care of by Ayabatwa while exiled in Burundi after President Milton Obote expelled all Rwandan refugees from Uganda.