Governments, like clerics, balance good acts against bad ones in a moral balance sheet. This calculus governs international relations. The leaders of Kenya and Uganda, for example, know that participation in the bloody fight against the jihadists of Al Shabaab in Somalia wins indulgences from Western powers, the United States in particular, who are reluctant to send their own troops into battle in Africa. In President Yoweri Museveni’s case it buys near silence on his government's crackdown on the opposition and new homophobic laws. In Kenya's case, Western powers quickly shifted from a position of 'minimal contacts ' with President Uhuru Kenyatta because of the charges against him at the International Criminal Court to a level of security and intelligence cooperation in northern and coastal Kenya that reminds some of the trade-offs during the Cold War.

Rwanda is the country with the biggest deposit on the moral credit side of the balance sheet since the 1994 genocide after Britain, France and the USA on the United Nations Security Council drafted the resolution for the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers at the height of the killing. This has hitherto inoculated Kigali against public censure, let alone sanctions, for direct and indirect interventions in Congo-Kinshasa and a comprehensive and sometimes murderous clampdown on political dissidence at home and abroad. The approach that Rwanda’s leaders adopt is not to ease up on the debit side, but to add more moral credits to the other side. They are doing this by sending their highly trained troops as peacekeepers to Central African Republic, having won praise for their work in Darfur, Sudan: Mali is their next mission. When President Paul Kagame's second constitutional term expires in 2017, should he find it necessary to stay on for 'security reasons', he can expect a clear signal from the West: a deafening silence.