First Ladies host Prayer Breakfast

By Ivan R. Mugisha

Women in leadership should take family responsibilities seriously and become vehicles of social and family values that are essential for the sustainability of future generations, the First Lady, Jeanette Kagame, told the Rwanda Women Leaders’ Prayer Breakfast yesterday.

First Lady Jeannette Kagame(R) with her Ugandan counterpart Janet Museveni arrive at Serena Hotel for the Prayer Breakfast yesterday. The New Times / Timothy Kisambira.

The Prayer Breakfast, held at Kigali Serena Hotel, was hosted by Mrs Kagame, with Mrs Janet Museveni, First Lady of Uganda, as the guest speaker.

Also present were wives of American Senators, guests from Jordan, Burundi and Uganda, as well as hundreds of Rwandan women leaders.

Quoting from the Bible, Mrs Kagame challenged women leaders to use their God-given attributes to promote their families by raising their children morally and providing support to their husbands, as well asbecome mirror before which societies see themselves.

“Leadership, it is said, comes from God. Our pact with God, therefore, is to be the best that we can be. Our leadership must be a reflection of God’s values and in the absence of such godly values, the question begs whether that leadership is legitimately from God,”

Mrs. Kagame said.

“When I speak of leadership, I do not only speak of government, church, intellectual or economic authority; I speak of people who influence the world by their works, like Mother Teresa or Martin

Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi and many others like them. They were not rich or powerful but through the work they did, they touched lives and influenced people’s attitudes in ways that are beyond

comprehension.”

She urged the women leaders to use their powerful positions to serve other than wait to be served by the people they lead.

“We must be led by the spirit of servant hood like Jesus who bent at his disciples’s feet and washed them. Literally, it is hard to imagine but metaphorically what this means is using our podium of influence and importance to serve others diligently, to feed them before we feed

ourselves and our families.

“It means sacrificing for the greater good of humanity and of the nation.

Anything less is false modesty and fraud,” she said.

The First Lady of Uganda, Mrs Janet Museveni urged Africa to persist against influences that “seek to destroy the family setting as it was defined by God.”

“The family matters in Africa; a mother and a father raising their children in a God-fearing and upright way. Unfortunately these days, people are trying to redefine a family by saying that a man and a man,

or a woman and a woman, can start up a family,” Mrs Museveni said, adding: “If we go against God and introduce these strange family models, true family values will surely get extinct.”

She urged women to jealously guard their families, protect and provide for their children in order to build a society that can stand for many generations.

The Prayer Breakfast concluded with a prayer for peace and end of poverty in Africa.

Source The New Times