Venuste Nshimiyimana

Vénuste Nshimiyimana is a Rwandan-born Belgian journalist and radio-TV presenter for the BBC. He is a presenter of the daily News TV bulletin programme (BBC Info) and the weekly news roundup for BBC Hebdo. He is a senior BBC team manager editorially responsible for BBC Afrique’s TV output.

Vénuste was born in 1973 in Gishamvu sector of Nyumba district in Southern Province of Rwanda and attended Nyumba Primary school, then The Nyakibanda Major Seminary. A graduate of The Open University, where he received a Master's degree in social sciences, he also attended Anglia Ruskin University from 2016-2017, receiving a Postgraduate diploma in marketing and studied international humanitarian law at the London School of Economics.

In April 1994, when the genocide against Tutsi started, Vénuste who was living in the capital city of Kigali took refuge in the compound of a school known as ETO (Ecole technique officielle Don Bosco) hoping to escape the massacre. He witnessed how the UN peacekeepers, made up of Belgians, French and Italian soldiers, abandoned all the refugees to the mercy of the thugs Interahamwe while saving only those with foreign nationalities

Venuste began his journalistic career as a trainee for the Rwanda Television in Brussels (1991). He worked for Radio Rwanda in 1992 before moving to the African Union as a Press officer seconded to the Neutral Military Observer Group. In 1993, he moved to the United Nations as a public information officer for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) working with the UN Special Representative to the Secretary-General (SRSG) and the UN army commander. In 1994, he moved to Belgium and freelanced as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. He also served as the Editor of Radio Amahoro, set up by a Coalition of European NGO’s as a response to the exodus of Rwandan to DRC and Tanzania. In September 1997, Venuste moved to London as a Producer and broadcast journalist for the BBC and later worked as Regional Planning Editor for BBC Africa.

Venuste, a multi-lingual journalist, worked for diverse radio and TV teams across the BBC Africa department as editor, planning editor and senior journalist team manager. He was in charge of the coverage planning of various events such as the London Olympic Games in July 2012, Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013 and the US presidential election Obama’s second term in 2012. He also worked as Africa & Middle East editorial coordinator to change the narrative about Africa in the news coverage.For the past 15 years, Venuste has covered the Middle East and has developed an interest in the area. He was in Iraq, reporting for the BBC, in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in May 2003.

Vénuste gave a BBC interview with Jean Kambanda, the former Prime Minister in the caretaker government of Rwanda at the start of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the first person convicted under the 1948 Genocide Convention since it came into effect in 1951, currently jailed in Koulikoro Prison in Mali. This created a controversy between BBC and the government of Rwanda which lead to the closure of the Kinyarwanda/Kirundi programme “BBC Gahuzamiryango” coverage in Rwanda

With his book, Prelude du genocide rwandais, Enquête sur les circonstances politiques et militaires du meurtre du président Habyarimana (Prelude to Rwandan genocide, investigation into the political and military circumstances of the murder of President Habyarimana), Vénuste became the first writer to establish a relation between the assassination of President Habyarimana and the 1994 genocide against Tutsi and moderate Hutus. Vénuste's goal, in his book, was to provide facts that help better understand the immediate political environment that preceded the Rwandan tragedy. While question marks inevitably remain, his investigation contributed to a better understanding of this crucial period in Rwanda's history .

Vénuste was among the 40 participants of the conference table, International Decision-Making in the Age of Genocide: Rwanda 1990-1994 Conference in The Hague, June 1 – June 3, 2014, including former members of the United Nations Security Council, the leadership of UNAMIR, diplomats stationed in Kigali, the architects of the Arusha peace accords, NGO representatives, journalists and scholars. The conference focused on the breakdown in the accords and the failure of the international community to either prevent the genocide or protect hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians once the mass killing started in April 1994