Rwanda Confirmed Its Only Music Royalty Collector Was Shut Down in April 2025. Fifteen Months Later, Its Own Record Shows No Successor Has Collected a Royalty.

Rwanda confirmed in April 2025 that it no longer has a working music royalty collector. In the eighteen months since, the government has passed a new intellectual property law, consulted artists on a replacement body, and told a roundtable in Kigali that the legal order creating that body has been published. No source found by this desk, through the most recent dated reporting available, says that replacement has registered a member, set a tariff, or paid a single Rwandan franc to an artist.

What RSAU was, and what it never managed to do

The Rwanda Society of Authors was the country’s first and, until it closed, only collective management organisation: the body that collects royalties for public performance and broadcast use of music, the revenue stream that exists separately from streaming payouts and record sales. It was registered in 2010 with government backing and a grant from NORCODE, the Norwegian Copyright Development Association. The New Times, reporting directly from Rwandan officials at the time, put RSAU’s total startup budget at more than Rwf83 million: Rwf15 million from the Rwandan government, over Rwf27.4 million already disbursed by NORCODE, and a further 300,000 Norwegian Krone, worth roughly Rwf41 million, promised over three years.

Enforcement did not begin until 2017, when the Rwanda Development Board started requiring businesses that play recorded music, hotels, bars, restaurants and radio stations, to pay royalties through RSAU under Rwanda’s then-governing 2009 intellectual property law. RSAU, under chief executive Nadine Bwiza, set tariffs scaled to business size and revenue (hospitality venues under 300 square metres paid Rwf336,000 a year under a later-cited figure) and registered 460 musicians. The model was borrowed from Botswana’s COSOTA on the advice of that body’s own chief executive.

The record that followed is the one the Rwandan government itself now cites as the reason RSAU no longer exists. Across thirteen years of operation, RSAU distributed royalties to artists exactly three times: Rwf8 million shared among 80 musicians in 2019 (Rwf100,000 each), Rwf18 million in 2021, and Rwf24 million in 2023, split between Rwandan and foreign rights holders. One music producer, quoted anonymously by The New Times, said he received Rwf12,000 in 2023 despite having registered his copyright and had his music played on radio and in public venues: “I tried to understand how my royalties were calculated, but no one could give me a clear answer. It felt like RSAU either didn’t know what it was doing or simply didn’t care.” The musician and broadcaster known as Uncle Austin said he had separately considered legal action after unidentified third parties deducted portions of his royalty payments with no explanation given.

The confirmation, and what came next

Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and Arts, Jean-Nepo Abdallah Utumatwishima, confirmed RSAU’s dissolution after an April 22, 2025 session with parliament’s committee on education, technology, culture, sports and youth. The New Times reported his statement on April 25: a new, legally independent artists’ body would be created by law, alongside two further steps, a ministerial decree on how artists’ works are protected and a Collective Management Organisation, or CMO, built specifically to collect the public-performance royalties RSAU had failed to distribute at scale. Utumatwishima said the predecessor body’s status had been under review for some time, and that efforts to grant it legal independence had proved difficult, without detailing what that meant in practice.

Rwanda had, by then, already replaced the legal foundation RSAU operated under. Law N° 055/2024 on the Protection of Intellectual Property, signed on June 20, 2024 and in force from July 31, 2024, repealed the 2009 law. It was controversial from the outset on a separate point: Rwanda Music Federation president Intore Tuyisenge argued that Articles 297 to 301, which let government bodies, schools and religious institutions use creative works without consent or payment in defined circumstances, could undermine gains the music industry had made, while another industry voice, cited as Ekongolo, countered that the exceptions were narrow and covered under 20 percent of public performances. Minister Utumatwishima said the government would work with relevant authorities to review Article 301. Nothing found in this inquiry confirms whether that review changed the article’s text.

A published order, and a parliament that says implementation is weak

The clearest evidence of where things stand by late 2026 comes from two government statements issued three days apart, and they do not agree on what has actually happened.

On July 3, 2026, Rwanda Development Board chief executive Jean-Guy Afrika told a Ministry of Youth and Arts roundtable on creative-industry monetisation, convened with the Ministry of ICT and Innovation, the Rwanda Convention Bureau and the Office of the Government Spokesperson, that the government “has published the Collective Management Organisations (CMO) Ministerial Order” and that RDB was strengthening its Intellectual Property Office to operationalise it, a statement carried on the Ministry of Defence’s own news channel. Earlier in the year, a MINICOM newsroom notice describing a government consultation with artists over the same instrument had called it a draft, “currently under development,” meant to support the 2024 law.

Three days after Afrika’s statement, on July 6, 2026, parliament’s committee on education, technology, culture, sports and youth, chaired by MP Emma Rubagumya Furaha with deputy chair Balinda Rutebuka presenting the findings, told a different story. The committee’s report on Rwanda’s 2015 National Cultural Heritage Policy welcomed the 2024 intellectual property law and “a ministerial order on the collection and distribution of royalties” that Cabinet had approved in March 2026, then stated plainly that implementation of these reforms “remains weak” and called for Rwanda to “establish effective collective management organisations or mechanisms” so creators could benefit from commercial use of their work. A separate account of the same week’s parliamentary pressure, reported by a Nairobi-based outlet, quoted Minister of Trade and Industry Prudence Sebahizi describing intellectual property protection as “an economic imperative, not merely a cultural courtesy” and named Rwanda Arts Council president Niragire Marie France and MOYA permanent secretary Ngabo Brave Olivier as having taken part in consultations on a Ministerial Order that report described as still being finalised, not published.

Both sets of officials are describing the same instrument. One calls it published and says the job now is to operationalise it. The other, in the same week, describes an order Cabinet approved months earlier as something parliament still needs to see enforced. Neither account states that the CMO has registered a single member, collected a tariff from a single venue, or distributed a single royalty payment. This desk could not locate the Ministerial Order’s own text in Rwanda’s official gazette archive to resolve which characterisation is accurate, and no reporting dated after July 6, 2026 was found describing the CMO as operational.

What this means for artists and for anyone assessing the market

For a Rwandan musician, the practical consequence has not changed since RSAU closed: there is currently no domestic body collecting the broadcast and public-performance royalties that, in most functioning music markets, make up a meaningful share of a working artist’s income separate from streaming. Streaming royalties, paid directly by platforms such as Spotify and YouTube per play, are unaffected by any of this and continue regardless of whether a Rwandan CMO exists. What does not exist is the mechanism that would pay an artist when their song plays on the radio, in a hotel lobby, or in a bar, the exact revenue RSAU was built, and then failed, to collect at any meaningful scale.

For a label, distributor or investor assessing Rwanda as a market, the distinction that matters is between a law and an institution. Rwanda now has an intellectual property statute that is more current than most in the region, and, on the Rwanda Development Board’s own account, a ministerial order that creates the legal shell for a collection society. It does not yet have, on any evidence found here, a functioning collecting body with members, tariffs or a payment history. Treating the published order as equivalent to an operating CMO would be the same category error this desk has flagged in a similar Tunisian levy and a Congolese collecting-society dispute: a government committing to a mechanism on paper is not the same fact as money moving through it. Until a tariff is actually collected from a venue and a royalty actually reaches an artist’s account, the honest description of Rwanda’s public-performance royalty system is that it does not yet have one.