Kieran Holmes is the first Commissioner General of the new Office Burundais des Recettes. As I look out my office window directly above the beautiful Lake Tanganyika, with the mountains of Congo barely visible through the haze, I am reminded of the words of William Butler Yeats written about another, very different, lake. I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core. Of course Yeats was writing from the point of view of an Irish emigrant in London remembering the lake waters of Lough Gill - a lake I happen to know very well having spent my youth in Sligo. While I am not an emigrant, having spent four years in Burundi leading the new revenue authority, I can't help wondering in these last few days of my mandate, whether the sight and sounds of Lake Tanganyika will similarly resonate with me when I am very far away. It was late 2010, but it seems like only yesterday, that colleagues and I marked exam papers in the basement of my home in Kiriri. We had sought to recruit 425 [...]
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