Is Uganda moving toward a unified party state?

Election fever is here; as Daudi Ochieng (RIP) once said in preamble to the motion censuring prime minister Milton Obote, “with a mass of great weight”! Are the recent orchestrations against Opposition attempts to consult their supporters not moving the country towards a one party State?
Neither over-reliance on coercive methods nor disobedience have never created the conducive environment necessary for peace and tranquillity.

Non-coercive efforts produce better results. Co-optation of credible opponents and mediation by eminent stakeholders such as religious and cultural leaders, negotiation and reconciliation have never been superseded in that respect.

Guinean leader Sékou Touré once argued that “…the mode of election of representatives can only be raised to the level of the nation by instituting constitutionally the election of deputies (MPs) on a national list whereby (as Dr Obote in his ‘4 plus 1’ electoral reforms proposed in his infamous Nakivubo Pronouncements) a deputy has to be mandated by the nation as a whole and has no other concern than to better serve the national interests without allowing himself to be influenced” by other considerations and that “the party is the basis of the legitimacy of all other institutions;…. it is the nation.

Therefore, it must be one”, which would’ve perhaps been alright if he hadn’t defined opposition as ‘illegitimate’.

His Senegalese counterpart Leopold Senghor acknowledged the legitimacy of opposition but with absolute naivety warned, “The opposition must pursue the same goal as the majority party…..While we must condemn the single party, does it mean also that we must abandon the Unified Party, i.e., the hope of rallying the Opposition to our national idea?”

He differentiated the ‘Unified Party’ from the ‘Single Party’ with the explanation that the former was inclusive rather than exclusive which is not true. Membership to the top echelons of such ‘vanguard parties’ tended to be limited to ‘those who fought’; or measured by how much those who didn’t contributed in material, financial and/or moral support to ‘the struggle’; even though they attempted to neutralize opponents through incorporation rather than eliminate them.

If it had been soccer, Ghanaian leader and Pan-Africanism’s icon Kwameh Nkrumah wouldn’t have been ruled offside because he played an unconventional game on a round field when he argued that his party was, “the uniting force that guides and pilots the nation and is the nerve centre of the positive operations in the struggle for African irredentism. Its supremacy cannot be challenged. The CPP is Ghana and Ghana is the CPP”.

In what scholar Aristide Zolberg with typical academic cynicism called “blunt honesty”, Nkrumahists rendered a new dimension to Nkrumahism when they blurted, “Ghana is the CPP, but the CPP is the Leader” the conclusion being “Nkrumah is Ghana”!

The formation of a personality cult around a leader was part of the Pan-African ideology which, whilst hyping the weaknesses of Africa’s ancient kingdoms and chiefdoms, remained conspicuously incommunicado when the African dictators of the yesteryears developed monarchical tendencies!

The one-party ideology, with localised variations, spread throughout Africa and constituted the Pan-African ideology that authoritarian leaders used to entrench themselves in power. Mightn’t pessimists alluding to an attempt steering the NRM towards Senghor’s concept of a ‘Unified Party’ have a point?

Touting an obsolete Pan-Africanist ideology and co-optation of inconsequential opponents; alleged orchestration of legal, social and political pressure on those who resist [Pingamizi]; and misfeasance of preventing open discussion in the name of enforcing POMA, makes pundits wonder whether Uganda isn’t dangerously levitating towards the ‘Unified Party’ the West Africans, president Milton Obote [between 1967 to 1971] and NRM experimented on when everybody was co-opted into the ‘Movement’. Who is spot-on? The pessimists, self-styled do-gooders or the latter-day Nkrumahists?

British Statesman Winston Churchill would have advised that, “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope”. Many Ugandans concur.

Mr Baligidde teaches at UMU.
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