Prime
Uganda after Museveni and NRM: Part II
Ugandans expect better freedom of movement and expression after Museveni is gone.
What you need to know:
Continuing from last week where this writer anticipated what Uganda will be like after the rule of President Yoweri Museveni, today we look at what these last 26 years have done to Ugandan society.
Based on the image of principle and revolutionary that the NRM government projected in 1986, there are not many people then who would have expected that the NRM would still be in power to this day.
Also, when the NRM took power in 1986 most of the state structure inherited at independence in 1986 was intact. Ugandans took for granted that they should have a nationally owned airline, railway and commercial bank.
It was assumed that hospitals and schools owned by the government would receive the first priority of the government. It was assumed that civil servants and other officials who worked for the government or its related corporations would live in houses built decades ago by the government.
It was assumed that the army would be housed in good barracks and have its own efficient transport system and soldiers’ children, just as it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, would enjoy a decent middle class or lower middle-class life.
Of course, for the prestige of the country, not only was it important to have a national airline but it was taken for granted that any normal country should have a string of embassies and diplomatic missions around the world to handle the country’s political, military, commercial and cultural interests.
It being Africa, many would not have been surprised that Museveni would wish to cling onto power or would want to dominate the political stage. Even reports of election rigging would not have entirely shocked Ugandans or watchers of Uganda.
Disappointed citizens
But what was taken for granted was that the NRM would be better in public administration, delivery of social services and accountability for public funds and property than any of its predecessors with the exception of the first Obote government in the 1960s.
Given the above assumptions, most Ugandans alive and of age in 1986 would have expected that all these institutions that even the governments headed by the semi-literate Tito Okello and Idi Amin had been important enough to maintain, would either crumble to ruins, be sold off or stolen under the NRM government, the one viewed as being led by some of the best-educated men and women in Uganda’s post-independence history.
Very few people indeed would have expected in 1986 that the NRM would prove to be not only by far the most corrupt government in Uganda’s history but one of the 20 most corrupt in the entire history of Africa since the start of the independence wave in the late 1950s.
The bitter reality of what has happened is one of the most important effects the NRM has had on Ugandan history.
The second effect has been on the way the population views the military. Because the army, from the days of the Kings African Rifles in the 1940s until 1986 had been dominated by tribes from the north and north-east regions of Uganda, the southern and central tribes had come to assume a stereotype about northerners as being somehow genetically inclined to violence and brutality.
The now very public stories, TV footage and newspaper photographs of the NRA (now UPDF) beating up, shooting, raping, setting granaries on fire, torturing opposition supporters and leaders in safe houses has caused the old stereotype to get revised.
Now an army is viewed as an army, no matter its ethnic composition.
By 2011, this great disillusionment with the NRM and with President Museveni had started showing itself in patterns in national elections with opposition candidates taking over places considered to be NRM strongholds.
These telling victories by the unlikeliest of candidates reveal the new understanding Ugandans now have of their history and nation since 1986, and how much they have had to come to terms with what befell them.
After the Museveni government one day goes, the post-NRM Uganda will be a different one in the “fundamental change” sense that Museveni declared at his swearing-in in January 1986.
Most likely, there will be a public outcry for a repossession of some, if not most, of the state-owned corporations that the NRM sold off to foreign “investors” or NRM leaders sold to themselves.
The national political mood after Museveni is gone will incline toward social democracy, if not a downright state-led economy. Whoever succeeds Museveni, if he or she is not from within the NRM, will have to placate the public anger and hope to win widespread national support by doing some of what Idi Amin did in 1972 - announce a Ugandanisation or re-Ugandanisation of the economy.
As mentioned last week, so great will be the resentment against western Uganda by the rest of the population that only the absolutely most honest and deserving westerners will win government tenders, scholarships and contracts for the next 20 years.
Western against other regions
In interviews or bids, even if someone from western Uganda scores 75 per cent and the runner-up from, say, eastern or northern Uganda scores 69 per cent, the pressure and overwhelming public opinion will be that the job or contract or tender or scholarship should be given to the one who scored 68 per cent.
Ugandans will start to respect their national assets much more after the departure of Museveni, now that they have had the bitter experience of seeing what they took for granted, taken away from them.
Right now in 2012, there is still a good deal of complacency within Ugandan society and it is clear that not all the lessons that need to be learnt have been learnt.
However, at the present rate and from the trend that the country is taking, in which public land is being grabbed by the acre every single day, billions of shillings stolen daily, the true “fundamental change” is going to set into society over the next five years.
But 2016, Uganda will be in an acute and desperate state of mind. To have driven Ugandan society to that state of total despair, total loss of faith in the NRM and in educated people who can’t respect the law and who loot with impunity, will be the ironical lesson Museveni will have bequeathed Ugandans.
The Italian historian Benedetto Croce, in his 1932 book History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, in which he examined that tumultuous century in European affairs, painted a picture of a political climate not unlike what we see in Uganda today in 2012.
He wrote on page 202, of an atmosphere of “mental restrictions, compromises, and fears and terrors and desertion of friends and cowardly denunciations, insensibility to the violation of justice and to daily wrongs, the pretence of not seeing and knowing, in order to silence the pangs of conscience, what everyone saw and knew perfectly well, ignorance concerning the conduct of public affairs with accompanying and ceaseless whispering of scandals, supine applause for every statement or assertion coming from above and at the same time incredulity for all news of an official character; and in the midst of this general timidity, the boldness of the bold in taking fortune by storm, the readiness to seize private advantages or to satisfy private hates under the semblance of political zeal…”
Local angle
That passage alone is one of the best descriptions of the current Uganda as almost being submerged in primitive 19th century political intrigue, and Croce summed up the broader reason for why a society can sometimes sink to this level: “Liberty is a divine gift, and the gods sometimes take it away from men, who are eternal children, and remain deaf to their supplications, and do not give it back until they have once more become worthy of it.” (page 203)
Yoweri Museveni, the man who has done the most to destroy the infrastructural foundation of the country is going to be the man, by these very actions, who will give Ugandans the desperation of circumstance to really undertake deep soul searching and out of that soul searching, will emerge a new, much more sober nation.
If these 26 years and counting - some would say 50 years - have been a divine punishment, then let us drink of the bitter cup of hemlock until our lesson has been learned.
