O-Level grades are great to have but swamps are slippery spaces

It is a silly argument, but one inserted into the public domain by a very clever person. Inserted, I say, because as soon as the debate kicked off, the public record on Parliament’s website was changed to create a discrepancy between the MP’s stated and recorded dates of birth, and therefore, the whole provenance of his academic standing.

This kind of political mischief is not new. In the 1996 election, Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere, the Democratic Party candidate, wasted valuable time and political capital denying false allegations that he was a mere trojan horse paving the way for the return of Milton Obote, then said to be waiting in Kisumu. 

What looked like a mere distraction proved fatal to Ssemogereres political career. By also positioning DP as being in cahoots with the disliked Obote and his Uganda People’s Congress, it loosened the party’s grip on the Buganda vote in ways that put it in limbo and continue to manifest themselves today in the confusion inside the party.  

The current academic debate is a similar distraction. First, those demanding to see the incumbent’s papers are not only responding predictably by volunteering to a mud-wrestling contest; they also reveal, in their questions, their own ignorance. They have clearly not read Mr Museveni’s undergraduate thesis from the University of Dar es Salaam and, therefore, not understood the man.

Secondly, they repeat a long-standing error of equating time spent in school and the subsequent attainment of some academic rating or the other with competence and the ability to govern or lead. This is not a congenital flaw; rather it is a symptom of gene-editing that presents after sufficient exposure to a colonial education system built to produce unthinking clerks, typists and other low-voltage bureaucrats.

Thus, a lot of the incompetence around and in us is often because we went to school, not because we didn’t. A bad education, especially of the dogmatic type that closes one’s mind to the exploration of alternative views and thoughts, even without necessarily agreeing with them, is probably worse than no formal education at all.

The movement that Bobi Wine represents presents itself as one comprising outsiders seeking to agitate the political establishment and make it more transparent and accountable. The more then are forced to conform, and to play off the back foot, the less able they will be to distinguish themselves. 

We have seen this repeatedly when outsiders, elected to Parliament, for instance, on waves of populism, merely blended into the parliamentary potpourri, of the non-fragrant variety.  Even highly accomplished professionals and academics, once they wade into the festering swamp that is our politics, have tended to vegetate or develop decidedly reptilian characters. If the plan is to drain the swamp, croaking with the frogs is the wrong way to project signals through the noise.

The novelty of non-career politicians seeking political office has been quickly blunted by the deliberate infusion of an army of non-career politicians seeking political office. It is hard to find in this country today a minstrel, comedian or upcoming “artiste” who hasn’t, in the dead of the night, alone in their wild thoughts, not wondered why they can’t manage this parastatal or that ministry.
Political inexperience coupled with other accomplishments can be an asset or a breath of fresh air. Presented enmasse, inarticulate and unwashed, it is less revolutionary and more barbarians at the gate.  

Rather than get caught up in the weeds defending O-Level passes or the provenance of their political organisation, the outsiders pushing for reform should articulate alternative methods and messages, urgently and quickly. They do not have time, and you only have one chance to make a good first impression. Swamps are slippery spaces.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 
[email protected] @Kalinaki