Prime
Stripped of quality leadership, societies lazily drag their dirty flip flops along dusty streets
Author: Daniel K Kalinaki. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
- Deficient in logic and insufficiently exposed to learning, they grabbed at the lowest hanging fruits of power – be it grabbing private property, banning mini-skirts and flip flops, or wanton violence against real and imagined threats
As someone who likes wearing flip flops, I should consider myself lucky not to have lived in the days when Lt. Col. Abdul Abdallah Nasur held sway as governor of the Central Province in the Idi Amin government.
Urban legend has it that as part of beautifying his province, Nasur banned the wearing of flip-flops in public and even force-fed the rubbery snack to those caught in violation of the rule. The story is probably apocryphal and Lt. Col. Nasur, who died this week aged 77, denied it in a 2021 interview.
Yet few would put it past the Amin regime. Much has been said about the murderous ways of Amin and his henchmen on the one hand, and his attempt to rebalance the economic inequality in the post-independence state on the other.
But not enough attention has been paid to the sheer mediocrity of ‘leadership’ – to use the word loosely – that emerged during that regime. Ironically, Amin had set out his stall with the humility of his limitations in mind; his first cabinet included some of the sharpest tools in the drawer at the time.
As his deficiencies became clearer, however, Amin’s insecurities gave way to a violent anti-intellectualism in which the big brains in cabinet and other public institutions were quickly thinned through murder, or exile for those lucky to escape.
Bereft of competent and capable people able to hold and express alternative views, Amin then turned to loyalists who tended to be Muslim, military officers, or his tribesmen and, whenever possible, all of the above.
Now, the good lord might work in mysterious ways, but there is no evidence that He concentrates competence in a small coterie of people joined at the hip by blood, narrow self-interest, or military epaulettes. Diversity of views and opinions is the furnace in which resilient strategy is forged.
The resulting rulers used violence to shield their incompetence, but even this was insufficient. The Israeli raid on Entebbe in July 1976 to rescue hostages should have been a warning sign about the fragility of Amin’s military edifice.
If any lessons were learned, they were not put in practice. Repeated violence against citizens was always going to extinguish any support Amin and his henchmen had garnered from the ‘Economic War’. Handing private enterprises to untried and untested relatives, friends and in-laws was always going to bring the economy to its knees.
Burning bridges with neighbouring states was always going to leave Amin and his henchmen isolated. And the military adventure in the Kagera Basin in 1978 was always going to give Tanzania the justification to openly throw its weight behind the anti-Amin forces encamped in that country.
It isn’t even a case of hindsight giving clarity. Anyone with half a brain could have seen that these choices would have undesirable consequences. But skulls had been cracked open and good brains spilled. So it fell to people like Lt. Col. Nasur to manage the affairs of the state.
Deficient in logic and insufficiently exposed to learning, they grabbed at the lowest hanging fruits of power – be it grabbing private property, banning mini-skirts and flip flops, or wanton violence against real and imagined threats – while the more complex issues, like rebuilding the economy and healing the state passed them by.
The match that lit up the bonfire of their vanities was the vainglorious belief in the messiah complex of their leader, Amin. As the Tanzanian army crossed the border into Uganda and began its final descent into Kampala, this military cabal appointed Amin, who was already Life President and Commander-in-Chief, inter alia, as the Chief of Staff of the Joint Services.
As it was reported, “The Defence Council arrived at this decision because of the confidence they have in the Life President’s God-given planning and coordinating ability and, above all, the confidence they have in him as a well-trained professional soldier, which traits will enable him as Chief of Staff of Joint Services, to carry out the immediate mission of smashing the Tanzanian invading forces and to liberate Ugandans from the unprovoked aggression by Tanzanian troops, mercenaries and traitors. Kampala fell a month later.
Forty-five years later, the sun is setting on the last of Amin’s henchmen, but the impact of, and lessons on, leadership remain timeless.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
