Categorical inequalities are very harmful to democracy

The standard claim is that, to the extent that such inequalities translate directly into categorical differences in political rights, obligations, democracy remains impossible. Prof Mahmood  Mamdani has spent his life’s work looking at how colonial institutions instrumentalised cultural differences across most African states to what he calls, in his most recent seminal book, Neither Natives Nor Settlers, ethnic majority versus ethnic minorities: the former belong to the political community and thus have political rights and civil liberties as citizens; the latter are excluded, and thus are denied access to formal political and civil rights.

This, he argues, has fueled political violence, undermining democracy as a result of contestation over the control of the state as the excluded seek to force their inclusion in the political community. But Mamdani is too erudite a historical scholar that he pays less attention to the contemporary forces that have exacerbated categorical inequalities, and subsequently undermined or posed a threat to the prospect of democratisation.

Salient to mention has been the globalising force of neoliberal economics, forcefully thrust around three central tenets: liberalisation policies to facilitate free movement of capital, and goods whilst restricting movement of labour, a new institutional architecture to protect foreign direct investment rights across different countries especially in developing countries where the risk of nationalisation looms large, and the minimal state, which retreats from intervening in the economy and rather focuses on creating an enabling environment.

These shifts in policy paradigms have thrown global capitalism in a tailspin increasingly grappling with even more real than imaginary spectres of income inequality and climate change. It is, however, less contested that the most affected countries have been in the Sub-Saharan African: while, for example, the Ugandan state in the 1960s and 1970s was an investing state expanding investment in infrastructure, quality education, and health, the ‘enabling environment’ state pales to insignificance when it comes to investment in infrastructure, education, and health relative its 1960s and 1970s counterpart. The consequence: low growth that only benefits those who are privileged to gain jobs in a minuscule formal sector dominated by multinational corporations.

Thus, the contours and geography of inequality takes different squiggles and turns too complex to properly grasp: urban residents, such as those in Kampala, and other towns are richer than those in rural areas, the latter, condemned to declining productivity, and by extension decline in income. But also, within urban areas, formal well-paying secure jobs are hard to find, a preserve of only a few. This has fueled informality, economic destitution often illuminated by the contiguous contrast of settlement that characterise Kampala’s skyline: while residents of Kololo, Muyenga, Bunga, Naguru, for example, enjoy safe neighbourhoods, their other neighbours in Kamwokya, Kinoni, Bwaise, Naguru (not that one, the other) wallow in risky neighbourhoods.

But we are not done: income inequality, an indelible mark of the casino capitalism we have created overseen by a spectating state has a sub-regional dimension to it: the western and the central, for example, are wealthier than the North and the East, awakening the perilous ethnic undertone that often (although not yet with buoyant force) provide a sharp reminder of the sectarian politics that drove the country into civil war, not so long ago.    The most consequential effect of this rising inequality is the creation of social separateness that undermines collective commitment to the citizenship project, and thus weakening democratisation because citizens are very different today, and thus experience life in the territorial jurisdiction called Uganda differently than the 1960s and 1970s generation. Need I ask why we have a more fragmented Parliament today than the one that foisted upon us the 1995 Constitution?

Ms Michael Buteera Mugisha, is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and lecturer at Makerere.