Philip Matogo
If we are to contend that the National Resistance Movement (NRM) was a Marxist organisation, we must concede that it has not failed as completely as we think it has.
Please, stay with me on this.
When Karl Marx wrote The German Ideology (1846), he viewed the state as a creature of the bourgeois economic interest.
Years later, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin offered tomaytos for Marx’s tomahtos by defining the state as an organ of class domination.
Marx, however, believed that the “backward” economic conditions in Russia were unsuited to the orthodox Marxist theory of communist revolution. Lenin demurred and that is why we have Marxist-Leninism.
Mao Zedong also deviated by fomenting a peasants’ uprising instead of a worker’s revolt.
That’s why we have Maoism.
The NRM agreed with Marx and Leninism but practiced Maoism in order to snatch power from what we previously assumed to be the jaws of death.
The three streams of thought—Maoism, Marxism and Leninism--- agreed upon the overthrow of the existing order.
The devil in the detail, though, lurches in what they sought to replace it with.
This brings us back to the NRM.
In his university undergraduate studies, Mr Museveni wrote a thesis: ‘Fanon’s theory of violence and its application in Mozambique.’
In it, he stated that the beauty of revolution is its equalising power: where the first will come last and last will come first.
At the dawn of independence, Uganda was given to a religion-ethnic order. That is why the political parties then organised themselves in the sectarian manner in which they did.
There was also an elites-masses gap that ensured it was the intellectual who dominated Ugandan politics.
Then, in 1986, the NRM happened. Political parties were banned and this overturned the religion-ethnic order to the extent that Ugandans could not formally organise around region or religion.
New elite were also birthed in the pangs of change.
Gone was the intellectual ascendancy of ivory tower thinkers as professors were elevated to high office only to be humiliated, one by one.
In seeing the unfortunate antics of the intelligentsia, Ugandans were disabused of their (the intellectual’s) right to lead.
Accordingly, with a vacuum left behind by the departure of intellectuals from the apex of politics; we witnessed the rise of the Lumpenproletariat.
In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat is the underclass devoid of class consciousness or, as Mr Museveni would say, ideology.
Even in the NRM, the Lumpenproletariat took the reins of leadership at full gallop.
As you can see, the NRM’s Marxist plot to overthrow the pre-existing order worked like a treat.
In this vein, the NRM has not failed; it has only fallen dangerously short of understanding that Marxism was not for Uganda.
Neither was revolution when evolution was inevitable.
In Tarsis Kabwegyere’s book, The Politics of State Formation and Destruction in Uganda, he notes the words of a staff correspondent of The Economist in the issue of June 20, 1959, two years before independence.
The correspondent foresaw what would happen in 1966: “For all its considerable autonomy [Buganda] remains bedded in Uganda” and this would lead to a “black Prime Minister in Kampala who will prove stronger than the Kabaka in his court at Mengo.”
Change was inevitable in 1966, but did it have to be violent? And did the NRM have to come to power riding on the muzzle of a gun in 1986?
No. Uganda could have evolved without the violence that came with revolution.
In failing to appreciate this, the NRM failed Uganda where it succeeded for itself.
Mr Philip Matogo is a professional copywriter
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