Karl Marx, Kagabo and our destiny

In 1851, The New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed the writer Karl Marx as its foreign correspondent based in London.

At the time, Marx was stone broke. He constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his salary of $5 per article, a salary which he and his confederate Friedrich Engels labelled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”

Nobody bothered to help Marx, so he quit The New York Herald Tribune and devoted his efforts to the cause that would “bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the Cold War”.

If only Marx had been treated better and remained a foreign correspondent in The New York Herald Tribune, history might have been different.

The world may have been spared the bloodshed of the Paris Commune of 1871, the reign of Mao in China which reportedly claimed over 72 million Chinese lives, the bloody Korean and Vietnam wars and the fatal posturing of the pseudo-Marxist National Resistance Movement/Army revolutionaries. 

Similarly, this week, the Rules, Privileges and Discipline Committee of Parliament summoned the Leader of Opposition, Mr Mathias Mpuuga, and the Bukoto South MP Twaha Kagabo to explain the source of the Shs40 million that “they have been throwing around.”

Speaker of Parliament Anita Among directed the committee to probe Kagabo’s claim that he received the said money from her and intended to return it to her.

Among denied giving him the Shs40 million, then questioned the intention of the MP whose accusation she said besmirches her name and the integrity of Parliament.

This hoopla all began when Kagabo attempted to return the money to Mpuuga, during a Shadow Cabinet meeting.

“Some time ago, I received money to a tune of Shs40 million on my account, and shortly after that I was also invited to pick money…Shs40m which money, I was told was an arrangement internally from Parliament. And I received this money,” Kagabo told members of the Shadow cabinet.

However, Mpuuga reportedly directed him to return the money from whence it came and not to the Shadow cabinet.

Thereupon, Among asked the Rules Committee, chaired by Bugweri County MP Abdul Katuntu, to probe the matter.

The Inspectorate of Government (IG) is also carrying out investigations into the matter.

Whether or not Kagabo was bribed, it reminds us that one thing always leads to another. In this country, we find that bribes oil the wheels of a neo-patrimonial system which has reduced citizens to clients.

In this system, voters are bribed into being primary clients and leaders are bribed into becoming secondary clients as the State remains our patron. In ancient Roman law, this was known as ambitus, which was a crime of political corruption.

Revealingly, the Latin word ambitus is the origin of the English word “ambition”. I call this revealing because, in Uganda’s neo-patrimonial system, receiving such bribes is a form of getting ahead (ambition).

In this context, the Rules Committee of Parliament should not treat Kagabo’s case on its own merits, but appreciate its extrinsic nature as being symptomatic of a wider problem.

Kagabo’s hearing should thus not place Kagabo in the dock, but instead indict our whole neo-patrimonial system which ensures money changes hands to determine political outcomes.

We must deal with it now or it shall grow into a self-consuming fire. And this will have consequences as impossible to contemplate as those that turned Karl Marx’s denied request for a salary increment into unimagined human calamities.

Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter 

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