Compatriot Kintu Nyago,
Please thank you for your balanced article below, "Blame DP woes on ban of party activity". It is nice reading, for a change.
At the end of the article you suggest that we borrow a leaf from the Ghanaian experience where their Electoral Commission is mandated to ensure that their parties clearly subscribe to the principles of internal democracy.
Well, we have a big Ghanian community here in Toronto and the news they are bringing from 'home' indicates that their party primaries are a fraud and a sham.
The average total of a party's membership in a constituency is always below 100, a number which is small enough to be bribed or otherwise arm-twisted into seconding only those favored by the fat cats at the top.
The struggle for democracy, accountability etc.... in Africa is going to be very protracted with no easy path for us, I am afraid!! But destiny demands that we fight the struggle without flinching!!
On another note, you have for quiet sometime now, been writing what appears, to me, as propaganda cover for the criminal killers in Rwanda and Uganda. ( Remember your escapades with Kabarehe etc.... ). Well, never forget that the role played by these so-called Tutsis, for example, is well documented in the archives of the UN and other agencies.
For example, Human Rights Watch in New York is always crying about a terrible miscarriage of justice where the authors of the Rwanda genocide are now masquerading as the good guys.
It may take decades but if ever the Pentagon gets somebody in Kinsasha to ensure it exclusive access to the strategic minerals of DRC - niobium, tantalum, chromium etc - such that there is no more need for Rwandese and Ugandan shock troopers, that will be the time when Kagame, m7 etc... will join Milosevic at the Hague. I wonder what fate holds for our small, poor country!!
Meanwhile on our part the least we can do is honor the over 5 million Congolese men women and children, and all other Africans, whose innocent blood Rwandese and Ugandans have spilt so that the Pentagon, Bechtel, the Anglo-Saxon international mafia etc... may just loot Congo.
The only 'gain' we have had from these crimes is assurance to Kagame and m7 that they will be kept in power. For the rest of us, surely, we should never sell our souls for 'byeya bya nswa'.
Peace, Old Boy
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Blame DP woes on ban of party activity
By Kintu Nyago
Oct 21, 2004
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Most commentators on the current disagreements within the DP have summed it all up as a personality clash between Dr Paulo Ssemwogerere on the one hand, and Hajji Nasser Sebaggala on the other. This I find dismaying, because it is a tendency that focuses on the symptom while glossing over the fundamental issue of the cause. The cause of the DP's current woes derives from the fact that we, as a society and our institutions, are not liberal democratic in either our thinking nor our practice. And this is not because we are African, but rather due to our history, greatly influenced by the colonial experience. For although the state of Uganda was established approximately 100 years ago, in only about 20 of these have we experienced any semblance of formal democracy. Otherwise for 80 of these years, Ugandans got subjected to the worst forms of autocratic rule imaginable. The emergence of Uhuru, which we celebrated earlier in the month, introduced to us the worst forms of post-colonial dictatorships even within the context of Africa.. Ranging from One Party rule, for National Unity, to Amin's military junta, which he also referred too as the 'Government of Action", and a veneer of multipartyism, that in essence had all the hallmarks of primitive fascism. The above legacy directly relates to the DP’s current woes, because all the above forms of dictatorial rule established legal frameworks and institutions, that either influenced our thinking and actions or which we have inherited. The NRM's coming to power in 1986, further complicated matters for Ugandan political parties. To begin with the spirit of the Legal Notices that established the new order and the subsequent 'Gentlemen's Agreement' on political parties, in addition to the 1995 Constitution's establishing the Movement Political System, confined political party activity to Kampala while denying them access to their upcountry arteries, where more than 95% of our population lives. A situation compounded by their being literally broke and struggling to exist on meager resources, while the NRM on the other hand, has been free to mobilize amidst generous state funding. Much of the NRM's mobilisation has focused on demonizing the parties, a task rendered easier through the vivid recollection, by our peasantry, of the UPC administration's excesses while in power. The history of the DP, Uganda's oldest existing political party, having been formed close to 50 years ago is instructive. Some commentators mistakenly argued that its formation was aimed to undermine the Buganda monarchy. Rather, the DP emerged to champion the cause of the then systematically marginalised Catholic elites, by the Anglican dominated Mengo oligarchy, thanks to the Buganda Agreement of 1900. In turn, Mengo vehemently opposed political party activities describing them as 'alien' and went on to form the Kabaka Yekka, primarily to oppose the DP and any other party in Buganda. Put differently, in as much as the current DP leadership can not be absolved of all the blame for not internally democratising their party, one also has to understand the broader context. For also none of the other parties have ever transited from one leader to another in a democratic manner! Hence it is not a DP disease, but a national one, which we need to address as a nation. |
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
"Americans are born in a half-savage country" Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972.
Mitayo Potosi
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