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Without Mincing Words
Andrew M. Mwenda |
Meetings with donors not enough to bring democracy
Dec 19, 2004
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“Freedom is not a commodity that is given to the enslaved upon demand. It is the precious reward, the shining trophy, of struggle and sacrifice.” Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite, 1963 I rarely respond to critics of my articles but I will make an exception of Mr Allan Tacca’s “Does Andrew Mwenda Admire Fascism?” (Sunday Monitor, December 12). Tacca claims that my defence of former President Milton Obote (he does not specify on which subject) is flirtation with fascism. If acknowledging that Obote built 26 rural hospitals, did not sign death warrants when President, among others, is flirtation with fascism, I am guilty as accused.
In Tacca’s world, we should not highlight Napoleon Bonaparte’s civil code, or Otto von Bismarck’s role in unifying Germany, or Park Chung Hee’s transformation of South Korea because that would be “flirting with fascism” since all these guys were dictators. Tacca is angry that I refused to buy Kizza Besigye’s claim that by merely challenging President Museveni in the 2001 presidential elections, the retired colonel stood for the advancement of democracy in Uganda. Besigye was campaigning for political power, so what convinced Tacca that he would be a vehicle for further democratisation in Uganda? You do not need to be a President to advance the cause of democracy. The Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. led a successful civil rights movement in America without ever seeking residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Tacca’s naivety is baffling. Most of the leaders of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) supported Museveni when he stifled political party activities, drove tanks and mambas to break up Mr Michael Kagwa’s rally at City Square, helped him during the Constituent Assembly to entrench provisions that muzzled democracy, stood by him when his security apparatus jailed journalists, killed demonstrators. Now they preach democracy and multiparty politics with a fanatical zeal. Is it flirtation with fascism to say: Please, wait a minute, when did you change? And why should we believe you now? That is a lot of baloney! The opposition in Uganda claims to be fighting a dictatorship. It follows that they would have to face numerous restrictions and violations. Historically, such violations have always been a sign of weakness for the dictatorship, and actually a source of strength for the opposition. Instead of exploiting such restrictions to build their political credentials, the opposition types in Uganda, and their admirers like Tacca, claim that that path is suicidal. They prefer to hold meetings with donors, appear on radio talk shows, hold seminars in air-conditioned conference halls financed by foreign donors and, worst of all, expect journalists to massage their weaknesses. Not me! We have all read about democratic struggles across time and space in this world. Opposition politicians spend years in jail, some get maimed, or even killed. As my friend Kyazze Simwogerere would say, if you cannot stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. How many opposition leaders in Uganda have been arrested and sent to jail? I know Mr Raila Odinga in Kenya spent seven years in the cooler! Can a group that does not want to risk anything for “freedom” really be a force for democracy? Ms Anne Mugisha, in a similar article in the Weekly Observer, said the police “under Museveni” killed a journalism student along Kampala Road during a peaceful demonstration. Mugisha, Besigye and company campaigned furiously for Museveni in 1996 as the state beat up, harassed, intimidated and jailed Dr Paul Ssemogerere’s supporters and openly rigged the vote; not to mention that they served and praised him when his security killed, jailed and tortured many others. They only complain now because the heat has been turned on them. So how can the dictator’s allies of yesterday pose as today’s democrats and still insist that we, the ordinary citizens, should not question their democratic credentials? Which brings me to Tacca’s claim that “democratisation” in the former Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe was born out of the “moral commitment” of leaders located in the state since “there were no civic groups” to “organise protests” against communist rule. Never mind that Russia today is under strongman rule. The economies of these countries were industrial and for the ruling elites there to reproduce political power, they needed to create wealth. This could only be done by application of human skill. In an economy based on human skill, production plans cannot be imposed; their attainment must instead be elicited because a supervisor cannot make someone think faster or more cleverly. To increase productivity, those who possess skills and talents must be listened to and their needs ascertained. As Mr Robert Bates has demonstrated, one needs to only compare a steel mill in the Rust Belt of the United States with a high-tech firm in the Silicon Valley: the former is regimented and authoritarian, the latter is decentralised with the pace of work largely determined by employees themselves. The difference is not between heavy industry and research-oriented firms; but between industries that rely more on human skill and those that rely more on plant and machinery. When firms that use a high proportion of plant and machinery relative to human skill formed the basis of economies, centrally directed systems tended to work and the Soviet Union and North Korea competed successfully with capitalist states as measured by rates of economic growth. However, as nations moved towards modes of production that require high levels of human skill, organisational methods of command and control proved increasingly inefficient. The Soviets and their satellites were not willing to surrender control over key decisions to those with talent and skill. Dissatisfied with the authoritarian character of their governments, the educated middle class, instead of taking to the streets in protest, simply withheld their productive effort thus leaving their governments with collapsing industries and uncompetitive economies. To save the inevitable collapse of the Soviet economy and by extension the economies of its satellites, President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms. But even then he continued to hesitate on democracy – only that the window of change he had opened brought a torrent that not only swept him aside but also destroyed the Soviet Union. The democratic impulse was sparked off by the middle class withholding its skills and leaving the government with collapsing industries and uncompetitive economies, not from the “moral commitment” of Soviet leaders to have a free and open society as Tacca naively claims. If you come to think of it, the productive margin of Africa’s economies does not lie in industry based on human skill but in the extraction of minerals and peasant agriculture. On the contrary, when African dictators cannot dig resources out of the soil, they just expropriate them from someone else: Idi Amin in Uganda from the Asians and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe from white farmers. Of course, such policies are not sustainable in the long, even medium, term as they cause economic decline: peasants withdraw into subsistence, private enterprise into the black market, professionals migrate to other countries, etc. Even without confronting the state through protests, the different classes in Africa still undermine the ability of dictators to reproduce themselves. But dictators go to international donors for fiscal support who in turn insist on reforms that benefit multinational capital, not domestic private enterprise or peasant agriculture, a factor that further undermines the democratic process as I have argued in this column before. |
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
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