This & That --- By Henry Ochieng
Nov 5, 2003
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Let us call him GB for a change. GB is a professor with a white goatee and until this year was only the proud occupant of the Busiro South seat in Parliament and also glorified minister for the Presidency. Those fortunes were brightened with a promotion to the over-rated office of Vice President in a dramatic cabinet reshuffle on May 23. GB has been very busy since. He has been busy to the point of being a busybody and annoyed some people in the process. But most of us have most likely noticed the increase in volume in his praise singing and this is why we could have been thrown off balance by the comments he made in an interview on Monday. The man said two things from different sides of his mouth about the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA) and the National Agircultural Advisory Services (Naads). He said they were very good but at the same time largely ineffective as poverty eradication measures. Why? Because they do not have horizontal linkages, he said. We are to assume that by this he meant that they were conceived without the relevant structures that would make them useful in the spectrum they are supposed to operate. But they are still good, nevertheless, he still insisted. In the world of political double-speak, GB was saying that the PMA and Naads are a lot of hot air on a lot of paper best left in their theoretical state. Barring that, you would have a royal screw up on your hands if you attempted to go through with them. Remember now that GB's immediate predecessor, Dr Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, MP Kigulu, was an enthusiastic promoter of the PMA, even after she had been relieved of the Agriculture ministry portfolio following the Shs 3.4 billion valley dams scandal. Also worth retaining in your memory is that his boss waxed lyrical in the 2001 presidential campaign pleading the virtues of the PMA before bemused peasants. The PMA talk puzzled many because as the former Lwemiyaga MP, Sam Rwakoojo, told the 6th Parliament its policy document is muddled in technical jargon and is rather difficult to explain. And yet this plan was supposed to be implemented during the five years of this term of the Yoweri Museveni presidency. Two years down the road it is still stuck at the sensitisation stage with lots of cash being spent on this and that seminar. This is a plan that was supposed to be the core of the poverty eradication strategy mainly because Uganda enjoys a comparative advantage in agriculture, which is the mainstay of its economy anyway. If it was prize cow why is GB suddenly behaving as though he has abandoned ship? It is disorienting to see this YM convert proclaiming that the words of 2001 were half the truth. The National Democratic Forum's leader, Chapaa Karuhanga is of the opinion that GB has taken the "brave" step of disagreeing with Museveni because "he means well for the country". "But he has put himself in the firing line and will as a result not be [VP] in 2006 because Museveni does not like independent thinkers. I salute him because he is now saying what we have always said," Karuhanga told me over the phone yesterday. But where does this seeming difference of opinion leave us? Not very far off if you consider his other thinking on politics. While YM has been, at least through his speeches, a believer in the possibility of changing society through politics, GB says he is going to "use society to change politics". Deep philosophical stuff! YM has favoured Apollo Milton Obote's style where the emphasis was on sloganeering and feel-good propaganda. But GB now says "the politics we have been doing in this country is politics of exciting people - I call it politics of blinding people". Is this another departure from the laid down course? I think not. The professor says he is obsessed with the desire to push "practical peasantry development". It is from this point when the game these two gentlemen are playing begins to take shape. For 17 years, this government has said the thrust of its vision is geared towards lifting the masses out of their misery and transforming the society from a primitive, pre-industrial one to something of a much higher order. It might come as a heart-breaking reality check for those who have believed those things when GB gives the impression that he is just going to get started down that road. But do we believe him? His boss just told a collection of peasants in Mukono at month's end that for these 17 years, unpatriotic, elitist bureaucrats have been thick as thieves in corruption. He said now is the time to grab and prosecute them. Do you begin to see a familiar ring to the utterances of GB and YM? There is an almost covert appealing to the peasant in a manner that casts the urban constituency in funny light. This is not very far off the Marxist-Socialist way of thinking. (Remember Gilbert was in China recently). Notice too that the enlightened urban constituency has spoken loudest against the nefarious Project Third Term. Seen in that light, the import of this re-awakening of the sentiments of the early Movement years when screams of fundamental change and power to the masses were still popular rhetoric, can only bypass the soft-headed. YM and GB seem to be alienating the peasants from the alleged elite in a very subtle way - with one possible aim in mind. This is the populist Marxist-Socialist way of doing things that has served so well in the past. With their numbers, once the peasants are sufficiently rattled and ranged against the `elite', life presidency will no longer seem like a dream. +26577 501436 |
� 2003 The Monitor Publications
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