Why Museveni will stay COMMENT: By Timothy Kalyegira June 13 - 20, 2004
It might be a fate we resign ourselves to, that as deeply as we resent President Yoweri Museveni’s now clearly intended decision to remain Uganda’s head of state past 2006, we can do nothing about it. Que Sera Sera, what will be will be.
The “we” referred to here are the middle-class, educated, urbanised professional establishment of Uganda.
We have written newspaper columns and articles by the ton, been vocal on radio and television talk shows, worked through domestic NGOs and partnered with western NGOs and think tanks, and appealed to western nations to ostracize the NRM government.
All to no avail. Que Sera Sera. Yoweri Museveni will have his way and nothing will become of him (as repugnant as this idea might be to us).
Time then to step back and absorb this all. Time to ask how this state of affairs came to be. How did it come about that Africa is still ruled to this day by self-willed heads of state who feel no qualms about personalizing power and who can hardly see beyond self?
It is not simply sufficient to describe, in our moments of disgust, President Museveni as a dictator “just like all the others”, a cheap trick who promised us heaven but proved to be heathen; we must wonder how he and countless other African leaders came to possess and wield, in the first place, the power that enables them make a chess board of their countries.
How do they get away with it? Why, in other words, has civil society and the urbanised intelligentsia proved so ineffective to control their countries’ destinies in Africa so that the uncouth, the manipulative, the tyrants ruled over them unabated?
We were supposed to be the class that sets and directs the national agenda, while the proletariat (those clueless masses that follow like a wind vane any leader who shows up) does our enlightened bidding. Yet clearly, we failed to live up to our breeding and our bidding.
Or at any rate, we are not numerous enough, influential enough, consequential enough to act as a dyke between our societies and the flood of third world dictatorship which we seem so doomed to live with.
Is this not symptomatic of the Ugandan elite — very knowledgeable about a broad range of subjects and quite competent at the crafts and professions we work at to earn our bread; and yet, half our national development budget, 40 years into independence, is funded by donors from industrialized countries?
Could this be the crisis we now find ourselves in — that of Uganda and who will lead the country? And that we the supposed elite have proved to be wimps in matters of who controls Uganda’s fate.
Will Uganda (and by extension, Africa) continue to be led by roughnecks, crass “freedom fighters”, and other men who lack even such things as table manners (but who, like President Museveni, have a great ability to connect with the impoverished masses); or will Uganda/Africa be led further into the 21st century by people who respond to the finer things in life — people who are urbane, have a sense of the appropriate (and hence feel shame at having to seek third terms, take the presidential jets for family shopping, or feel discomfort that only their tribe is prospering under their regime?)
The advantage of the present Ugandan/African leaders is that they know their countries and their histories.
They know by instinct and by fact, that the vast majority of their people across the continent are largely dispossessed, beleagured, and barely living a modern life. Thus they know that it takes the bare minumum to appease or win the support of their people. They tend to be men of action and have few qualms about taking decisions that reinforce their hold on power.
They possess — like President Museveni, former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi and any of the leaders who have dictated over us since the late 1950s — a certain raw Machiavellianism, a political Darwinistic survival of the fittest mode of mind. They know that you don’t need to possess a taste for jazz music, you don’t need to subscribe to the Economist magazine, or don’t need to have good table manners to be an African President or military leader.
Without the social affectations that the “elite” of Africa fall prey to and because of this down-to-earth upbringing and outlook, they have plunged Africa down the drain and 40 years after the independence era began, we are far the worse off than where the British and French left us.
On the other hand, we the intellectuals, the corporate executives, journalists, the professionals, the people who attended “good schools” and were probably born in towns and cities and have lived an urban life, with its tastes and sensibilities, have one large set of weaknesses.
We don’t know how to thrive in this medieval social setting that marks much of Africa and that is why we often have this identity crisis, much written about by, say, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe — the appearance of western sophistication with the comical image of social pretenses: we buy cars but don’t read books; have swimming pools at home but pay the man who clears it of leaves and insects Shs 20,000 a month.
We tend to be hesitant about most things and particularly so in taking decisions. Discussion, debate, expression of ideas and positions matter so dearly to us. We seem to have much stronger views on what should not be than what should.
But in its worst form (and most of the time it is a bad form) it has rendered us largely theoretical people — always complaining how our country is “going to the dogs” but never offering remedies; wishing the government were less corrupt and manipulative but never bothering to vote (or even registering to vote); faced with decisions, preferring to debate and split hairs over the meaning of words and pros and cons, rather than take action.
At the slightest hint that Uganda is really going to the dogs, most Ugandan middle-class families remain passive, knowing that they can easily board a plane and migrate to another, usually western country.
Because we play a scant part in shaping our national destinies, by our apathy over voting, standing up to be counted, taking part in public action, we become a pathetic lot: we are neither fully westernized nor fully Ugandan; neither fully rural and “peasantish” nor fully elite.
(Robert Kabushenga, host of the Capital FM’s Capital Gang late last month, almost as a reflection of our essential social insecurity, firmly told the listeners that he is “as elite as elite can get”, itself a pathetic comment on our misplaced sense of importance.)
This, in my views, is the main reason Uganda’s agenda is now firmly set by the people we most resent and despise: Idi Amin, Nasser Sebaggala, Major Roland Kakooza Mutale, Charles Rwomushana, and (some might say) President Yoweri Museveni.
In that regard, the Kakooza Mutate types have made themselves our elite. They might be crude and crazy; but it is they who fight long guerrilla wars while we watch on from the safety of western capitals. It is they who hit the election campaign trails and show up on polling day (if often to rig, but that’s besides the point.) The most important thing about them is that they act, speak, feel, and live as if the country belongs to them and it is they and no other who must shape it.
That commitment, that hands-on dedication and most important of all, involvement in Uganda’s affairs has (unfortunately from the middle-class viewpoint) earned them the right to proclaim themselves our leaders.
And if this be so, if by our inaction, by our preference to listen to music at home while the rural folk queue up patiently in the sun, we the so-called elite have left the machinery of state to these roughneck people, then they are the leaders we deserve.
© 2004 The Monitor Publications
Mitayo Potosi
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