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Beti Kamya
Turwomwe |
Beti Kamya Turwomwe
Uganda not yet ready for
(political) parties � Museveni � screamed Sunday Vision�s
front page last week!
While closing a leadership
training course for East African Students at Makerere
University on August 13, President Museveni reportedly
reiterated his overplayed and long outdated song on the
relevance of political parties in Africa, saying, �The
environment in African countries is not conducive for
multipartyism to thrive because THERE IS NO RIGHT SOCIAL BASE
FOR IT... (emphasis mine)�.
And if you think that is
shocking, it is because you haven�t heard him say that the
right time to �discuss political parties would be in 1789
during the French Revolution... because France had four
distinct social classes, each one struggling to protect their
interests��.
In other words, according to the only
person in Uganda with a vision, only social classes
categorically defined as feudalists, capitalists, industrial
workers and peasants, as they existed during the period of the
French Revolution, have the legitimacy to freedom of
association and to express their various interests through
formation of political parties!
Knowing the poor
reading culture in Uganda, M7 always awes his listeners by
daring them to �read the emergence and formation of political
parties in Europe�, as if there is any fundamental difference
between social classes in the Europe of 1789 and Uganda today.
A famous story of the 1789 French Revolution goes that
Queen Marie Antoinette, who, watching the hungry, rioting
peasants outside her husband�s palace was baffled why anybody
should make so much fuss over bread.
Protected all her
life from the harsh realities of life outside the nobility,
Marie Antoinette said, �If there is no bread, give them
cakes�. Lucky Marie didn�t even know that if you cannot afford
bread, the peasants� food, certainly you cannot afford cakes.
What is the difference between Marie Antoinette of
1789 and Museveni�s daughter of 2004, who, without a thought
about the medicine-less clinics and hospitals of Uganda, takes
a whole plane to herself to have her baby in Germany? Or, what
is the difference between a resident of the Kasubi slums whose
family went to bed hungry last night and the hungry peasant of
the French Revolution?
Although centuries apart, Marie
Antoinette and Museveni�s daughter live in the same world,
very far removed from that of the Kasubi slum dweller and the
French revolution peasant.
Museveni successfully
marketed his anti-political parties view during the honeymoon
years of his rule, when most Ugandans, like the young,
adoring, na�ve bride, just took in whatever he said.
Unfortunately, he has failed to realise that while he
has remained static in his deception, Ugandans are 18 years
older, wiser and have developed independent views on
democracy.
Political parties may have their beginnings
in the Europe of the 18th century, but they are just an
_expression_ of the principle and concept of organised
alternative ways of seeing, saying and doing things
differently by different political players, in a free and fair
environment.
Thus, different people with common
interests organise themselves into a group, historically known
as a political party, define their background, articulate
their interests, propose ways of achieving them and present
their proposal to the public for endorsement or rejection.
Eating cooked food, wearing clothes, building houses,
drama, music, writing, courts, leadership hierarchy etc all
have historical foundations, but they are good principles
which have stood the test of time, so we just keep adapting
them to the times.
There is nothing new or original
that we do today that does not have historical foundations.
Museveni said that in demanding the return to
multipartyism before reading about the French Revolution and
formation of political parties in Europe, �Africans abdicated
thinking�, but I think that he is the one who did and resorted
to parroting the post-independence African communist
politicians of the 1960s/70s, whose theories have long been
abandoned by the free world.
Published on: Sunday, 22nd August, 2004 |
