Attempt to prohibit miniskirts further exposes NRM regime

The Anti-Pornography Bill’s pre-occupation with women’s hemlines underscores NRM ideological and theoretical inconsistencies in public policy formulations. First, Uganda is a tributary of global capitalism. Second, there is no distinct ‘Ugandan Culture’ but a global capitalist culture. Third, in liberal economies, market forces, individualism, and rational choice rule. Therefore, Uganda as a tributary of global capitalism, and the miniskirt as a global capitalist cultural symbol of femininity flaunted by our women, is evidence of Ugandan success as a peripheral capitalist economy.

However, economic liberalisation was not coupled to democratisation of politics; therefore, growing affluence, consumer freedoms, and individualism, become contested spaces in the struggles to democratise the State.

This all began in the late 1980s, when the NRM liberalised the economy. Embracing neo-liberalism as a ruling philosophy, it adopted World Bank-supported structural adjustments programmes which flung open Uganda’s frontiers to free trade and international finance.
Goods and capital streamed across, seeking rent. Expatriate managers and technical advisors, and local corporate, political, and professional numbers stimulated demand for basic and leisure goods and services along global consumption patterns. These included cars, televisions, satellite dishes, music, films and videos, books, fashion clothing, and food.

These cross cultural communications and exchanges deepened penetration by international capital. Consequently, the national economy was dismantled, piece by piece, and integrated into the global capitalist economy. Henceforth, Uganda became part of global capital’s logic of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.

Efficiency and rationality imperatives of liberalisation forced the State to cede its production, allocation, distribution, and redistribution roles to the market, private enterprises, and rational individuals.

Rational choice theory presumes consumers maximise material welfare preferences, exercise economic and personal freedom by purchasing goods and services to satisfy notions of a good life.

The miniskirt, a cultural artefact of global capitalism, is such a good. It is a fashion style, and global capitalist cultural expression of femininity and sexuality.
Not only is it organic to the evolution of Uganda’s market economy, but represents free will and spirit, and self-determined choices of individuals and rational consumers.
Criminalising minis on public morality claims is dubious and contests NRM neoclassical economics ideological credibility, which views socioeconomic policy problems through the prism of rational preferences of individuals maximising private interests.

Dangerous
Furthermore, blaming ‘foreign culture’ for the miniskirt is disingenuous, because it was an invertible product of NRM economic liberalisation, free trade, and private enterprise-driven development strategies.

Its ubiquity on the Ugandan social and corporate scenes reveals a greater truth than bare thighs; something Ethics and Integrity minister, Rev. Fr. Simon Lokodo & Co.; are intellectually too lazy to admit.

That, once Uganda became part of the global capitalist economy, there was nothing culturally ‘Ugandan’ or ‘African’, which we could protect; since material culture, intellectual productions and consumption are products of the state of development of a society, under a particular mode of production.

In this case, the miniskirt as an article of the global capitalist culture proves Uganda’s success as a mere tributary of this dominant socioeconomic system. This is nowhere more remarkable than in urban economies. The middle classes in Kampala, Gulu, or Mbarara, have more in common, in life styles and cultural tastes, with their counterparts in Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, Paris, London, or New York , than with their kinsfolks in the rural economies of Kabong, Lacekocot, or Kihihi.

This is due to the articulation of more than one mode of production -- capitalist and non-capitalist. Consequently, certain aspects of global capitalism do co-exist with kinship systems of production and exchange. The rural-urban differences in opinion over the Marriage and Divorce Bill, for example, showed that within sociocultural spheres not dislocated and displaced by capitalist penetration, tribal elders’ authority structures predominate.

In addition, in a ‘liberal’ economy and polity, individuals exercise economic freedom, lifestyle and consumption choices independent of the State.

Historically
Historically, democratisation acted as a form insurance for economic liberalism; entrenching economic and political freedom and liberties, through institutional and legal development in the administration of law and justice, enforcement of contracts, protection of private property and individual rights. This was the classic path to liberal development in politics and economics.

Democratisation of the State followed struggles by vested economic and political interests challenging arbitrary powers of the Church and State. In Uganda’s case, this path was blocked because an ideologically vacuous NRM decoupled economic and political liberalism, by promoting the former, while brutally suppressing the latter.

Consequently, the ruling elite in Uganda treat economic interest as different and separate from politics, meaning the two are unconventionally forced to operate within two impermeable universes.

Hence, powerful economic groups remain intimidated, subordinated to an authoritarian State -- unable to use their economic power to expand economic and democratic freedom through mobilising against anti-liberal political and economic policies.

Besides, they are cowed from forging alliances with progressive social forces; hence are unable to assume the historical roles played by corresponding classes in other countries at different epochs inn time, to challenge arbitrary powers of the Church and State, and expand democratic rights.

Therefore, seeking to dictate choices of what women can wear undermines individual freedoms and liberties; which are fundamental to market economies and democratic societies.

However, these inconsistencies are not accidental; they are the logical outcomes of the NRM’s ideological and intellectual incoherence, opportunism, and resultant policy eclecticism, and authoritarian proclivities.

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The writer is the Uganda Peoples Congress party spokesperson

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The Anti-Pornography Bill

As the Anti-Pornography and, opposition to, the Marriage and Divorce Bills have demonstrated, Ugandan women endure daily cultural assaults, in the private and public spheres. This occurs despite presence of rights and democracy advocates because focus of the social justice movement is segmental.

First, it is split between civil and political territories with strict division of labour and specialisation. Second, division of labour and specialisation means exclusive focus on one but not other planes of rights claims. For example, actions on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, or gender equality; let alone freedom to choose what to wear, are left to women’s groups.

Beyond circumspection about turfs and encroachment, parties are exclusively preoccupied with political rights, and cannot frame the democratic debate within inclusive rights. Similarly, civil society organised around particular issues of social justice, e.g. women’s wellbeing and agency, resents political parties intruding into their niches.

Hence, minority, women, gay and lesbian rights, are understood in isolation, and abstracted from the broader struggles for democratic rights and freedoms.
Banning miniskirts would not just be an injustice to the women who wear it; but threatens the very tenets of individual rights and freedoms.

Uganda is a market economy. Any liberal economy is built around free, private individuals making independent choices to meet their needs. Free choice in the consumption of goods and services has corollaries in political liberalisation where individual rights and consumer freedom are predicates of democratic rights and freedoms. And, equality principles object to draconian control over the woman’s body and sexuality, or limiting her choices as a citizen and consumer in a market economy.