When NRM fails to explain what removal of age limit will address
When the mighty NRM fails to encapsulate in one sentence the central question which the removal of Article 102(b) will address, and religious leaders (bona fide citizens of this country) are reprimanded for exercising their constitutional rights and enjoying their freedom to express opinions on governance issues, victory is vainglorious. Then the question is prompted whether the past may have once again caught up with the present causing the future to arrive sooner than expected.
One is also reminded of the political ingenuity of leaders in the West African states, who in pursuance of the ‘revolutionary pan-Africanist mission of creating political unanimity’, took well-documented steps to achieve selfish political objectives. Not surprisingly, there are now themes with local variations.
In Creating political order…Aristide Zolberg with lucidity narrates how Kwameh Nkrumah transformed a thriving robust democracy into a “no-party” or “one-party” dispensation similar from Movement-dominant to NRM-dominant metamorphosis, which intolerance towards dissent suggests and is a risk removal of age limits might create in future when a latter-day neo-Leninist-Czar like Nkrumah emerges.
Nkrumah’s policies were so jurisprudentially objectionable that Julius Nyerere (now waiting for beatification into Sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church), took exception at the Osagyefo’s lofty rhetoric about fast-tracking Africa’s political integration. The litany of repressive steps ‘pan-Africanists’ Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Houphouet-Boigny took included monotonous recitations of well-known facts. Nkrumah enacted public order laws making political competition difficult or unlikely; like Cromwell, who peremptorily dismissed the House of Commons and defiantly disregarded the people’s feelings through his own righteousness.
Nkrumah misused discretionary authority, employed political loyalty for selecting key public officials, reduced the independence of the Judiciary, introduced measures to control the media, institutionalised his own adulation when cadres contrived the fallacious argument that the ‘CPP was Ghana, and Ghana was the CPP, but the CPP is the Leader. The conclusion being Nkrumah is Ghana’! Without doubt, a president is the Fountain-of-Honour in any country, but Nkrumah’s belief that he was Ghana bordered on eccentricity.
Holding regular elections, upholding the “rule of law” and observance of human rights can create a conducive environment for free democracy to thrive, but where guided democracy prevails, all of the above cannot safeguard universally-accepted parameters for real democracy; which is only secured by the sanctity of the Constitution that is now absent with official leave.
In ‘I Speak of Freedom: A statement of African Ideology’, Nkrumah acknowledges adulation thus: “The CPP is the unifying force that guides and pilots the nation, the nerve centre of the positive operations in the struggle for African irredentism. Its supremacy cannot be challenged”.
But in a 1961 referendum, Nkrumah garnered only 16 per cent, prompting the angry outburst: “The CPP will not allow freedom to destroy freedom...A young State cannot afford to dissipate its national efforts through senseless wrangling, obstructive and destructive tactics that organised Opposition encourages”.
Where politicians fight each other in an uncompromising life and death struggle, driven by fear, the temptation for ruling parties to introduce repressive measures is often high.
Movements that became ruling parties lost their way. Instead of harmonising their country’s political and constitutional systems with current global parameters, they pushed for rabid nationalism, which was out of step with the wisdom of prioritising regional economic cooperation. This is what Nyerere wanted, but he was unfairly accused by Nkrumah (who dreamt of being the first president of a United States of Africa) of seeking to balkanise the continent.
When ostensible ends such as perfecting democratic constitutionalism, for which many regimes are judged as not more enduring than the means to which their ‘altruistic patriots’ resorted in capturing power are desecrated, where after 36 years of revolutionary Siasa as political entrepreneurialism grew and no politician, except the NRM leader, appeals to all Ugandans or evokes so much public anger, looking at constitutional tampering with great circumspection is invariably justifiable.
Mr Baligidde is a lecturer at Uganda Martyrs
University-Nkozi. [email protected]
