Revolutionary ruling parties in Africa are unwilling to break from the past

One of the most enduring legacies of resistance movements which transformed into ruling parties in Africa is their unwillingness to break from the past once they capture power and retain it for such a long time that they begin to make horrendous mistakes.

They gripe at those who are so ungrateful for the favour of being “liberated from the excesses of the bad regimes of the past eras”, which they “treacherously” criticise. For now though, I lugubriously refuse to be drawn in a related debate over the semantics of whether ‘least bad’ means ‘good’; but incidentally does it?
Ernest Renan’s observation that “an essential factor in the making of a nation is to get one’s history wrong” which Professor Ali Mazrui hyped in his book On Heroes & Uhuru Worship, invariably complicates the debate.
Anyhow, post-struggle regimes’ contempt for Opposition renders them incapable of envisioning openness to the possibility, let alone reality, of the inevitability of change.

The unwillingness to learn how to live with the possibility of leadership change at the top gives a chance to the ‘invisible government’ of securocrats to push the limits too far; inadvertently adding to the complexity of the problem of pushing further the tottering popularity of any regime and disabling the efficient detection of obtrusive challenges to the regimes they serve and pushing the limits to self-destruction mode.
The situation will not, as Chaos Theory’s meteorological fractal pattern proponents might argue, repair itself; someone must initiate the switching away from the trajectory by addressing fundamental issues.

The movements, which became ruling parties have, sadly, lost their way when instead of harmonising their countries’ political and constitutional systems with those of their neighbours push for a kind of nationalism, which is out of step with the current wisdom of regional economic and political integration.

Problem is, when the ostensible ends such as the noble objectives of restoring democracy and constitutionalism are desecrated, for which the regimes are being judged, as not more enduring than the means to which the ‘altruistic patriots’ resorted in the struggle to ‘capture’ power.

A legacy of most of them is how the post-struggle political elite selectively recognise and reward heroes or deal with former combatants and veterans, which is what Mazrui meant by ‘selective memory’ providing an answer to the question why the prestige of revolutionary struggles has faded.
As he prophetically opined, building national consciousness should involve remembering all past heroes as common heroes and revising the criteria for martyrdom to account for the heroes of the other eras.

In his article ‘Creative Inquiry and Scholarship: Applications and Implications’ in a Doctoral Degree Prof Alfonso Montuori wrote ‘inquiry can be an enormously joyful, creative and transformative process”. In the same vein, student inquirers consisting of a fairly representative microcosm of age limit politics recently asked whether Uganda is “a free democracy” or “a dictatorship”. While we may not yet be under the throes of the latter, we may have reached the limits.
Prudence dictated resort to Edmund Burke’s ‘Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol’, in which he wrote: ‘If any man ask me what a free government is, I answer that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful and competent judges of the matter’.

Because I did not give a straight answer; preferring instead to let the students critically examine the facts for and against, with an air of resignation, some branded me an NRM neophyte. But from a research perspective, their responses and my observations lead to findings with intriguing conclusions.
Have we reached a stage where citizens’ views swing towards the kind of dualistic conformism that lies at the heart of ultimate futility and nihilism of narcissism, which heaps privilege on self; promotes subjectivity, emotion and spontaneity at the expense of developing objectivity?

Mr Baligidde is a former diplomat.
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