The meaningless mantra of political and economic emancipation continues
During his speech to mark the 31st Anniversary of the NRM, President Museveni highlighted export enhancement, operation wealth creation, infrastructure development, improving social services especially education and health and maximising benefits from the oil sector. He said oil will bring about $2 billion.
Ugandans are not fools. Or at least they cannot be fools eternally. The parameters we need to use to assess the performance of the NRM over the past 31 years is what the NRM promised. Political relationships, nay life itself, is built on promises. Promises kept and promises betrayed. In it’s Ten Point Programme, the NRM says economic success will not happen unless political questions are settled. After 31 years, we are in a position to bring the straight edge of promises made and put it alongside the hand drawn line of the NRM (achievements) and thus determine how straight or how crooked the line is.
Even when a prevailing political equilibrium is overthrown, a process has to be embarked upon to entrench a new equilibrium. The 1995 Constitution was the culmination of that process of reaching a new settlement. The outcome of the process did not please everyone but at least national aspirations were declared and rules of engagement entrenched in a written Constitution. But hardly 10 years after the promulgation of the Constitution, the infant document was brutally defiled. A cornerstone of the document, namely presidential term limits, which many saw as a vaccine against leaders who overstay their welcome, was excised through a combination of coercion, deception and inducements. The agony and ear piercing cry of that key constitutional provision reverberates to date.
NRM ideologues argue that everything is done democratically. That is to say the majority rules. The NRM has forgotten that side by side with the principle of majority rule is the principle of minority rights. That is why an enlightened constitution always puts certain rights beyond the reach of majorities. To insist that you are right simply because you are many is a line of argument more suited for “interahamwe” apologists than genuine democrats. If the NRM is to leave a legacy it should bequeath to Ugandans something they have never seen before, namely peaceful transition of power.
If the NRM is incapable even of ensuring a leadership transition within its top ranks after over three decades, why should Ugandans expect that they will do that for the country? On the high sounding economic promises we can assume that their premise is the original pledge in the Ten Point Programme of building “an independent, integrated, self-sustaining national economy”. The programme’s diagnosis of Uganda’s economic woes is worth quoting extensively. It said the problem is that “among other things, there is a constant outflow of resources from our economy to developed countries – the metropolitan centres of the world system, while we content ourselves with the role of outlying villages. Resources flow out, in the present era in the form of: cheap raw-materials, repatriation of high dividends on investments (which investments do not contribute to the disengagement from foreign economic domination but rather re-enforce the dependence); payment for highly priced manufactured goods (most of them just trash of consumer goods, theft of the nation’s convertible currency by a multiplicity of state officials including topmost leaders; flight of capital due to insecurity; purchase with convertible currency of items that could easily locally produced, brain drain due to scientists seeking better opportunities or simply security”.
After 31 years, the NRM has reinforced our economic dependence, disintegrated the sectors, and enhanced the role of foreigners in our economy. The price of foreign currency high because importers scramble for the little available. Household incomes cannot support families because of the high cost of basic social services which the government has abandoned and left citizens at the mercy of private profiteers.
Thirty years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Russia was a super power. What has NRM got to show relative to its longevity in power. Sankara did more for Burkina Faso in four years than Museveni has done for Uganda in 31 years. I think the NRM is beyond fixing. It is beyond redemption. It’s only utility is for those who are feasting in its economic banquet halls.
