Uganda’s path to peace, stability and democracy is still misty

Ms Bwiire works with the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI)

What you need to know:

  • For democratisation to be achieved, people should have some influence over government policies. But I cannot see how this can be achieved in the short- or even medium-term given the present political and prevailing socio-economic situation in Uganda.

From the foregoing, it can be seen that the road to free and stable Uganda is still thorny.
The conditions for ensuring a stable and sustainable peace have to be tackled primarily at the economic level. But for this to happen, state officials, including ministers and parliamentarians, must be accountable to the people and be subject to their power. This is the only way corruption and graft, which have resulted in billions of dollars, which should have gone to social economic development, being stolen over the last 15 years, can be checked.
Militarism, which dominated the thinking in the ruling party, has ensured that large amounts of state funds from the national budget are allocated to the army. At one time this was estimated to be as high as 60 per cent of the total budget.
If insecurity has in part to be traced to poverty and lack of economic and social development, then the dominance of the armed forces in the political economy of the country has to be seen as a factor contributing to the future instability of the country. It has to be seen as a factor contributing to the future instability of the country, which will result from further impoverishment of the people.
The mere fact that the top officials in the army have the possibilities of accumulating wealth through corruption, which they use to build mansions for themselves, denies the people not only the means of development , but also ensure that the army has a vested interest in maintaining themselves in power.
An oppressive state whose economic and social structures are riddled with high-level corruption generating widespread poverty can only result in the political disempowerment of the affected population.
Today, the outcry throughout the country is against the widening and deepening poverty in which the poor can survive by partly disenfranchising themselves through “selling “ their voting rights to elect people who will not represent them but will instead join the corruption bridges to recover what they “lost” to the people during their electioneering.
Such impoverished and disenfranchised people cannot have ‘sovereignty “power and control over state institutions.
To the contrary, they become victims of the very institutions which they created. They are thus disempowered and further impoverished in the process.
Such a population cannot enjoy “positive peace”, they can only become victims of negative peace” which is a form of war whose real purpose is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standards of living of the people.
Therefore, they find themselves in this kind of perpetual warfare to maintain peace and being disempowered in the process, people in the Ugandan situation resorted to finding another form of positive peace through socio cultural actions.
This include some restoration of self respect and human dignity through cultural identity, restore some kind of morality in general human relations by returning to the “roots” of things as a way of finding “inner peace”.
In the modern world, which is crumbling because of these contradictions, this socio-cultural peace can only be transitory.
It is a temporary resort but which in itself has no prospect of sustaining individuals on any long-term basis. It has to interpret the reality around it more carefully because some of this reality tends to contradict the socio cultural identity which is desired.
It has to find a new synthesis with these contradictory forces which exist beside it. On the basis of this reconciliation, some kind of future sustainable peace and stability can be found in a new world.
In a nut shell, for democratisation to be achieved, people should have some influence over government policies. But I cannot see how this can be achieved in the short- or even medium-term given the present political and prevailing socio-economic situation in Uganda.

Ms Bwiire works with the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI)