Even teenagers can see how groupthink works in NRM
When the Daily Monitor of July 26 published my article titled ‘Groupthink: The driving force behind debate on age limit,’ the concept of groupthink – a pattern of faulty decision-making based on the biased opinions of a group – may have sounded rather academic.
Not any more. Ibrahim Manzil noted in the Sunday Monitor of September 17 that the overwhelming push by NRM adherents to kick the presidential age limit out of the 1995 Constitution is “something that even a one-day tourist would see coming.”
I would go further to assume that even teenagers can now see clearly how groupthink works in NRM. The two tools, which NRM people are forcefully utilising to impede change are: Organisational level resistance and individual level resistance. When organisations and their members resist change, there is a tendency to maintain the status quo. In that manner, it is clear that events unfolding in the form of well-orchestrated acts of mutilating our Constitution are traceable to that point in time when NRM grudgingly accepted the idea of Uganda returning to a multi-party political dispensation after a decade of “no party” rule.
Right away, however, NRM wanted to be seen as different. It made it very clear that it was not a political party, but an organisation. That is how it came to be known as NRMO, an acronym DP’s Norbert Mao derisively referred to as “NRM Zero.” That also made it easier to analyse the culture of NRM as an organisation. Organisational culture is a set of values that help people in an organisation to understand which actions are considered acceptable or unacceptable. There are two main sources of organisational values: Founders of an organisation and their personal values and beliefs. Ethical culture provides a sense of what is right or wrong. In the first sense, many NRM members assumed wrongly that their leader, President Museveni, was a public servant until he made it clear that he is not anybody’s employee; he is a freedom fighter pursuing his own beliefs. And in the second sense, most members of NRM have realised too well that the right thing to do is heed what Museveni desires.
This is the logical progression of a behaviour that led, as I noted in my article of July 26, to NRM taking the first concrete step toward groupthink in 2005 when it used its numerical strength in Parliament to get rid of the constitutional two-term presidential limit.
In 2014, Evelyn Anite, then a Youth MP and NRM cheer-leader, put a cherry on Museveni’s cake by proposing him as NRM’s sole candidate in the primaries for the 2016 presidential race. Party members unanimously endorsed the proposal. That is how NRM again overtly used groupthink to impede change. To arrive at a unanimous decision, members of NRM discounted negative information just because they wanted to make a unanimous decision. Yet the information discounted may have been crucial to NRM’s internal democracy. But members saw that it was not in their interest to consider such information.
Now NRM members are at the groupthink level known as escalation of commitment. Even if many of them realise that they made a mistake in 2005 and/or 2014, some have no choice, but to continue pursuing the wrong course because NRM as an organisation is committed to the course. It is too late for the Anites to go back on the wrong decisions made in 2005 and 2014. Article 102(b) must go. Indeed, escalation of commitment may, subsequently, demand a further push to safeguard the groupthink decisions made in 2005, 2014 and 2017.
Therefore, a possible post-2017 course of action for NRM will be to amend the Constitution yet again. Not to remove any clause, but to add one making it illegal to debate imminent death of the President.
What is also likely is that NRM will eventually experience organisational inertia, decline and collapse. Examples of organisations that achieved a global reach, but declined and collapsed due to resistance to change include Trans World Airlines, Pan Am Airlines and Eastman Kodak.
Dr Okodan is the dean, Faculty of Social
Sciences and Management Studies,
Kumi University. [email protected]
