The discussion in the opposition should be about the strategic outcome and how to get wider appeal and support for those reforms, including among NRM members and supporters.

An interesting contest is taking place within the Opposition, primarily between Democratic Party leader Norbert Mao and Dr Kizza Besigye, easily the de-facto leader of the opposition in the country.

It started several weeks ago when Mao, who is struggling to control the Young Turks in his party, accused Besigye of instigating and fomenting the dissent in DP.

Not many took notice for DP, which could easily pass for the Divided Party, has reeled from one leadership contest to another since Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere retired from the scene over a decade ago. Mao then raised the ante by suggesting that the contest is as much one of ideology and strategy as it is about individuals.

On his Facebook page he posted thus: “There are two tendencies in the opposition today. There are those who believe that political parties are irrelevant and we should embrace a personality driven struggle and not bother with the agenda we seek to achieve. Then there are those who believe that institutions matter and that political actors should relate on an institutional basis and craft an inclusive agenda.”

Mao revealed that he, alongside FDC leader Mugisha Muntu, belong to the latter category while Besigye and UPC’s Olara Otunnu belong to the former.

Assuming this is a correct categorisation, this discussion, far from a crisis within the opposition, reflects progress in the form of self-awareness and a better understanding of the different approaches available.
The debate should be encouraged, not suppressed, and it should be transformed into a national debate, not a partisan clash of personalities.

Besigye has long argued that the current political set-up does not offer grounds for a credible political contest.

He should know, having contested for the presidency thrice. Besigye’s sideways shift, from a political contestant to a political protagonist is an acknowledgment of the dominant and impenetrable position the incumbent and the NRM party enjoy.

The coercive arms of the State, which have acted as enforcer and protector of the regime during elections and other political contests, are directly under the thumb of the President. So is the Electoral Commission. And the Treasury. And an army of cadres across the State.

Even Big Business is beholden to the Big Man, offering vast campaign contributions in exchange for licenses, tax breaks and other concessions.

Even religious bodies, which can claim to appeal to a higher authority, wait on Caesar, receiving hand-outs and favours in exchange for their silence on fundamental questions of governance, accountability and inclusiveness.

In fact, I strongly believe that if Jesus Christ stood against Museveni in 2016 under the current environment he would need a miracle to win (or have God appoint his apostles to the Bench).
Political parties are relevant but what the country needs, more than anything else, are deep electoral and political reforms.
We need to get the army out of politics, we need to change the way we choose the Electoral Commission and the way it runs polls, and we need to tweak our political system, which gives the presidency too much power and directly promotes patronage and a winner-takes-it-all political culture.

We could go about it the hard way, like Kenya did, and use violence to shake up the status quo and inspire reforms. This is certainly not desirable.

Or we can go about it the easier way, like Ghana did.
The discussion in the opposition should be about the strategic outcome and how to get wider appeal and support for those reforms, including among NRM members and supporters.

As long as the calls for electoral and political reforms are seen as an opposition matter they will find no traction but who in the NRM, for instance, can deny that we need more efficiency and accountability?

But we must also shake the stick at the thieves and vandals. How about a whistle-blower name-and-shame campaign against people with stolen streetlights lighting up their backyards? Surely these can be identified?

You know you have spent a lot of time in Kampala when you find yourself driving down a smooth road and worry that there is something wrong. The penny often drops a few moments later when you realise that the potholes you expected, that sense of painful adventure as you cut a path through the pitiful roads of the urban jungle like one of the early explorers, is no more.

There have been some very impressive roads built across the country in recent years. The section from Masaka to Mbarara, for instance, or my personal favourite, from Mityana to Fort Portal, offer real driving pleasure.
Surely some credit is due to the government and the relevant agencies, even from notoriously critical columnists. Ahem!

Kampala City remains a laggard, but even here there are some exciting new developments overseen by the new city Authority. The recently completed Bukoto – Kisaasi road, for instance, has changed the face of that neighbourhood; the dust is gone, rents and property prices are up, and crime, I suspect, must be on the way down, thanks to the streetlights.
The question, though, is: for how long?

A few years ago Rotary Avenue (better known as Lugogo bypass) was done up very well and streetlights installed. Within three days – I counted – some of the streetlights had gone missing. Further inquiries established that some unscrupulous people had somehow climbed to the top of the poles and unscrewed the lights.

(I have always wondered how someone can climb that flimsy pole; either it is an organised racket that hires specialist cranes, or Uganda has some unexploited pole vault talent!).

A few months down the road, most of the streetlights were gone (some brought down by hapless motorists checking to see whether their airbags actually worked) and the road was dark again.

What kind of person steals a streetlight? Do they use them as reading lights at home? Use them to light up their compounds? Don’t their children wonder why daddy, whose known occupations do not include ‘KCCA electrician’, suddenly returns home one day with a green and yellow streetlight? And if you can spend Shs200 million on a mansion, you should be able to afford to buy your streetlights in a shop – unless of course you stole the Shs200 million in the first place.

Yet this is no isolated case. Road signs and rubbish skips are routinely sawn down and sold to scrap metal dealers. At the very least it becomes an inconvenience and a case of throwing good money down the garbage chute, if you can forgive the lazy pun. But who knows how many motorists have found themselves flying over the top of a speed hump whose uprooted warning sign is under the bed of a nearby resident?

How many pedestrians have broken their limbs when their feet miss the news of the theft of the manhole cover supposed to be under them?
The Uganda Railway, which once snaked across the country, has supported the growth of an illegal steel industry based on the theft and smelting of the railway tracks.

Electricity cables are sawn off and sold. Transformers are drained of their oil. Bridges are vandalised by people – some eminent! – looking for mercury and other rare metals!

How many days will it take before the streetlights and signposts on the Bukoto – Kisaasi road are relocated?
Something surely must be done about this petty theft. KCCA has tried, through one or two campaigns, to get Kampala residents interested in the city and its redevelopment. It probably needs to do some more radical things.

How about we resurrect the old neighbourhood associations and hand them ‘ownership’ of communal assets, like roads, streetlights, etc., as well as the responsibility of taking care of them? To do this you need to get people out of their walled fences and have them actually meet their neighbours and talk about their common gripes.

But we must also shake the stick at the thieves and vandals. How about a whistle-blower name-and-shame campaign against people with stolen streetlights lighting up their backyards? Surely these can be identified?
Regular raids through the scrap metal dealers and prosecution of those found with stolen poles, railway tracks, et cetera are unlikely to deter all thieves but surely will also help.

Without addressing this vandalism of public property we will keep going round in circles. In many ways our vandalism is a metaphor for our primitivism and narcissism.

We can tarmac roads and light up the streets but the biggest potholes we have are not on Kampala’s roads but in our values.
dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki

The Shs250 million is probably part of the money and an attempt to offer some form of accountability but it is all patronage and politics.

The sight of a young man struggling under the weight of a sack full of money while President Museveni looks on is the latest highlight in our school of political scandal and certainly not the last.

The follow-up explanation from State House, which attempted, with predictable futility, to explain it away as a normal poverty-eradication exercise, has done little to inspire confidence in the running of our public affairs.

In criticising Museveni, many people have missed the point. The President knew exactly what he was doing. It was all well thought out and the unofficial launch of his campaign for the 2016 election.
Few people understand political symbolism better than Museveni. Even fewer know that in his early days in power, while trying to carve out a political identity for himself and his Marxist ideology, he often wore a ‘revolutionary’ Kaunda suit, sometimes under the formal western suits.

The Kaunda suit was soon discarded when Marxism was thrown out of the window of political pragmatism and replaced by ultra-liberal capitalism but Museveni continued to understand and develop symbols to resonate with his target audience; the poor peasant voters.
A very clever young Ugandan lady called Sheila Kulubya researched this political symbolism for her master’s thesis at the London School of Economics. It was surprising, insightful and a real eye-opener, and not because she is my partner!

Thus in 1996 he temporarily discarded his military fatigues and adopted olubengo, a grinding stone many peasants are familiar with, as his de facto campaign symbol. The large stone represented the problems people were facing and the message from Museveni was “let me take care of your burdens”.

In 2001, when Besigye declared himself the hammer, Museveni turned into the cotter pin, a small but vital part of most bicycles, which is very hard to remove. Again the symbol was a clever choice of an everyday item that many are familiar with.

In 2006, as Museveni engineered a political Houdini act in changing the Constitution, the symbolism turned into dry banana leaves whose local name, essanja, is a homonym for another term in office.
That was replaced in 2011 by the rap skit as Museveni courted younger voters, and auto-calls that had peasants excited about “speaking personally” with the recorded voice. But that election also required large doses of money, not just gimmickry and symbolism.

The latest choice of sacks of money is a powerful metaphor for peasant voters. It says, simply and powerfully, that those who support the President and his party will receive so much money they will need sacks to carry it away.

With so much poverty around tempered by the promise of vast oil riches Museveni’s sack of money offers insights into the kind of campaign he intends to run in 2016: He intends to throw money at the problem and to clearly own the patronage delivery systems.

For the record, these handouts never seem to leave their beneficiaries any better off. A couple of years ago, the President accused your columnist of sacrilege after he publicly opposed a decision by the Uganda Journalists Association to beg Museveni for money.

Those protestations were swept aside and within weeks there was a photograph of the association leaders next to a beaming Amelia Kyambadde, then the principal private secretary to the President, counting a bag of currency notes.

I hear but cannot confirm that some of the money was shared in the State House parking lot but what is clear is that the association has never been the same again. The office for which the money was requested has never been seen and the behind-the-scenes fight over whatever was left of the money has brought the association to its knees.

In the recent supplementary budget request, State House asked for Shs40 billion for presidential donations. The Shs250 million is probably part of the money and an attempt to offer some form of accountability but it is all patronage and politics.

Unless the handouts are taken away, Museveni will continue to use taxpayer money to reward his supporters and buy political support. So in effect Museveni will be giving you back some of your money so that you can keep him in office. You can disagree all you want but you can never accuse him of not being a smart politician.

Others, however, will wonder how a revolutionary turned into an automated teller machine. This life!

President Museveni will not be in power in 2040, neither is the NRM likely to be in power. Come to think of it, half the politicians in power today will either be dead or senile. So who is expected to own the Vision when the current visionaries retire?

Do you remember the heady days as the Millennium approached? The fears of apocalypse; the grossly exaggerated fears of the Y2K bug which we were told would turn our computers into scrap, crash planes and generally thrust us back into rural Busoga (that is to say the stone-age)?

Then there were the expectant promises bandied around by NGO and UN types: ‘Water/education/health for all by the year 2000’, they shouted. Wherever one looked there was something being promised to happen “by the year 2000”.

Most of it passed without incident. We woke up on January 1, 2000 and, save for some serious hangovers, the world was still in one piece. Planes still ran (late) and many still did not have health, water, education or wealth.

The politicians simply moved the goalposts and gave themselves another quarter of a century. Those fancy things would now be achieved by 2025, they said, as we launched Vision 2025. We would all have money in our pockets, taxi drivers would indicate before joining the road, and small babies would stop crying on planes – well, not really, but you get the picture; the world would be a much better place.

You might, therefore, be surprised to learn that the government is today launching a new major plan, Vision 2040, to implement all those awesome things in the next three decades. One would have expected that we would try to achieve Vision 2025 before attempting to achieve matters beyond that but some of these things can only be understood by politicians with elections to win.

On paper, the plan is massively ambitious. Per capita income, for instance, is expected to grow from about Shs4,000 per person per day to about Shs66,000 per person per day by 2040. Factor in our population growth rate and the projection for our numbers to have almost doubled at that point and you will see the true scale of the ambition.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with ambition, and some countries have shown the ability to dream as well as act. China, for instance, is on course to double its 2010 GDP and raise its per capita income for rural and urban residents to over $9,000 by 2020. Without seeking to rain on the parade, let me share some misgivings with our grand plans.

First, while the plan, which I have read, is full of ambition, it is less eloquent when it comes to action. It talks about the areas that we need to focus on without telling us what we need to do differently to get there. So in some areas we are not very different from the village boys who sit by the roadside waiting for a soda truck and a bread van to overturn so they can feast.

Secondly, the plan is inspired too much by the success of countries like Malaysia, Mauritius, etc., and not enough by the failure of our own previous schemes. Failure sometimes teaches better lessons than success; understanding why we struggle with executing our plans is more valuable than trying to mimic the success of others.

Thirdly, the plan is too grand and the time frame too far in the future for us to hold anyone accountable for it. Whatever the advances in science, President Museveni will not be in power in 2040, neither is the NRM likely to be in charge. Come to think of it, half the politicians in power today will either be dead or senile.
So who is expected to own the Vision when the current visionaries retire? In China we have seen the Communist Party engineer internal change of guard while largely protecting the core market-based socialism. We are yet to manage internal transitions, let alone peaceful national change of leadership.

While this is not necessarily a dealmaker (as we have seen in Malaysia and Singapore, for instance), it is important for ownership and implementation. This is not to say that we should discard the Vision 2040 plan; what we should do is break up the plan into five-year and one-year plans that we can measure as independent parts and as constituent parts of the bigger plan.

That way we can keep our vision on the long-term goal but can measure ourselves against the annual pace of growth. If we can’t achieve the five-year plans we include in our party manifestos, how can we expect to achieve a 30-year grand plan? Thinking big and acting small sounds reasonable and comprehensible but politicians rarely trust the rest of us to have a vision.

dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki

So you pay each MP Shs5 million – at Shs2 billion, it is only two per cent of your Shs128 billion jackpot – to go out and consult and fulminate with their constituents.

Experts in guerrilla warfare will tell you that in order to attack an entrenched enemy position, it helps to create a diversion or a distraction. The bigger the distraction the more likely you are to get the enemy to pay attention to it, allowing you to attack the real target with a higher probability of success.

Sometimes the distractions are self-made, such as an election that allows you to raid the Treasury while everyone is away campaigning. In other cases you need to create the distraction yourself.

So what do you do when you need Parliament to approve a supplementary budget for State House of Shs128 billion? How do you deal with the fact that the amount is more than twice the original approved figure? How do you get approval for the money when the government is struggling to raise money to pay teachers’ salaries?

You guessed it; you create a distraction in Parliament. And for a really big distraction, you need to get the MPs to talk about something they are passionate about, such as sex.

So you introduce the Marriage and Divorce Bill, one that has failed to pass through Parliament in 47 years, and which has been gathering dust on the shelves since 2009 when it was last tabled.

As expected, a Bill that talks about sex is bound to get hormones racing and tongues wagging in Parliament. MPs who yawn with disinterest when government announces plans to scrap an agricultural project key to their constituency development, suddenly become animated and vocal at the sound of the words “cohabitation” or “marital rape”.

The August House is overnight transformed into the ‘MPlayboy Mansion’, with the walls of its inner chamber covered in the dirty, sweaty, energetic funk of chauvinistic testosterone and feministic adrenaline in a political Battle of the Sexes.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” they scream at one another, playing with the pun the way dogs play with bones, a cold sweat dripping down the backs of some whose public proclamations, at odds with the reality of their domestic arrangements, earn them an earful – or worse – when they return to the real Masters of the Home.

You know the Bill is a non-starter but you need to spread the fire, the angst; the peasants must be given some sense of power; a chance to froth at the mouth. So you pay each MP Shs5 million – at Shs2 billion, it is only two per cent of your Shs128 billion jackpot – to go out and consult and fulminate with their constituents.

Even if it is your own Bill that was debated and passed in Cabinet, you also add your clever rhetoric to the voices of reason, calling for calm and warning against upsetting traditional values.

By this time the rent-a-quote religious leaders, afraid to speak about the real issues of the day, or closeted by allegations that they cross bones as often as they make the sign of the cross, will have joined the fray, issuing forth scripture-lined proclamations, hopping from one radio station to another, and trying to look serious and holy for the cameras.

If you feel signs of the opium wearing off, you might consider introducing another hare-brained sex-related Bill, such as one that proposes a ban on the wearing of miniskirts.

By this point you will have the moralists riding their white horses and wagging their fingers at the Marriage and Divorce Bill while the liberalists will be strutting their short skirts and daring anyone who is man enough to dare touch their flesh without suffering grievous bodily harm by repeatedly knocking their heads into the business end of six-inch high heel shoes.

That is the point at which, like a thief in the night, you sneak your State House Supplementary Budget request into Parliament. You do not need to worry about the ‘MPigs’; they are busy grunting at the feeding trough over whether or not to return the Shs5 million maize bran, neither do you have to worry about the Finance Minister who pledged to end supplementary budgets last June; she is too busy negotiating aid reinstatement with donors and trying to fill the black hole in the next budget.

There might be one or two newspaper articles that expose the scheme for what it is but you need not worry much about that either; the elites are too busy sharing jokes on Whatsapp to read boring newspapers, the peasants are busy warning their MPs to leave their women and men alone and to go shove the Bill in a dark place, and the critical radio talk shows were all shut down a long time ago.

dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki